Allan Pinkerton

Allan Pinkerton (August 21, 1819 – July 1, 1884) was a Scottish-American cooper, abolitionist, detective, and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the United States and his claim to have foiled a plot in 1861 to assassinate 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.

Allan Pinkerton was born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow on August 21, 1819, the second surviving son of Isobel McQueen and William Pinkerton; 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.

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.

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.

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 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.