In January 1861, a Scottish immigrant named Allan Pinkerton learned of a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln during his inaugural journey to Washington. Pinkerton had been hired to investigate threats to a Baltimore railroad, but the intelligence he gathered pointed toward something far more dangerous. He rerouted Lincoln’s travel, moved the president-elect through Baltimore in the middle of the night under an assumed name, and delivered him safely to Washington. It was, in miniature, what would become the practice of American intelligence.
Pinkerton had come to the United States from Glasgow in 1842, fleeing Scotland after his involvement in Chartist political activities. He settled in Illinois, became a deputy sheriff, and in 1850 founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency with the motto “We Never Sleep.” His early cases involved railroad theft, counterfeiting, and the kind of interstate crime that local police forces were structurally unable to handle.
When the Civil War began, Lincoln asked Pinkerton to organize a secret service for the Union Army. Pinkerton’s operation was the first organized military intelligence service in American history. He placed agents inside Confederate territory, ran networks of informants, and attempted to assess Confederate troop strength and intentions.
His record was mixed. His intelligence about Confederate forces was consistently and sometimes catastrophically overestimated — he told McClellan the Confederates had far more men than they did, and McClellan’s excessive caution was partly a consequence of those inflated numbers. After the war, Pinkerton returned to the detective agency and built it into the largest private law enforcement organization in the country. The intelligence tradecraft he developed during the Civil War, however imperfect, was the foundation on which American intelligence services were eventually built.
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