The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (5 page)

Privately, his memories of his start in life were harsher still. In a letter written nearly twenty years later, at the start of the Civil War, Pinkerton expressed a sentiment that would color every aspect of his new life in America. “In my native country,” he declared, “I was free in name, but a slave in fact.”

Slave
was not a word Pinkerton bandied about lightly. Within three years of his flight from Scotland, he would be running a station on the fabled Underground Railroad, helping runaway slaves make their way north to freedom.

CHAPTER TWO

HOW I BECAME A DETECTIVE

I am a success today because I had a friend who believed in me, and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.

—quote attributed to ABRAHAM LINCOLN

THE SHARP-DRESSED STRANGER
wore a heavy gold ring on his left hand. He was tall, perhaps six feet or so, sixty-five years of age, and “very erect and commanding in his appearance.” As he rode his horse through the center of the village on a fine, clear day in July 1847, it was obvious that trouble was coming.

Henry Hunt, the owner of a general store at the center of town, knew all too well what would happen next. Few outsiders ever troubled to visit Dundee, a quiet Illinois farming settlement about fifty miles northwest of Chicago. Lately, the appearance of a visitor signaled that a ruinous flood of counterfeit coins and notes was about to wash over the town. Hunt’s business had barely recovered from the last wave of bogus currency, and he was determined not to let it happen again. In his view, there was only one man who had the skills to deal with the matter. Keeping an anxious eye fixed upon the stranger, Hunt sent his errand boy to fetch Allan Pinkerton, the town cooper.

“I was busy at my work,” Pinkerton recalled, “bareheaded, barefooted, and having no other clothing on my body than a pair of blue denim overalls and a coarse hickory shirt—my then almost invariable costume—but I started down the street at once.”

Arriving at the store, Pinkerton found Hunt and another shopkeeper, Increase Bosworth, waiting behind the counter. “Come in here, Allan,” Hunt said, leading him to a room at the back of the store; “we want you to do a little job in the detective line.” Pinkerton greeted this proposal with a burst of incredulous laughter. “Detective line!” he cried. “What do I know about that sort of thing?”

It was a fair question. Pinkerton was still a newcomer in Dundee, struggling to make a success in the coopering trade. After his turbulent departure from Scotland five years earlier, he and his bride had alighted briefly in Chicago, where his old friend Robert Fergus helped him land a job at the Lill & Diversey brewery, making beer kegs for fifty cents a day.

Soon, Pinkerton set his sights on a business of his own. In the spring of 1843, he heard talk of a community of Scottish farmers on the Fox River in Kane County, and he realized that there would be plenty of work for a man who could make barrels, churns, and tubs. He told Joan that he would go ahead and “get a roof over my head” while she waited in Chicago.

For Joan, married barely one year, it was a tearful parting. After a lingering farewell on the banks of the Chicago River, Pinkerton turned and crossed a pontoon bridge, his bag of tools slung across his shoulder. Upon reaching the other side, he looked back and waved, then set off into the tall grasses that lay beyond, whistling a Scottish ballad. “I couldna bear it when the great grass swallowed him up so quick,” Joan recalled, but long after he disappeared from view, she could hear him whistling, and was comforted by the thought that “there’d be a wee home soon for us.”

In Dundee, near a bridge that crossed the Fox River, Pinkerton hand-built a small log cabin and work shed. Farmers and cattle drovers passing on their way to market could not fail to notice the bright new sign:
ALLAN PINKERTON, ONLY AND ORIGINAL COOPER OF DUNDEE.
After a few weeks, he headed back to Chicago to collect Joan, who soon turned her hand to growing vegetables and tending chickens. “In the little shop at Dundee,” she recalled, “with the blue river purling down the valley, the auld Scotch farmers trundling past with the grist for the mill or their loads for the market, and Allan, with his rat-tat-tat on the barrels, whistling and keeping tune with my singing, were the bonniest days the good Father gave me in all my life.”

Pinkerton, too, seems to have enjoyed the quiet charms of Dundee, and his hard work soon brought dividends. By 1846, he had eight men working for him, a mix of fellow Scots and more recent German immigrants. “I felt proud of my success,” he wrote, “because I owed no man.” Pinkerton’s family, too, was growing. In April of that year, Joan gave birth to a son—the first of six children—named William, after both of his grandfathers.

Now twenty-seven, Pinkerton became regular, even rigid, in his habits, going to bed each night at 8:30 and rising each morning at 4:30, a schedule that seldom varied for the rest of his life. He neither drank nor smoked, but he might indulge himself at bedtime with a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose florid historical melodramas, widely ridiculed today, were hugely popular at the time. Though Pinkerton would surely have read the novel
Paul Clifford
—with its much-parodied “dark and stormy night”—his favorite was
Eugene Aram,
which drew on the career of a real-life murderer and his eventual capture. At the outset, Bulwer-Lytton declared his belief that the case was “perhaps the most remarkable in the register of English crime,” and he insisted that the reader must examine the “physical circumstances and condition of the criminal” in order to “comprehend fully the lessons which belong to so terrible a picture of frenzy and guilt.” These lessons were not lost on Pinkerton, who judged the novel to be the greatest ever written. As a Dundee friend later recalled, “He didn’t think much of you if you disagreed with him on that.”

If Bulwer-Lytton fired his imagination, Frederick Douglass sparked Pinkerton’s conscience. The newspapers at that time were filled with stories about Douglass, the escaped slave whose 1845 memoir—
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
—was becoming a touchstone of the abolitionist movement. Pinkerton was deeply moved by Douglass’s struggle, as well as by his eloquence. Soon, the political ideals of Pinkerton’s Chartist days found a new channel. “This institution of human bondage always received my earnest opposition,” he later wrote. “Believing it to be a curse to the American nation, and an evidence of barbarism, no efforts of mine were ever spared in behalf of the slave.” The first of these efforts, it appears, was to offer his services to Charles V. Dyer, a leading force in the Chicago chapter of an organization called the American Anti-Slavery Society. Dyer soon found a way for the only and original cooper of Dundee to make himself useful.

The Underground Railroad—a secret network of meeting points, back-channel routes, and safe houses used by abolitionists to ferry runaway slaves north to free states and Canada—had been up and running for many years by this time. Writing in 1860, one former slave claimed that the operation got its name from a disgruntled slaveholder who could not understand how his “escaped chattel” had disappeared so completely: “The damned abolitionists must have a railroad under the ground,” he complained. Pinkerton admired the cunning and subterfuge of the enterprise. The circuitous routes were changed frequently to throw marshals and bounty hunters off the track, and the organizers made use of coded railroad terminology to protect the individual components of the system from discovery. The planners of the escape routes were known as “presidents of the road,” the guides who escorted the fugitives from place to place were “conductors,” the hiding places and safe houses were “stations,” and the ever-changing routes were “lines.” The fugitives themselves were variously known as “passengers,” “cargo,” or “commissions.”

Within months, Pinkerton’s log cabin on the Fox River would become an active station on the Underground Railroad, being a useful stopping point on the journey north to Wisconsin and Canada. Though some of the Illinois stationmasters would be prosecuted for harboring slaves, Pinkerton made little effort to conceal his activities. Some of his passengers stayed long enough to receive instruction in the basics of barrel making, in the hope that the skills might prove useful to them as free men. Years later, Pinkerton spoke feelingly of his efforts at this time, and of his growing awareness that the issue of slavery threatened to divide the nation. “Above all,” he said, “I had hoped for the oppressed and shackled race of the South that the downfall of slavery would be early accomplished, and their freedom permanently established. I had the anti-slavery cause very much at heart, and would never have been satisfied until that gigantic curse was effectually removed.”

For the moment, at least, Pinkerton had more immediate concerns. Although he claimed to be content with his “quiet, but altogether happy mode of life” in Dundee, he often found himself pressed for cash. “There was plenty of dickering, but no money,” Pinkerton complained. “My barrels would be sold to the farmers or merchants for produce, and this I would be compelled to send in to Chicago, to secure as best I could a few dollars, perhaps.” A series of bank failures earlier in the decade compounded the problem. “There was but little money in the West,” he wrote, and a workingman such as himself “could get but little.” Looking to save whatever he could, Pinkerton found ways to scavenge for the raw materials he needed for his barrels and casks. “I was actually too poor to purchase outright a wheelbarrow-load of hoop-poles, or staves, and was consequently compelled to cut my own,” he recalled. To this end, he often roamed along the banks of the Fox River, and in time he found a small island a few miles north “where the poles were both plentiful and of the best quality.”

One day, as Pinkerton took a raft upriver to cut a fresh supply, he stumbled across the smoldering remains of a campfire. For months, he had heard talk of gangs of counterfeiters in the region and concluded that the island was being used for unlawful purposes. “There was no picnicking in those days,” he recalled, “people had more serious matters to attend to, and it required no great keenness to conclude that no honest men were in the habit of occupying the place.” Curious, and perhaps offended at the thought of sinister doings on his patch, Pinkerton decided to investigate. He returned again and again over the next few days, hoping to catch sight of the visitors. One evening, hearing a splash of oars as a small boat rowed out of the darkness, Pinkerton hid himself in a stand of tall grass and watched as several men scrambled ashore and lit a fire. After hearing a few snatches of conversation, Pinkerton felt sure he had uncovered a criminal hideout.

The following day, Pinkerton took his suspicions to the sheriff of Kane County. Rounding up a posse of men, Pinkerton and the sheriff led a raid on the island a few nights later and discovered an elaborate counterfeiting ring. “I led the officers who captured the entire gang,” Pinkerton reported proudly, “securing their implements and a large amount of bogus coin.” The sheriff subsequently discovered that the ringleaders were well-known swindlers, or “coney men,” who were also wanted for cattle rustling and for horse theft. The episode brought Pinkerton a great deal of attention, with eager villagers stopping him in the street to hear details of the raid. “In honor of the event,” he recalled years later, “the island ever since has been known as ‘Bogus Island.’”

The matter would likely have ended there but for the arrival a short time later of the tall, well-dressed stranger. It seemed obvious to the shopkeepers Henry Hunt and Increase Bosworth that Pinkerton, the hero of Bogus Island, would be just the man to prevent another outbreak of counterfeiting. Pinkerton himself, standing barefoot in the back room of the general store, felt dubious. He had no skills, he told the two men, and no experience. “Never mind now,” one of the shopkeepers told him. “We are sure you can do work of this sort, if only you will do it.” If Pinkerton could catch the stranger in the act of passing bad paper, they insisted, the plague might be cut off at its source.

This, Pinkerton later realized, was the turning point of his career:

There I stood, a young, strong, agile, hard-working cooper, daring enough and ready for any reckless emergency which might transpire in the living of an honest life, but decidedly averse to doing something entirely out of my line, and which in all probability I would make an utter failure of. I had not been but four years in America altogether. I had had a hard time of it for the time I had been here. A great detective I would make under such circumstances, I thought.

Privately, his reservations were more practical. He could see little advantage in neglecting his cooperage for this “will-o’-the-wisp piece of business.” He wavered for a moment or two—“What do
I
know about counterfeiting?” he asked—but Hunt and Bosworth persisted, certain he would succeed if he put his mind to it. Pinkerton, flattered by their confidence, made an impulsive decision: “I suddenly resolved to do just that and no less,” he recalled, “although I must confess that, at that time, I had not the remotest idea how to set about the matter.”

For all his reservations, Pinkerton wasted no time. Posing as a “country gawker,” he strolled into town to strike up a conversation with the stranger, and he soon found himself invited to have a quiet chat on the outskirts of town, away from prying eyes. There, the visitor opened a cautious line of questioning, identifying himself as John Craig, a farmer from Vermont, and hinting that he needed a local partner to join him in a lucrative scheme. Not wishing to seem too eager, Pinkerton gave measured responses, admitting that times were “fearfully hard” and that he would be open to a scheme “better adapted to getting more ready cash.” All the while, Pinkerton noted, Craig studied him closely with “a pair of the keenest, coldest small gray eyes I have ever seen.” Worse yet, Pinkerton glimpsed the handles of a pair of pistols protruding from Craig’s coat. “I had nothing for self-protection,” he recalled, “save my two big fists.” As Craig continued his questioning, Pinkerton felt “a sense of insignificance” as he measured himself against the older man. “There I was, hardly more than a plodding country cooper,” he said. “I felt wholly unable to cope with this keen man of the world.”