The organized investigation of suspicious behaviors has evolved in two directions. One is in the case of detective work, dealing with activities that endanger individual citizens. The other, integrally linked avenue is in intelligence, investigating threats to the state. Flowing out of the same font, the modern incarnation of these entwined investigative avenues are largely the creation of two people. In Europe, Eugene-Francois Vidocq may be considered the godfather of the former criminal turned secret agent who is largely responsible for the development of the modern, entwined arts of intelligence-gathering and criminal investigation. But stateside, his parallel, no less influential, was Lincoln’s spy master during the Civil War, Allan Pinkerton.
Born to an impoverished family in Glasgow in 1819, Pinkerton’s policeman father died early, and the young son was forced to work. While earning his living as a cooper, he grew interested in a pro-democratic movement called Chartism, which was keenly watched by British authorities. In danger of arrest for this political activity, he escaped Scotland and moved to the United States, where he continued to work as a cooper near Chicago. Part of his early legend was burnished by the story that, while one day felling trees for wood to make his barrels on a small island, he came upon a group of counterfeiters, associated with a renowned gang called the Banditti of the Prairie, who were meeting there, thinking that they were alone. He was able to single-handedly apprehend them and bring them to the the mainland in custody. He developed a reputation among the locals as an upright citizen and was made deputy sheriff. He was promoted in 1846 and worked as a sheriff based in Chicago. But sensing an opportunity in the private sector, Pinkerton stepped down from the official police force to found a private detective agency, along with a lawyer partner, Edward Rucker. This was not the first private detective agency (recall the Vidocq had founded one in 1833), but it would become the best-known and most influential.
Specializing initially in thefts from trains and train stations, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency had a series of very high-profile successes in the 1850s, which impressed the heads of the railroad and the railroad company’s lawyer, a promising young man with political aspirations by the name of Abraham Lincoln. He was an avid abolitionist and secretly aided various plots, including John Brown’s ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.
Two years later came Pinkerton's grand success that would make his career — saving newly-elected President Abraham Lincoln from an assassination attempt in Baltimore. Pinkerton’s agency was hired by the rail company to investigate suspicions of a threat to the president during his planned route by train from Illinois, via 70 towns and cities, to Washington, D.C. The main concern was Baltimore, Maryland (a pro-slavery state at the cusp of the Civil War), one train stop before Washington. Pinkerton had learned from one of his agents, Kate Warne (like Vidocq, Pinkerton was for equal rights at the workplace, employing female as well as male detectives), that a plot was afoot to attack Lincoln in his railroad carriage between the two stations in Baltimore, on February 23.
Pinkerton was extremely cautious — he would be criticized for this frequently, but then again, if you want someone to care for your security, presumably caution is a plus — and he tried to get Lincoln to alter his program, but to no avail. Lincoln’s friend, Ward Hill Lamon, wanted Lincoln to ride armed with a revolver and a Bowie knife, but Pinkerton famously stated that he “would not for the world have it said that Mr. Lincoln had to enter the National Capitol armed.”
On February 22, Pinkerton had telegraph lines cut to keep conspirators from communicating. A special train was arranged to secret Lincoln from the previous stop, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Baltimore. The train the president was meant to arrive on, the one which Pinkerton had learned would be swarmed en route by knife-wielding assassins, was a decoy. The crowds waiting to greet Lincoln went away confused, but Pinkerton and his employers, the railroad company, considered it a job well done. He telegraphed them from Washington with the coded phrase, “Plums delivered nuts safely.”
Pinkerton’s agency functioned by using undercover secret agents, dressed in civilian clothing, and by paying criminals to rat on other criminals — both of these methods were new at the time, revolutionary, and would quickly become commonplace, as they remain universal to police agencies to this day. The employment of female detectives was also new, but so effective that, in 1860, Pinkerton had opened a branch of his agency called the Female Detective Bureau to, as he said, “worm out secrets” in ways that male detectives could not.
His successes continued, many of them making headlines, like his 1866 arrest of a gang that stole a whopping $700,000 from the Adams Express Company (worth in the tens of millions in today’s currency). But Pinkerton cemented his reputation when Lincoln called on him to run his intelligence service during the Civil War. Taking the alias E. J. Allen, Pinkerton used his criminal investigative talents to focus on military intelligence gathering, as head of the Union Intelligence Service. Continuing his now well-developed approaches of using undercover agents, he had his detectives, now spies, disguise themselves as Confederate soldiers. He was one of Lincoln’s confidantes, and his efforts certainly helped the Union victory, though he was known to have over-estimated Confederate abilities.
After the war, the Pinkerton Agency continued. It would become the world’s best-known private detective agency. The term “private eye” refers to it, via their agency’s logo, an open eye, with the caption “We never sleep.” A Pinkerton detective would always have their eyes open for their clients. Pinkerton detectives not only chased the famous gangsters of the Wild West, but worked internationally, assisting the Spanish government in 1872 to suppress a revolution in Cuba — this demonstrated Pinkerton’s credentials, but also showed that his morality was flexible when there was a buck to be made. He had worked avidly on behalf of abolitionists and the Union, but the Cuban revolution sought to end slavery, and he was content to work in opposition to it. Pinkerton’s own memoir, "The Spy of the Rebellion" (1883) touts his work as an abolitionist, but Spain only outlawed slavery in 1880, long after the revolution. If there is another black mark on Pinkerton’s records, it was his failure to capture Jesse James and his gang. The infamous outlaw was tracked by the Pinkerton Agency, and there was an undercover agent placed at the James family farm, but they could never catch him. Even after the railroad company ceased to pay the Agency to track James, Pinkerton continued out of his own pocket, chasing the one that got away.
Pinkerton died in an underwhelming way. On July 1, 1884, he slipped on wet pavement, biting his tongue. The bite turned gangrenous and took his life. In his final years, in direct parallel to Vidocq, he was at work on a way to organize and centralize all identification records on criminals. Pinkerton’s two institutional legacies, the Detective Agency and the Union Intelligence Service, are considered the direct predecessors of the FBI and the CIA. The way American governmental organizations investigate, whether nationalized crimes against citizens or foreign threats, hearkens back to one man.
The agency continued to blossom under the stewardship of Allan’s two sons, Robert and William. William Pinkerton is a particularly cinematic figure, and it is entirely bizarre that so little has been written about him that he does not even have his own Wikipedia page (I know that having one’s page is no mark of importance, but not having one, for so dramatic a figure, seems a wild oversight). While Robert was the administrator, William was an action man, chasing the likes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid through the West (his hot pursuit forced the gangsters to flee the United States, and they were eventually killed in Bolivia), but equally at home in the lamp-lit streets of Europe, where he spent his career at the heels of Adam Worth, the so-called “Napoleon of Crime” and inspiration for Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories. It was William Pinkerton who coined the phrase, “the Napoleon of Crime,” for Worth’s diminutive stature and major influence as the kingpin of his own international organized crime group.
There you go, HBO, Netflix and Amazon Prime. Between Vidocq and the Pinkertons, you surely have an abundance of dark, brooding period detective material that remains relevant today.
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