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= Allan_Pinkerton =
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Introduction
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Allan Pinkerton (August 21, 1819 - July 1, 1884) was a
Scottish-American detective, spy, abolitionist, and cooper best known
for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the United
States and his claim to have obstructed the plot in 1861 to
assassinate then president-elect Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil
War, he provided the Union Army - specifically General George B.
McClellan of the Army of the Potomac - with military intelligence,
including extremely inaccurate enemy troop strength numbers. After the
war, his agents played a significant role as strikebreakers - in
particular during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 - a role that
Pinkerton men would continue to play after the death of their founder.
Early life
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Allan Pinkerton was born in the Gorbals, a working-class area of
Glasgow, on August 21, 1819, the second surviving son of William
Pinkerton, a retired policeman, and Isobel McQueen; he was baptized on
August 25, 1819, which many sources incorrectly give as his birthdate.
He left school at the age of 10 after his father's death. Pinkerton
read voraciously and was largely self-educated. A cooper by trade, he
was active in the Scottish Chartist movement as a young man. He was
not raised in a religious upbringing, and was a lifelong atheist.
Pinkerton emigrated to the United States in 1842. In 1843, he heard of
Dundee Township, Illinois, fifty miles northwest of Chicago on the Fox
River. He built a cabin and started a cooperage, sending for his wife
in Chicago when their cabin was complete. As early as 1844, Pinkerton
worked for the Chicago abolitionist leaders, and his Dundee home was a
stop on the Underground Railroad.
Detective
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Pinkerton first became interested in criminal detective work while
wandering through the wooded groves around Dundee, looking for trees
to make barrel staves, when he came across a band of counterfeiters,
who may have been affiliated with the notorious Banditti of the
Prairie. After observing their movements for some time he informed
the local sheriff, who arrested them. This later led to Pinkerton
being appointed, in 1849, as the first police detective in Chicago,
Cook County, Illinois. In 1850, he partnered with Chicago attorney
Edward Rucker in forming the North-Western Police Agency, which later
became Pinkerton & Co, and finally Pinkerton National Detective
Agency, still in existence today as Pinkerton Consulting and
Investigations, a subsidiary of Securitas AB. Pinkerton's business
insignia was a wide open eye with the caption "We never sleep." As the
US expanded in territory, rail transport increased. Pinkerton's agency
solved a series of train robberies during the 1850s, first bringing
Pinkerton into contact with George B. McClellan, then Chief Engineer
and Vice President of the Illinois Central Railroad, and Abraham
Lincoln, a lawyer who sometimes represented the company.
In 1859, he attended the secret meetings held by John Brown and
Frederick Douglass in Chicago along with abolitionists John Jones and
Henry O. Wagoner. At those meetings, Jones, Wagoner, and Pinkerton
helped purchase clothes and supplies for Brown. Jones' wife, Mary,
guessed that the supplies included the suit Brown was hanged in after
the failure of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in November 1859.
American Civil War
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When the Civil War began, Pinkerton served as head of the Union
Intelligence Service during the first two years, heading off an
alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland while guarding
Abraham Lincoln on his way to Washington, D.C., as well as providing
estimates of Confederate troop numbers to General George B. McClellan
when he commanded the Army of the Potomac. His agents often worked
undercover as Confederate soldiers and sympathizers to gather military
intelligence. Pinkerton himself served on several undercover missions
as a Confederate soldier using the alias Major E.J. Allen. He worked
across the Deep South in the summer of 1861, focusing on
fortifications and Confederate plans. He was found out in Memphis and
barely escaped with his life. This counterintelligence work done by
Pinkerton and his agents is comparable to the work done by today's
U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agents in which Pinkerton's
agency is considered an early predecessor. He was succeeded as
Intelligence Service chief by Lafayette Baker; the Intelligence
Service was the predecessor of the U.S. Secret Service. His work led
to the establishment of the Federal secret service.
Military historians have been strongly critical of the intelligence
Pinkerton provided for the Union Army, which for the most part was
undigested raw data. In the view of T. Harry Williams, Pinkerton's
work was "the poorest intelligence service any general ever had."
Pinkerton's estimates of Rebel troop numbers, derived from his
credulous interrogations of Confederate prisoners, deserters,
refugees, escaped slaves ("contrabands"), and civilians unused to
counting large bodies of men, badly exaggerated the size of those
formations, sometimes almost doubling their actual strength.
Pinkerton's numbers caused McClellan to consistently believe that he
was drastically outnumbered by the Confederate forces he faced.
McClellan's action in the face of what he believed were overwhelming
odds were unduly cautious, causing him to avoid offensive actions
almost completely in favor of siege warfare and taking a defensive
posture. This led to his retreat in the Peninsula Campaign, his
failure to crush Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at the
Battle of Antietam, and his unnecessary delay in carrying out his
orders to pursue Lee's army as they retreated from their invasion of
Maryland back into Virginia. These actions were all based on
McClellan's firm trust of Pinkerton's reports, although the problem
was compounded by the intelligence-gathering ineptitude of Brigadier
General Alfred Pleasonton, McClellan's head cavalryman and his
alternate source of enemy troop information when Pinkerton did not
have agents in place.
On the other hand, Edwin C. Fishel in 'The Secret War for the Union'
and James Mackay in 'Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye' argue
that the troop strength figures which Pinkerton passed on to McClellan
were relatively accurate, and that McClellan himself held primary
responsibility for inflating those numbers to wildly unrealistic
levels.
After the war
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Following Pinkerton's services for the Union Army, he continued his
pursuit of train robbers, including the Reno Gang. He was hired by the
railroad express companies to track outlaw Jesse James, but after
Pinkerton failed to capture him, the railroad withdrew their financial
support and Pinkerton continued to track James at his own expense.
After James allegedly captured and killed one of Pinkerton's
undercover agents (who was working undercover at the farm neighboring
the James family's farmstead), he abandoned the chase. Some consider
this failure Pinkerton's biggest defeat. In 1872, the Spanish
Government hired Pinkerton to help suppress a revolution in Cuba which
intended to end slavery and give citizens the right to vote. If
Pinkerton knew this, then it directly contradicts statements in his
1883 book 'The Spy of the Rebellion', where he professes to be an
ardent abolitionist and hater of slavery. The Spanish government
abolished slavery in 1880 and a Royal Decree abolished the last
vestiges of it in 1886.
Personal life
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Pinkerton married Joan Carfrae (1822-1887), a singer from Duddingston,
in Glasgow on March 13, 1842. They remained married until his death.
They had six children: Isabella, William, Joan, Robert, Mary, and
Joan.
Death
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Pinkerton died in Chicago on July 1, 1884. It is usually said that
Pinkerton slipped on the pavement and bit his tongue, resulting in
gangrene. Contemporary reports give conflicting causes, such as that
he succumbed to a stroke - he had a year earlier - or to malaria,
which he had contracted during a trip to the Southern United States.
At the time of his death, he was working on a system to centralize all
criminal identification records; such a database is now maintained by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Pinkerton is buried between his wife and Kate Warne in the family plot
in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago. He is a member of the Military
Intelligence Hall of Fame.
Legacy
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After his death, the agency continued to operate and soon became a
major force against the labor movement developing in the US and
Canada. This effort changed the image of the Pinkertons for years.
They were involved in numerous activities against labor during the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, including:
* The Homestead Strike (1892), the direct impetus for the federal
Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893, prohibiting the federal government from
hiring its detectives
* The Pullman Strike (1894)
* The Wild Bunch Gang (1896)
* The Ludlow Massacre (1914)
* The La Follette Committee (1933-1937)
Despite his agency's later reputation for anti-labor activities,
Pinkerton himself was heavily involved in pro-labor politics as a
young man. Though Pinkerton considered himself pro-labor, he opposed
strikes and distrusted labor unions.
Allan Pinkerton was so famous that for decades after his death, his
surname was a slang term for a private eye, whether they were agents
of the Pinkerton Agency or not. The "Mr. Pinkerton" novels, by
American mystery writer Zenith Jones Brown (under the pseudonym David
Frome), were about Welsh-born amateur detective Evan Pinkerton and may
have been inspired by the slang term.
Writings
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Pinkerton produced numerous popular detective books, ostensibly based
on his own exploits and those of his agents. Some were published after
his death, and they are considered to have been more motivated by a
desire to promote his detective agency than a literary endeavour. Most
historians believe that Allan Pinkerton hired ghostwriters, but the
books nonetheless bear his name and no doubt reflect his views.
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In popular culture
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* In the 1951 feature film 'The Tall Target', a historical drama
loosely based on the Baltimore Plot, Allan Pinkerton is portrayed by
Scottish actor Robert Malcolm. The M-G-M production stars Dick Powell
and was directed by Anthony Mann.
* In the 1956 episode "The Pinkertons" of the ABC/Desilu western
television series, 'The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp', set in
Wichita, Kansas, Douglas Evans portrays Allan Pinkerton, who is
seeking to recover $40,000 in stolen money but interferes with the
attempt of Marshal Wyatt Earp (Hugh O'Brian) to catch the entire gang
of Crummy Newton (Richard Alexander).
* In the 1969 Spaghetti Western 'The Price of Power', Pinkerton
appears as an associate of President James A. Garfield who takes part
in his (highly fictionalized) assassination. He is portrayed by
Spanish actor Fernando Rey.
* Pinkerton is portrayed in an episode of 'The Life and Times of
Grizzly Adams' (1974) by Don Galloway.
* In 1990, Turner Network Television aired the 1990 speculative
historical drama 'The Rose and the Jackal', with Christopher Reeve as
Pinkerton, recounting his (completely fictional) romance with the
Confederate spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow.
* In 1994, "'Pinkertonova detektivní agentura'" ('Pinkerton's
Detective Agency") an episode of the Czech TV series 'Dobrodružství
kriminalistiky' ("The Adventure of Criminology") was aired.
* Pinkerton is portrayed in the 1994 American biographical western
film 'Frank and Jesse' by William Atherton
* Pinkerton is a major character portrayed by Timothy Dalton in the
2001 film 'American Outlaws'.
* Pinkerton's role in foiling the assassination plot against Abraham
Lincoln was dramatized in the 2013 film 'Saving Lincoln', which tells
President Lincoln's story through the eyes of Ward Hill Lamon, a
former law partner of Lincoln who served as his primary bodyguard
during the Civil War. Pinkerton is played by Marcus J. Freed.
* Charlie Day portrayed Pinkerton in "Baltimore", a Season 2 episode
of the docudrama TV series 'Drunk History', first broadcast on July
22, 2014.
* Pinkerton is a recurring character played by Angus Macfadyen in the
2014 TV series 'The Pinkertons'.
* Pinkerton is an important character in Steven Price's 2016 novel
'By Gaslight'.
* The Pinkerton Detective Agency plays a large role in the plot of the
2018 western video game 'Red Dead Redemption 2'.
* "The Pinkerton Agency" is a podcast episode of the Dollop in 2024.
* Pinkerton is the titular character portrayed by Dean Chandler Bowden
in the 2025 Xumo Play Original film 'Pinkerton'.
See also
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* American Civil War spies
References
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Informational notes
Citations
Bibliography
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* Mackay, James (1997) 'Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye'. New
York: Wiley.
* Sears, Stephen W. (2017) 'Lincoln's Lieutenants' Boston: Mariner
Books.
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Further reading
* Josephson, Judith Pinkerton (1996) 'Allan Pinkerton: The Original
Private Eye' Minneapolis, Minnesota: Lerner.
External links
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* [
http://www1.lib.uchicago.edu/e/index.php3 University of Chicago's
library database]
* [
http://main.library.utoronto.ca/ University of Toronto's library
database]
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[
https://web.archive.org/web/20131029010959/http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/cops_others/pinkerton/1.html
Detailed profile of Pinkerton]
* [
http://heritage.scotsman.com/greatscots.cfm?id=441632005 Allan
Pinkerton, in The Scotsman's Great Scots series]
* [
http://americanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa062002a.htm A
Brief History of the Pinkertons]
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Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Pinkerton
