Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy (6 page)

The undercover Pinkerton agent Kate Warne rented the two rear sleeping cabins of the regular southbound passenger train out of West Philadelphia, telling ticket agents that she needed to transport her brother, who she claimed was an invalid. Felton and a small squad of Pinkertons spirited Lincoln into the cabin. Allan Pinkerton stood by Lincoln’s door, and handed the tickets to the train conductor, never revealing who was in the cabin with him.

Pinkerton deployed agents along the train’s route, to watch for saboteurs trying to blow up the tracks or assassins preparing to assault the train. They waited in preset positions with lanterns to signal the train that all was well in each sector. Allan Pinkerton stood on the rear platform monitoring progress, sector by sector. The train left Philadelphia late in the evening, and pulled into Baltimore at 3:30
A.M.
, where it paused at the platform. This stop was the moment of highest danger. Only a few armed Pinkertons stood between the roiling population of Baltimore and a vulnerable Abraham Lincoln.

All they heard, though, was a drunk on the platform singing “Dixie” at the top of his voice. After an agonizingly long wait at the Baltimore station, the train rolled on to Washington, arriving at 6
A.M.

Later, when the decoy presidential train rolled into Baltimore, a menacing crowd of thousands gave lusty cheers for Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. But all they could do was holler.
*

T
HE
P
INKERTONS STAYED
in government service throughout the Civil War, and the company continued to operate its corporate service out of its Chicago offices. The Pinkerton precedent of intertwining private-sector intelligence agencies with government service continues to this day.

Allan Pinkerton went to work for General George McClellan’s army of Ohio, taking the rank of major. He turned to Timothy Webster, one of his most trusted agents, to help infiltrate the Confederacy. An Englishman who’d begun working for Pinkerton in 1853, Webster was dressed in the classy outfits of a dapper Brit, posing as a rebel-loving copperhead. At this point, the British were teetering toward full diplomatic recognition of the Confederate government, which would have been a blow to Union hopes for reconciliation.

Webster set up shop in Baltimore and cultivated copperhead contacts. He soon met the members of a secret society of Confederate loyalists called the Sons of Liberty, and heard from them about plans to stir up trouble for the federal government in Maryland. Thanks to Webster’s spying, Pinkerton agents pinned down the date of a large copperhead gathering. Webster himself, still undercover, was one of the keynote speakers, haranguing the audience with anti-Union rhetoric. But just as he reached fever pitch, Allan Pinkerton, a squad of detectives, and dozens of federal troops burst into the room and arrested the leaders of the plot.

Later, Webster made his way south, and reached out to the Confederate government, brazenly offering his services as a spy against the North. The Confederates employed him, giving him access to high echelons of their government and all kinds of Confederate facilities.

Now working as a double agent, he compiled detailed reports on the military installations he saw, including fortifications in the strategically significant town of Yorktown, Virginia, which sits at the southern end of Chesapeake Bay and might have offered
invading waterborne Union troops quick access to the Confederate capital, Richmond. The fortifications, he wrote, were “of split-pine logs with a 64-pounder [cannon] with a traverse of 180 degrees,” and the town’s landing was “in front of a hill with a slope of five feet above the beach.” He also included the price points for various goods in the town, giving the Union military leaders a sense of the troubled economy there.

Despite this detailed and accurate reporting—which he risked his life to deliver—many historians have highlighted Webster’s one great failure, which was also the signal failure of the Pinkerton agency during the war. Webster guessed in his reports that the Confederate troops near Richmond numbered 116,430. But it appears that his estimate was too high by far—there were actually 40,000 fewer troops in the area. That miscalculation may have contributed to General McClellan’s reluctance to attack the southern force. That in turn led to intense political antagonism between McClellan and Lincoln, who was pressing for an onslaught against the Confederate positions.

Webster’s bravery, though, is unquestionable. He continued to send back detailed reports until a slipup by a separate team of Union spies in the South revealed Webster’s identity as a Pinkerton. Webster was arrested, and on April 28, 1862, hanged for espionage in front of thousands of spectators on the Richmond fairground.

In his last message from his cell, Webster told a female Pinkerton agent who had come to visit him, “Tell the major I can meet death with a brave heart and a clear conscience.”
*

W
HEN THE WAR
ended, the industrializing North once again offered opportunity for corporate espionage. The Pinkertons would
again use undercover techniques in the late 1870s, under circumstances almost as dangerous as those faced by Timothy Webster.

The postwar era was a time of violent unrest in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, where child labor, unsafe working conditions, and an economic depression in the middle of the 1870s combined to provoke violent strikes by miners and brutal reprisals by management. Illiterate, poverty-stricken foreign immigrants vied with each other for work in the mines, and organized themselves into warring camps along ethnic lines.

Amid the chaos, some Irish-Catholic immigrants created a secret society they called the Molly Maguires. Historians aren’t quite sure where the name came from, although the organization seems to have had roots in secret societies in Ireland through which poor tenant farmers waged secret class wars against English landowners. There are those who believe that the Mollies never existed at all, and the society left almost no records for historians to examine. Legend holds that “Molly Maguire” herself was a poor widow whose cause was taken up by the local workingmen. Or she could have been a fiery Irish lass who led nighttime raids on wealthy landlords in Ireland. No one knows.

In coal country, the Mollies became a violent and vindictive gang motivated by both criminal agendas and the class war. In their lively account of the saga in their book
The Pinkerton Story
(1951), James Horan and Howard Swiggert wrote that the Mollies were believed to be responsible for numerous crimes in the area, including these over just a two-month period in 1870: ambushing a mining foreman, shooting a merchant, beating up a bridge watchman, beating a mine superintendent, and murdering a mine boss.

By 1873 Franklin Gowen, the president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, had had enough. He wrote to Allan Pinkerton and asked him to come to Pennsylvania. Gowen’s concern was not so much for the lives of the men on both sides of the fight as for the fate of a
business venture. Gowen was diversifying out of the railroad business and into the coal business. The Reading railroad had purchased enormous tracts of land, and planned to transport the coal mined from the land on its own rail lines. But the crime wave was bad for business. Gowen tasked Pinkerton with bringing down the Mollies.

Allan Pinkerton told Gowen that the operation had to be conducted with the utmost secrecy. He didn’t want anyone other than Gowen to read the Pinkerton reports, and he didn’t want the company to keep any records that would show it had hired the Pinkertons. He knew the Mollies had deep contacts inside the company, and might even be able to read Gowen’s own documents. Pinkerton began putting together a plan to infiltrate the Mollies with one of his own men. He knew he’d need an Irish-Catholic immigrant capable of passing as a hardened miner. And the recruit would have to be able to function even while fearing for his own life. Pinkerton settled on James McParland, a thin, red-haired twenty-nine-year-old immigrant from Ulster who had just begun work as a detective.

Pinkerton told McParland he could refuse the mission with no penalty to his career, but McParland agreed to the job. To keep up the secret, McParland left the Pinkerton service, and took the cover name “James McKenna.” Posing as an out-of-work immigrant, he made his own way to the coal country. He began to frequent local saloons, drinking heavily and spouting off publicly against English landlords. In Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he settled into the Sheridan House, where he bought a round of drinks and impressed the locals with his singing voice and dancing skill. The owner of the saloon, charmed, gave McParland a letter of introduction to Muff Lawler, who was the leader, or “body master,” of the Mollies in Shenandoah.

McParland told Lawler and his crew that he had been affiliated with secret societies in Ireland but had been out of contact for some time. He explained his ready access to cash by telling them it was the spoils from a murder in Buffalo, New York. And he covered his need to duck away frequently to meet with his Pinkerton
supervisor by explaining that he was a counterfeiter and needed to meet a contact. He would show off real money to his new friends, telling them that it was his counterfeit stash and daring them to spot any imperfections.

Eventually, McParland landed a real coal mining job, hauling twenty tons of coal in each ten-hour day. And on April 14, 1874, McParland came up for formal initiation into the Molly Maguires. The local group met at Muff Lawler’s house, and McParland waited downstairs under supervision of a Molly officer. McParland couldn’t be sure that he was really there for an initiation at all. Could the Mollies have figured out that he was a spy? Could they have a spy of their own inside the sprawling Pinkerton organization? It was impossible to be sure. But shortly he was led into a room upstairs, where he knelt down, swore an oath, made the sign of the cross, and paid the treasurer $3.

McParland remained in the society, before long as elected secretary of his local chapter, through 1875, dodging requests that he kill or commit crimes, and narrowly escaping discovery. The brutal Mollies would surely kill him instantly if they discovered that he was a Pinkerton spy.

Tension rose as the company sent in scab labor to break a miners’ strike. McParland talked his fellow Mollies out of blowing up a railroad bridge across the Susquehanna River, but despite his efforts toward peace, agitators still managed to burn a telegraph office and derail a train. McParland sneaked off to meet his Pinkerton supervisor and advised him to send in a force of police to control the area. He had already requested that the Pinkertons have one man arrested—if only to keep him safe from the Mollies, who wanted him dead. McParland broke away for a trip to Chicago to debrief Pinkerton on the operation, which had now been under way for a year and a half.

McParland wasn’t able to prevent the Mollies from spiraling into an increasingly violent rampage. He could speak out against some proposed killings, but if he opposed every crime that was planned,
he’d arouse the suspicion of the gang. Despite McParland’s best efforts to talk them out of it, Molly gunmen shot a man named Bully Bill Thomas as he stood tending his horse in a stable. But they botched the job, and Thomas survived. Then they turned their attention to Benjamin Yost, a night watchman who had earned their enmity by arresting several Mollies for minor infractions. The Molly killers Hugh McGehan, James Boyle, and James Kerrigan lay in wait for Yost at two o’clock in the morning, when they knew he’d emerge from his house to climb a ladder on the sidewalk and put out the street lamp. McGehan fired his pistol in the darkness, and Yost collapsed. A man working nearby rushed to his side, and Yost, dying from the gunshot wounds, was able to tell him that the killers were Irish. What’s more, he’d seen them in a saloon earlier in the night. He even ruled out some suspects before he died at 9
A.M.

McParland didn’t know who the killers were, but he thought he could figure it out. He carefully gathered evidence. He asked to borrow a pistol, and was given one that matched the caliber of the murder weapon. He pulled together bits and pieces of information about who had been on the scene at the time of the shooting. He also picked up word of yet another planned killing, this time of the mine boss J. P. Jones, and was able to get word to the Pinkertons to spirit Jones out of town until the danger passed.

McParland bided his time even as Molly gunmen killed one man at a fire department picnic and engaged in a gunfight with another target. Soon after that, Mollies proposed killing a mine boss, Tom Sanger. There were getting to be so many murder plots that McParland, still undercover as “James McKenna,” couldn’t warn the Pinkertons in time to head off each one. Molly assassins hit Sanger before McParland could do anything about it. When the mine boss Jones, thinking that the threat to his life had passed, returned to the area, three Mollies shot and killed him on a train platform in front of 100 witnesses. They got away.

McParland wrote up a detailed report for his Pinkerton bosses
about each murder, listing the killers and their accomplices. He was convinced he was doing the right thing. After all, the reports would be evidence for eventual court proceedings against the murderers.

Allan Pinkerton, writing from Chicago to his lieutenants on the scene, worried that the local authorities would never be able to get a conviction in counties heavily populated by Irish Catholics who supported the Mollies. Pinkerton advised his men to put together a vigilante party of their own to murder the Mollies and be done with them. That plan was too overt, and the Pinkertons in Pennsylvania developed a more hands-off solution. They printed up a handbill with the names of 374 Mollies and began circulating the document among the population. On December 10, a crowd of masked men broke into a home and opened fire on Mollies living there, killing Charles O’Donnell and his sister, Ellen McAllister, and wounding two others who escaped during the firefight. It’s clear that the Pinkertons hoped someone would take the law into his own hands and start killing Mollies, but it’s not clear if they arranged these particular killings.