On 18 April 1861, assistant presidential secretary John Hay recorded in his diary the report of several women that "some young Virginian long-haired swaggering chivalrous of course ... and half a dozen others including a daredevil guerrilla from Richmond named Ficklin would do a thing within forty eight hours that would ring through the world.".

The women feared that the Virginian planned either to assassinate or to capture the president. Calling this a "harrowing communication," Hay continued his entry: "They went away and I went to the bedside of the Chief couche. I told him the yarn; he quietly grinned." This is but one of the dramatic entries in Hay's Civil War diary, presented here in a definitive edition by Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger.