Allan Pinkerton was a Scottish American detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton
National Detective Agency.
Early life, career and immigration Pinkerton was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow,
Scotland, to William Pinkerton and his wife, Isobel McQueen, on August 25, 1819.
The location of the house where he was born is now occupied by the Glasgow Central Mosque.
A cooper by trade, he was active in the British Chartist movement as a young man.
Pinkerton married Joan Carfrae in Glasgow on 13 March 1842 secretly before moving to
America.
Disillusioned by the failure to win suffrage, Pinkerton emigrated to the United States in
1842.
In 1843, Pinkerton heard of Dundee, Illinois, fifty miles northwest of Chicago on the Fox
River.
He built a cabin and started a cooperage there, sending for his wife in Chicago after the
cabin was complete.
As early as 1844, Pinkerton worked for Chicago Abolitionist leaders, and his Dundee home
was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
In 1849 Pinkerton was appointed as the first detective in Chicago.
In the 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
and is 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 transportation increased.
Pinkerton's agency solved a series of train robberies during the 1850s, first bringing
Pinkerton into contact with George McClellan, then Chief Engineer and Vice President of
the Illinois Central Railroad, and Abraham Lincoln, the company's lawyer.
American Civil War
Prior to his service with the Union Army, he developed several investigative techniques
that are still used today.
Among them are "shadowing" and "assuming a role".
Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Pinkerton served as head of the Union Intelligence Service
in 1861–1862 and foiled an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland, while guarding
Abraham Lincoln on his way to his inauguration.
His agents often worked undercover as Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, in an effort to
gather military intelligence.
Pinkerton served in several undercover missions under the alias of Major E.J.
Allen.
Pinkerton was succeeded as Intelligence Service chief by Lafayette Baker.
The Intelligence Service was the precursor to the U.S. Secret Service.
After the war Following Pinkerton's service with the Union
Army, he continued his pursuit of train robbers, such as the Reno Gang and outlaw Jesse James.
He was originally hired by the railroad express companies to track down 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
foolish enough to gain employment at the farm neighboring the James farmstead, he finally
gave up the chase.
Some consider this failure Pinkerton's biggest defeat.
He also sought to oppose labor unions.
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.
Allan Pinkerton died in Chicago on July 1, 1884.
It is claimed that the reason was an accident in which Pinkerton slipped on the pavement
and bit his tongue, resulting in deadly gangrene.
However, reports of the time give different conflicting causes such as Pinkerton succumbing
to a stroke or to malaria he had contracted during a trip to the Southern United States.
At the time of his death, he was working on a system that would centralize all criminal
identification records, a database now maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Pinkerton is buried in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago.
He is a member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
Legacy 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, the direct impetus for
the federal Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893, prohibiting the federal government from hiring its detectives
The Pullman Strike The Wild Bunch Gang
The Ludlow Massacre The La Follette Committee
Many labor sympathizers accused the Pinkertons of inciting riots in order to discredit unions
and justify police crackdowns.
The Pinkertons' reputation was harmed by their protection of replacement workers and the
business property of the major industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie.
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.
Pinkerton was so famous that for decades after his death, his surname was a slang term for
a private eye.
Due to the Pinkerton Agency's conflicts with labor unions, the word Pinkerton remains in
the vocabulary of labor organizers and union members as a derogatory reference to authority
figures who side with management.
In the 1951 feature film "The Tall Target," a historical drama loosely based upon "The
Baltimore Plot," Allan Pinkerton is portrayed by actor Robert Malcolm.
The M-G-M production starred 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, the actor Douglas Evans plays Allan Pinkerton, who is seeking
to recover $40,000 in stolen money but interferes with the attempt of Marshal Wyatt Earp to
catch the entire gang of Crummy Newton.
The episode is set in Wichita, Kansas.
Pinkerton's exploits are in part the inspiration of the 1961 NBC western series, Whispering
Smith, starring Audie Murphy and Guy Mitchell.
In 1990, Turner Network Television aired the 1990 speculative historical drama The Rose
and the Jackal, with Christopher Reeve as Pinkerton, recounting his romance with female
spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow.
In the HBO series Deadwood, several references are made to the "Pinkertons" and fear that
agents might be called in to investigate illegal activities in the lawless Deadwood mining
camp in the Dakota territory prior to its being annexed by the US.
Pinkerton is a major character in the 2001 film American Outlaws, where he is portrayed
by Welsh actor Timothy Dalton.
Pinkerton's role in foiling the assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln was dramatized
in the 2012 film Saving Lincoln, which tells President Lincoln's story through the eyes
of Ward Hill Lamon, a former law partner of Lincoln who also served as his primary bodyguard
during the Civil War.
Pinkerton is played by Marcus J. Freed in that movie.
Writings 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.
See also
American Civil War spies References
External links University of Chicago's library database
University of Toronto's library database Detailed profile of Pinkerton
Allan Pinkerton, in The Scotsman's Great Scots series
A Brief History of the Pinkertons Allan Pinkerton Books at Project Gutenberg