The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (8 page)

These principles formed a template for Pinkerton’s first generation of “operatives,” the term he used to distinguish his employees from common police detectives. Along with his Chartist ideals, Pinkerton also drew on a robust strain of derring-do that he likely gleaned from Eugène-François Vidocq, the legendary French detective. A criminal in his youth, Vidocq later turned his talents to law enforcement, helping to create the Sûreté, the detective bureau of the French police, in 1811. The French detective, whose story would serve as inspiration for the character of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s
Les Miserables,
was still active in Paris when Pinkerton opened his doors in Chicago. Widely credited as the first investigator to bring scientific rigor to the detection of crime, Vidocq introduced such innovations as rudimentary ballistics, plaster of paris molds of footprints, and a centralized criminal database. At the same time, he pioneered the use of disguises and cover identities, a technique that Pinkerton would employ in nearly every major operation of his career. Vidocq’s dramatic, often fanciful memoir had been a publishing phenomenon both in Europe and the United States, and Pinkerton seems to have studied it closely. Pinkerton would have been especially amused by a chapter in which Vidocq matched wits with a duplicitous cooper from Livry, who was suspected of stealing a fortune in jewels. Posing as a fellow thief, Vidocq plied the cooper with alcohol and eventually wormed his way into the suspect’s confidence.

Pinkerton, for his part, advised his operatives against coercing statements by means of alcohol, as these tended to “shake the strength of evidence” when brought into court. The example of Vidocq, however, gave him a firm belief in the possibility of redemption for even the most hardened criminals. Pinkerton believed that lawbreakers were “capable of moral reform and elevation” if treated properly, and he advised his men to “do all in their power” in the interests of rehabilitation. “Unfortunately,” he noted, “under our present system, this is too little thought of.” If these views were progressive, other aspects of Pinkerton’s philosophy reached back to the ancients by way of Machiavelli. Again and again, Pinkerton insisted that “the ends justify the means, if the ends are for the accomplishment of Justice.” He understood, however, that this was not a universal view. “Moralists may question whether this is strictly right,” he said, “but it is a necessity in the detection of crime.”

During his first year of business Pinkerton spent much of his time assembling and training a core team of operatives. From the start, he demonstrated a strong eye for talent, beginning with his first employee, twenty-five-year-old George H. Bangs, a former newspaper reporter, who became Pinkerton’s right-hand man. Tall and reserved, Bangs traced his lineage to the
Mayflower
and could mix easily with the rich and powerful. Bangs proved “very able and efficient” as a detective, according to Pinkerton, and even more talented as a businessman. As general superintendent, Bangs oversaw the agency’s finances and rapid growth, leaving Pinkerton to concentrate on detective work.

With Bangs minding the store in Chicago, Pinkerton was free to travel wherever his latest case happened to take him. In 1853, when an investigation took him to New York City, Pinkerton spotted a man he felt would make an outstanding addition to the team. Pinkerton, who had never been to New York before, had carved out some time to take in the spectacle of America’s first world’s fair. Characteristically, he was less interested in the soaring Crystal Palace exhibition than in the special police force detailed to guard it. Pinkerton was particularly struck by the efficient and courteous manner of a young police sergeant on duty inside the main hall. His name, Pinkerton learned, was Timothy Webster; a thirty-two-year-old native of England, he had emigrated with his family as a boy. Webster had set his sights on a career as a New York policeman, but his advancement had been thwarted, he believed, because he had no political connections. Pinkerton, acting on impulse, offered him a job on the spot and handed him train fare to Chicago.

Timothy Webster soon became Pinkerton’s best and most resourceful detective. “He was a man of great physical strength and endurance,” Pinkerton said, “skilled in all athletic sports, and a good shot.” Above all, in Pinkerton’s view, Webster possessed “a strong will and a courage that knew no fear.” Two other Englishmen, Pryce Lewis and John Scully, soon followed. Pinkerton also brought on a “shrewd hand” named John H. White, who had the useful manner and appearance, in Pinkerton’s estimation, of a con man rather than a detective. White completed a core team of eight employees—five detectives, two clerks, and a secretary. Apart from Webster, none of Pinkerton’s original operatives came from a law-enforcement background, but each had a quality that Pinkerton felt could be turned to his advantage. The men trained on the job, learning how to shadow suspects and gain the confidence of otherwise tight-lipped criminals. Like Vidocq, Pinkerton encouraged his men to adopt whatever persona would be useful for the task at hand, as he himself had done at the Chicago post office, and to inhabit that identity as fully as possible—“acting it out to the life,” as he described it. One account of the Pinkerton operation describes the Chicago office as resembling the backstage of a theater, complete with a large closet full of disguises so that the men could easily transform themselves into bartenders, gamblers, horse-car conductors, or newly arrived “greenhorns” fresh off the boat from the old country.

In another corner of the office, Pinkerton pinned up sketches and daguerreotypes of wanted men, the rudimentary beginnings of what would become a storied “rogue’s gallery” of hunted criminals. Over time, Pinkerton refined his record keeping to take account of a criminal’s modus operandi, distinguishing characteristics, handwriting samples, and known associates. He cultivated an extensive correspondence with police captains and county sheriffs across the country, transforming the Chicago office into a national hub of criminal data. It was a project that would absorb him to the end of his life.

The ever-vigilant Pinkerton “Private Eye.”

In time, the soon-to-be famous Pinkerton logo—a stern, unblinking eye—made its appearance on the agency’s correspondence and legal documents. For Pinkerton, this aptly chosen symbol expressed the rigid work ethic and eternal vigilance he demanded from a prospective agent: “At an instant’s warning, he must be ready to go wherever he may be ordered. Sometimes, for weeks, he may have little or no rest; and he may be called upon to endure hardships and dangers which few men have the courage to face.”

Only a few years earlier, a scheming criminal had delivered a stinging rebuke to Pinkerton: “Old John Craig is never caught napping, young man.” Now, as he took his place at the head of a rapidly expanding detective empire, Pinkerton turned these words into a statement of purpose, and he had the boldly lettered line placed beneath the image of the watchful, all-seeing eye. He had boiled it down to three simple words: “We Never Sleep.”

CHAPTER FOUR

PINK LADY

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

IN OCTOBER OF 1856,
Pinkerton took a momentary break from the reports and correspondence piled on his desk and dashed off a quick note to his friend Henry Hunt, the Dundee shopkeeper who had set him on the track of “Old John Craig” a decade earlier. Much had changed since the day Pinkerton stood barefoot in Hunt’s store and admitted that he had never seen a ten-dollar bill. The Pinkerton agency now stretched across the region, with branch offices in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. The previous year, Pinkerton had signed a contract with the Illinois Central Railroad, undertaking to guard its “road” and rolling stock as the line pushed south to Mobile and the Gulf of Mexico. Several other railroad companies followed suit, employing a growing cadre of Pinkerton men for any “special and sudden exigencies” that might arise. For these services, Pinkerton received annual retainers amounting to ten thousand dollars a year, as well as “several funds hereinafter specified” to help the agency expand. As he told Hunt, “I am overwhelmed with business.” The grueling pace sometimes left him so exhausted, he admitted, that he could scarcely stand: “I never removed my clothes this evening but fell across my bed.”

That same year, Pinkerton made a decision that would change forever what it meant to be a Pinkerton man. One afternoon, as he sat “pondering deeply over some matters,” Pinkerton looked up and saw a young woman standing in the door of his office. The visitor introduced herself as Mrs. Kate Warne and explained that she was a widow seeking employment. Pinkerton estimated her age at twenty-two or twenty-three. “She was above the medium height,” he observed, “slender, graceful in her movements, and perfectly self-possessed in her manner.” Kate Warne was perhaps the most remarkable person ever to pass through the doors of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Her pale, broad face was frank and unassuming, Pinkerton noted, but her dark blue eyes were captivating—sharp, decisive and “filled with fire.” She was not a conventional beauty—her features, Pinkerton admitted, were “not what would be called handsome”—but she radiated a quiet strength and compassion. Kate Warne appeared to be the sort of person to whom one would turn in times of distress.

“I invited her to take a seat,” Pinkerton recalled. He assumed, understandably, that she had come in hopes of a secretarial position. “I’m afraid there are no openings at present,” he said, glancing down at his papers.

Mrs. Warne folded her gloved hands. “I’m afraid you have misunderstood me,” she said.

Pinkerton looked up. “Have I?” he asked.

The young widow gave him a level gaze across the cluttered expanse of his desk. Her blue eyes, he saw, were now burning with resolve. “I have come to inquire,” she said, “as to whether you would not employ me as a detective.”

These words, Pinkerton admitted, left him dumbfounded and thoroughly unsettled. Up to that moment, the possibility of hiring a female operative had simply never occurred to him. The very suggestion was shocking, and entirely outside the compass of his experience. Pinkerton agents, by definition, were rugged men of action, good with their fists and cool in the face of danger. The work was physically demanding, as well; one operative had recently trailed a horse-drawn carriage on foot rather than lose sight of a suspect, covering more than twelve miles at a dead run. This was not Pinkerton’s idea of women’s work.

To his credit, Pinkerton decided to give Mrs. Warne a fair hearing. “It is not the custom to employ women as detectives,” he told her. “How, exactly, do you propose to be of service?” The young widow leaned forward and spoke with sudden urgency. “A female detective may go and worm out secrets in ways that are impossible for male detectives. A criminal may hide all traces of his guilt from his fellow men, but he will not hide it from his wife or mistress. The testimony of these women, then, becomes the sole means of resolving the crimes, and this testimony can be obtained in only one way—a female detective makes her acquaintance, wins her confidence, and draws out the story of the wrongdoing.”

Pinkerton nodded his head as Mrs. Warne spoke, and continued nodding after she had finished. In spite of his instinctive reservations, he could not fail to see the merits of her reasoning. “She had evidently given the matter much study,” he admitted. Still, as Pinkerton knew all too well, his operatives routinely placed themselves in harm’s way—he himself carried scars along the length of his left arm from the night he had been shot in the back. He had grave misgivings about exposing a woman to such dangers.

Mrs. Warne, seeing the indecision in his face, tried to continue pleading her case, but Pinkerton held up a hand to stop her. “Thank you, madam,” he said. “I must consider the matter in private. If you will return tomorrow afternoon, I will give you my decision.” Mrs. Warne clearly wished to say more, but after a moment’s pause, she thought better of it. She gave a polite nod, thanked Pinkerton for his time, and swept from the room. Pinkerton spent several moments gazing at the empty doorway, an uncharacteristic look of puzzlement on his face.

Pinkerton spent a restless night weighing the “moral costs” of employing a female detective, but he admitted that “the more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that the idea was a good one.” When Mrs. Warne returned the next day at the appointed time, Pinkerton signed her up as America’s first female private eye.

There was no precedent for Kate Warne. The work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had barely begun in 1856, and their National Woman’s Suffrage Association was more than ten years in the future. The New York City Police Department would not have a female investigator in its ranks until 1903. Nevertheless, Kate Warne at once became an integral part of the Pinkerton agency, and she proved to be a versatile and utterly fearless operative. In one investigation, she posed as a fortune-teller—“the only living descendant of Hermes”—to lure secrets from a superstitious suspect, and on another occasion she forged a “useful intimacy” with the wife of a suspected murderer. “She succeeded far beyond my utmost expectations,” Pinkerton admitted, “and I soon found her an invaluable acquisition to my force.” Mrs. Warne proved so indispensable that Pinkerton encouraged her to recruit other female operatives. Soon, the Pinkerton agency had a female detective bureau running out of the Chicago office, with Mrs. Warne acting as superintendent.