The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (10 page)

As White made his way to Jenkintown, however, a fresh complication arose. Initially, Pinkerton had expected that Kate Warne and the handsome Mr. De Forest would have several weeks in which to work their way into Mrs. Maroney’s confidence, drawing out incriminating evidence by slow, steady degrees. With Adams Express pressing him for quick results, however, Pinkerton had been forced to adopt the faster, messier expedient of throwing Maroney into jail to extract an admission of guilt. Now, as the twin strands of the investigation crossed, it appeared that Pinkerton had tripped himself up. Mrs. Maroney, having grown fond of De Forest’s company, did not seem especially anxious to see her husband released. “I don’t know what to do,” she told Mrs. Warne. “I am almost crazy!”

Pinkerton realized that the success of the operation now rested entirely with Mrs. Warne. If she could persuade Mrs. Maroney to hand over the mysterious “packages” to White, and if—as Pinkerton assumed—those packages contained the stolen Adams Express money, the case would be solved. Otherwise, Maroney would stand trial in Montgomery without the evidence needed to convict him.

It took three days. During that time, Mrs. Warne “talked incessantly” as she attempted to coax Mrs. Maroney into revealing where she had hidden the packages. “She appealed to Mrs. Maroney’s sense of duty,” Pinkerton wrote. “She depicted in glowing terms the happiness of the wife who looks only to her husband’s interests, and makes sacrifices in his behalf. She drew a touching picture of Maroney’s sufferings in jail, and tried to impress upon her the conviction that it was more than probable that he had taken the money so as to be able to place her in a situation where she could command any luxury. ‘He loves you,’ said she, ‘and would do anything for you.’”

Mrs. Maroney was unmoved. She acknowledged that her husband had placed “certain funds” in her care, but she denied any knowledge of wrongdoing. Moreover, she insisted that the money should remain hidden at all costs: “I will burn it before I will give it to White,” she declared.

As the hours wore on, Mrs. Maroney “invoked the aid of stimulants” time and time again, growing even less inclined to assist her husband as the alcohol did its work. “I don’t want anyone with me but you,” she told Mrs. Warne at one stage. “Would you be willing to run away with me? We could go down to Louisiana, where we are not known, buy a small place in some out of the way town and live secluded for four or five years, until our existence was forgotten.” Mrs. Warne pretended to fall in with the plan, certain that it would bring the hidden money to light, but even now Mrs. Maroney refused to say where the cash was hidden. Instead, she proposed to live on Mrs. Warne’s income until the excitement over the Adams Express robbery died down. Only then, she insisted, would it be safe to recover the hidden banknotes and “make our appearance once more in the fashionable world, with plenty of money to maintain our position.” Mrs. Warne gave a heavy sigh, gathered herself, and tried again.

Pinkerton, meanwhile, waited in Philadelphia with Edward Sanford and other officers of Adams Express, who were pressing harder than ever for a resolution. During the long wait, Pinkerton assured his anxious clients that the case was in good hands, as Mrs. Warne’s “subtle but very potent” powers of persuasion were far greater than his own. In fact, Mrs. Warne had vowed in a letter to Pinkerton that she would see the money delivered safely to Philadelphia, “even if she had to walk in with it herself.”

At the end of three days, Mrs. Maroney’s reserves finally broke. “Your duty as a wife is plain and simple,” Mrs. Warne told her. “Do as your husband wishes you to do.” Mrs. Warne’s long hours of pleading and cajoling had done their work, said Pinkerton, “but to Mrs. Maroney it was a bitter pill.” Without another word, she led Mrs. Warne to the dirt cellar of the boardinghouse. There, a heavy bundle wrapped in an oilskin cloth was pulled from a deep hole and handed over to John White. This done, Mrs. Maroney withdrew to her room to seek the consolation of brandy. “This excitement has nearly killed me,” she declared.

Within hours, at the La Pierre House, a hotel in Philadelphia, Pinkerton’s team gathered one by one, shedding the various disguises they had assumed over the course of the investigation. Edward Sanford summoned the president of Adams Express to count up the recovered money personally. “The package proved to contain thirty-nine thousand five hundred and fifteen dollars,” Pinkerton reported, “within four hundred and eighty-five dollars of the amount stolen.”

Kate Warne burst into the room shortly after the money had been tallied, still covered in grime from the dirt cellar and hovering at the point of exhaustion from her three-day effort. On being assured that all was well, she sank heavily into a chair. “Her strength seemed suddenly to leave her,” Pinkerton wrote. “The victory was complete, but her faculties had been strained to the utmost in accomplishing it, and she felt completely exhausted. She had the proud satisfaction of knowing that to a woman belonged the honors of the day.”

*   *   *

IN FACT, THE VICTORY
was not yet complete. Even now, Nathan Maroney remained confident that he would be acquitted of all charges at his trial in Alabama. The money found in Jenkintown, he insisted, had nothing to do with any robbery; it had been raised by the sale of his property in Montgomery. As the trial commenced in December 1859, Maroney appeared relaxed and self-assured, smiling broadly at his friends in the courtroom and nodding approvingly as witnesses spoke in glowing terms of his character and service to the community.

Matters took a sudden turn on the second day of testimony, as the clerk of the court rose at the prosecution’s behest to summon John White to the witness stand. Only then did Maroney realize that his cell mate was a Pinkerton operative. “His cheek blanched with fear,” Pinkerton recalled. “His eyes were filled with horror and he gasped for breath. A glass of water was handed to him. He gulped it down, and, vainly endeavoring to force back the tears from his eyes, in a hoarse, shaky voice he exclaimed, ‘Tell the court I plead guilty … I am gone!’”

“This,” Pinkerton noted with satisfaction, “ended the matter.”

Pinkerton and his team had every reason to feel pleased with the operation. “The recovery of forty or fifty thousand dollars today is considered a small operation,” he would write, looking back on the case years later, “but in 1859, before the war, the amount was looked upon as perfectly enormous.” Though Pinkerton would investigate many high-profile robberies in the years to come, the Maroney case did more than any other to advance his reputation. By the time the verdict was delivered in Montgomery, Allan Pinkerton had become the most famous detective in America.

Every railroad baron in the country took note. The following year, when Samuel Felton—the president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad—heard vague rumors of a plot to disrupt the forthcoming presidential inauguration, he knew that only one man could be counted on to prevent it.

CHAPTER FIVE

LET US DARE TO DO OUR DUTY

John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves in which the slaves refused to participate.… That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN at Cooper Union, February 27, 1860

THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR
came at 4:30
A.M.
on March 11, 1859. Allan Pinkerton swung open the door in his nightshirt, a revolver in hand. The sight that greeted him was all too familiar: a group of eleven newly liberated slaves—men and women alike—in tattered clothing and worn boots, exhausted after an arduous trudge across miles of frozen prairie. One of the women cradled a cold, hungry baby in her arms, having given birth on the journey, and she and her fellow travelers, according to one man who helped them on their way that night, formed “a portrait of human misery.”

Pinkerton stepped back and waved the travelers inside, his eyes darting up and down the street before he shut the door behind them. His wife, Joan, still in her nightclothes and robe, set to work preparing breakfast while Pinkerton turned to the man who had brought them north after a raid in Missouri. Even in his soiled, ragged clothing, the visitor retained the stern and fiery appearance of an Old Testament prophet. Tall and angular, he carried himself with a crisp, military air. He had piercing blue-gray eyes under bristling brows, and a flowing white-gray beard framing his sharp, craggy features. Pinkerton stepped forward and grasped his hands. “John Brown,” he said. “We had not expected you, but you are welcome all the same.” The notorious fire-and-brimstone abolitionist returned Pinkerton’s greeting with uncommon warmth—“more than that,” said a friend, he embraced the detective as “brother to brother.”

“Old Brown of Osawatomie,” as he was known at the time, was no stranger to Pinkerton’s home on Adams Street. “John Brown,” Pinkerton would write, “was my bosom friend, and more than one dark night has found us working earnestly together in behalf of the fleeing bondsman who was striving for his liberty.” Not all abolitionists had such high regard for Brown, who advocated a “holy crusade” of armed insurrection as a means to end slavery. Abraham Lincoln would label him a “misguided fanatic.”

The abolitionist John Brown, Allan Pinkerton’s “bosom friend.”
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Pinkerton had come to know Brown at the time of the “Bleeding Kansas” crisis, a series of shockingly brutal clashes between abolitionist forces and pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” over the issue of whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state—a prospect that threatened to tip the balance of political power. In May 1856, Brown had led a raid into Kansas that left five pro-slavery Southerners dead—hacked to death with swords—an act he characterized as a response to recent violence against abolitionists, and a signal of his unflinching stand against the weak and conciliatory policies of the North. The “Pottawatomie Massacre,” as the assault came to be known, established Brown’s grim resolve to tear apart the increasingly fragile relations between North and South.

Now, warming his hands at Pinkerton’s fire, Brown appeared more than ever to be, as Frederick Douglass described him, a man whose “soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” For all his ferocious passion, he came to Pinkerton as a wanted outlaw. The governor of Kansas was reported to have offered a three-thousand-dollar reward for his capture. President Buchanan had ordered his arrest, and had added $250 to the bounty. As one newspaper declared, John Brown had become “the most notorious brigand our land has yet produced.”

Brown’s fugitive status did nothing to undercut the support offered him by Pinkerton, America’s top lawman. If anything, Pinkerton’s growing fame had added heat to his convictions. Even as he gained national renown as a tough and ruthlessly efficient lawman, Pinkerton continued to operate as an agent of the Underground Railroad. Having established himself as a detective, albeit a private one, Pinkerton found that his clandestine activities now carried a serious threat of legal consequences. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, intended to bolster earlier legislation that had fallen into disuse, sought to force federal marshals and other officers of the law in the free states to return runaway slaves to their masters. The new law overturned many of the “personal liberty laws” that had been passed in Northern states, and carried a one-thousand-dollar fine for any official who failed to enforce it. At the same time, any person charged with providing food or shelter to a fugitive would be subject to six months in prison and a one-thousand-dollar fine. As the stakes rose, Pinkerton found that he had become a lawbreaker with a badge—“half horse and half alligator,” in Edward Sanford’s phrase. The contradiction did not trouble him. “I have not a single regret for the course I then pursued,” he wrote in later years. To Pinkerton, John Brown was a hero to be emulated, a courageous figure “who almost single handed threw himself into a fight against the Nation.” So long as Brown was in Chicago, Pinkerton made sure he would not fight alone.

Pinkerton’s two-room clapboard house on Adams Street was now crowded with children, and not as well-suited to Underground Railroad traffic as the cooperage in Dundee had been. There were two sons, twelve-year-old William and ten-year-old Robert, and two younger daughters, Joan—born in 1855 and named after her recently deceased older sister—and the sickly Belle. Even so, Joan Pinkerton worked tirelessly to feed and clothe a steady stream of fugitives, who sometimes appeared in such great numbers that she was forced to find room in the cramped space beneath the floorboards and in the half attic below the roof. When the house overflowed, she enlisted friends and neighbors into the cause. Often, when her husband’s detective work took him away from home for long stretches of time, the duty of seeing the runaways safely on to their next destination fell to her. She would have been barely twenty-one years old when the family took up residence on Adams Street, but she threw herself into the struggle, according to one Chicago abolitionist, “as vigorously as did her husband.”