Years later, when Allan Pinkerton was well established in America, he let it be known that his father, the “policeman,” had been murdered while on duty. It was another lie, though he told the truth about his seven-year apprenticeship as a cooper. His role with the Glasgow Chartists, however, he bent like a stave of one of his barrels to fit his own ends
Pinkerton had joined the Chartist movement following the end of his apprenticeship in 1838 when his master, William McAulay, gave the job of cooper to his own unqualified son.
Pinkerton set out to find work elsewhere in Scotland, and during his travels the impressionable nineteen-year-old attended his first Chartist meetings. Here he listened to the impassioned arguments between those Scottish Chartists who favored action through peaceful means, “Moral Force” Chartists, and those who favored more robust methods, the “Physical Force” Chartists.
Pinkerton supported the latter, as did most Glaswegian Chartists, and such was the fervor with which Pinkerton embraced the movement that in September 1839 he was elected one of six members of the Glasgow Universal Suffrage Association. That same month, at the Chartist National Convention, it was decided that the time had come for a national uprising. The catalyst for the insurrection was the arrest and incarceration the previous May of four Welsh Chartists, and it was intended that Chartists from around Britain would descend on Newport in south Wales and demand their release. The date chosen for the attack was the first week of November, but what had been envisaged as a nationwide uprising dwindled to a regional protest. Men’s ardor cooled as the day approached and the realization dawned that this was revolution, and everyone knew the penalty for that. The tens of thousands of Chartists expected to converge on Newport was in reality no more than five thousand, the majority from south Wales, and armed only with pikes and clubs.
The Newport Rising of November 4, 1839, was a bloody fiasco for the Chartists. Five hundred special constables and a regiment of soldiers waited for the rebels, and in the ensuing violence twenty-two Chartists were killed. The ringleaders were hunted down and sixty-two of their number transported to Australia. Never again would the Chartists rise up in such force. In later life Pinkerton claimed he’d been present at the Newport Rising, but in all probability this was another distortion of the truth. Contemporary reports made no mention of a contingent of Glasgow Chartists, and none of those wounded or transported came from the city.
For the next two and a half years Pinkerton continued to work for the Chartist cause, but it was more a hobby than a belief. There were rallies and meetings and assemblies, all opportunities to rattle the Chartist tail, but the government had drawn the movement’s venom. Nevertheless it was at a Chartist fund-raising concert in the summer of 1841 that Pinkerton’s life turned upside down. There on stage, a vision in white, was Joan Carfrae, whose voice and beauty and whole being captivated the twenty-two-year-old Pinkerton. But he wasn’t one of life’s romantics, nor was he physically attractive. The young Allan Pinkerton was five foot eight with an upper body that resembled one of his barrels. He had the face of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, cold blue-gray eyes, a crude dark beard and a mouth that rarely smiled.
But Pinkerton was nothing if not persistent, and he “got to sort of hanging around her, clinging to her, so to speak,” during the months that followed. Eventually Joan succumbed, and the courtship resulted in marriage, along with another Pinkerton fabrication. The legend he promulgated in America was that he had fled Glasgow because he “had become an outlaw with a price on his head” and that he’d married Joan in a secret ceremony hours before friends spirited them onto a vessel bound for North America. The truth, as was often the case with Pinkerton, was more prosaic. He and Joan married on March 13, 1842, in one of Glasgow’s most prominent churches, and it wasn’t until April 3 that they boarded the Kent bound for Montreal. Allan Pinkerton was one of 63,852 Britons who emigrated to the United States in 1842, the highest annual total to that point. He might have told his fellow passengers, in hushed tones, that he was running from the law, but in reality the only thing he was fleeing was the powerlessness of the British workingman.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
“Murdered in the Most Shocking Manner”
NONE OF THIS WAS TOLD to Pryce Lewis during his interview with Pinkerton’s deputy. It was he who had to impress George Bangs, which he evidently did because he was offered a position with the agency. Bangs “praised Lewis’s appearance and was confident that he was adapted to detective work, would learn it easily and would like it.” Lewis remained unconvinced, even when he was informed that he could start immediately “with a good salary which would be increased as he became proficient.”
Lewis asked for time to think. He left the Pinkerton offices in the company of Charlton and over supper interrogated him about the agency and its founder. Charlton told Lewis how Pinkerton had worked his way from Scotland to Chicago, via Montreal, nearly twenty years earlier, before opening a cooperage in Dundee, a Scottish settlement forty miles northwest of Chicago. So how did a cooper become a detective? inquired Lewis. Charlton explained that in 1846 Pinkerton had helped track down a gang of counterfeiters in Dundee, an exploit that brought him fame among his fellow citizens. Storekeepers enlisted his aid to snare other petty criminals, and soon his name began to ripple across the state. In 1847 he was invited to become deputy sheriff of Cook County in Illinois. Two years later, as Chicago’s crime rate increased in line with its population, Pinkerton was appointed the city’s first detective by Mayor Levi Boone. But the following year he quit to become a mail agent for the United States Post Office, chasing thieves who stole checks and postal orders. That same year, continued Charlton, Pinkerton and a man named Edward Rucker rented a small office at 89 Washington Street and opened the Pinkerton & Co. Detective Agency.*
Rucker soon left the business to his partner, and for a while Pinkerton combined his work for the post office with running his agency. But the latter demanded more and more of his time as Chicago’s flourishing railroad network brought in troublemakers from across the country. Soon Pinkerton had expanded his agency. Charlton ran through the recruits: Lewis had already met George Bangs, the first detective hired by Pinkerton; then there was Sam Bridgeman, who liked his liquor but was good at his work; Adam Roche, a German whose only vice was tobacco; the canny John Fox; and finally there was Timothy Webster, not only the star of the agency but the most popular. Charlton was sure Lewis would find the British-born Webster agreeable. They were all fine detectives, said Charlton, but none had been born to the role. Bangs was a former reporter, Bridgeman a soldier, Fox a watchmaker, Roche a lumberman and Webster a tinsmith. Pinkerton had given them a few pointers at the start, but most of what they learned they acquired on the job, as Lewis would surely do.
Next Charlton told Lewis about some of the cases they solved, most of which centered on the network of railroads. Since 1855 Illinois Central had been paying the agency ten thousand dollars per annum to protect its six railroads and their employees: Michigan Central, Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana, Galena and Chicago Union, Illinois Central, Chicago and Rock Island, and Chicago, Burlington and Quincy.
There had been murders to crack, robberies to solve, outlaws to catch, and at this very moment Pinkerton and most of the team were in Alabama, waiting to give evidence at the trial of Nathan Maroney, the charismatic manager of the Montgomery branch of the Adams Express Company, who had been charged with stealing forty thousand dollars of the company’s money. The crime had riveted the Southern states, and there was outrage in some quarters that a Yankee like Pinkerton had accused so prominent a man as Maroney of criminal activity.
Charlton had said enough. This was the life of adventure Lewis craved. The next day he accepted Bangs’s offer. Once the paperwork had been dispensed with, it was down to work. First, Lewis was to consider himself an “operative,” not a detective, the latter having connotations of corruption, at least in Chicago, where venality was rife among law enforcers, uniformed or oth
erwise. It was emphasized to Lewis that he was to adhere scrupulously to the Pinkerton’s operating guidelines (later published in pamphlet form under the title General Principles of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency). Failure to do so would result in instant dismissal. For example, operatives were not to accept rewards or bonuses, nor were they to tail any public official while he was executing his duty; the agency would not accept cases that involved divorce or other scandalous affairs, and it would refrain from prying into a woman’s morals. This was because in Pinkerton’s view the role of detective was a “high and honorable calling … he is an officer of justice, and must himself be pure and above reproach.” Thus it was unacceptable for any of Pinkerton’s operatives to resort to nefarious means to ensnare their prey; this was to be done by stealth and guile. “It cannot be too strongly impressed upon detectives that secrecy is the prime condition of success in all their operations,” stated Pinkerton, which meant that every operative had to be, to some extent, a performer, an actor, a master of disguise, with the “player’s faculty of assuming any character that his case may require, and of acting it out to the life, with an ease and naturalness which shall not be questioned.”
Bangs taught Lewis how to shadow a target, how to wear a disguise (there was reportedly a large closet in the agency’s office full of costumes and accessories) and how to pull off the new persona without arousing suspicion. Bangs would also have introduced Lewis to the agency’s gallery of rogues, a Pinkerton innovation that soon caught on worldwide. Wanted men were described in detail—their accents, physique, dress and distinguishing features—and these descriptions were often accompanied by sketches or daguerreotypes of the suspects, along with examples of their handwriting.
Bangs’s last point was his most emphatic: be careful. Many of the men they pursued were violent desperadoes for whom human life was cheap. Cornered, they’ll come out fighting. Satisfied that Lewis had a strong command of the basic tenets of detective work, Bangs sent him out onto the Chicago streets to shadow a suspect. Lewis trailed the man for several days, closely, unobtrusively, skillfully. But it was boring work, and when Lewis reported to Bangs at the end of the assignment, he was ready to resign. Detecting wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Bangs laughed and told him it had been a trial run, that the “suspect” was in fact a fellow operative and that another Pinkerton man had been tailing Lewis to see how he got on. His report had been glowing, and Bangs was delighted to welcome him into the fold.
For the next few months Lewis roamed the western and eastern states, tailing and tracking. He lived out of a valise, and whenever he had a few days off he returned to Connecticut and lodged with his brother George in Torrington. It was in the Constitution State that Lewis helped bust a gang of express robbers, a success that won him a salary hike. Toward the end of 1860 he was invited by Pinkerton to work with him on a case in New York.
The affair was quickly solved, so the two men had time to become acquainted. Their common ground was Chartism, and though Lewis had been only a boy during the movement’s heyday, in manhood he embraced the ideology. Delighted that Lewis had been a supporter of the Chartists, Pinkerton wanted to know if Lewis’s social conscience had made the journey across the Atlantic; was he now an abolitionist? Lewis looked down at Pinkerton and replied that he was “an out-and-out Abolitionist.”
They must have made a strange pair as they walked along a New York sidewalk, the graceless Pinkerton with his scowling, overgrown face, and the debonair Lewis, described by a contemporary as being “in the vigor of early manhood, tall and erect with an affable presence, regular features, a healthful complexion, and pleasant enough, though penetrating, black eyes … he was naturally light-hearted and possessed a keen sense of humor.”
Suddenly Pinkerton turned to Lewis and asked if he was familiar with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s book Eugene Aram. Lewis replied that he was not. “Procure it, and read it on your return to Chicago,” instructed Pinkerton. “I’ll have something further to say on the matter when I next see you.”
The pair parted, and Lewis sought out a copy of Eugene Aram, his interest piqued by the strange demand. Not that he was particularly surprised. In the eight months since he’d started working as one of Pinkerton’s operatives Lewis “had come to regard him as a man of original, not to say eccentric, methods.”
He found the book in the salesroom of Harper & Brothers, the grandiose office block in Franklin Square, and the next day boarded a Chicago-bound train. During the journey northwest Lewis barely looked up from his lap, so engrossed was he in the fate of Daniel Clark, a shoemaker from Knaresborough in central England, who had vanished one foggy night in the winter of 1745. Bulwer-Lytton had reconstructed the true story with haunting accuracy, from the day Clark disappeared to the day, thirteen years later, when the schoolteacher Eugene Aram was arrested and accused of murdering his former friend. The evidence was weak—an unidentified skeleton in a cave and the testimony of a man whom Aram said was the real murderer—but the defendant was found guilty and sentenced to hang. On the eve of his execution, Aram wrote a confession and then slashed his wrists.
Lewis had finished the book by the time he was back in Chicago, and the tale of Eugene Aram left a deep impression on him. In particular, he was “fascinated by the descriptive analysis of Aram’s mental condition after he had committed a great crime. He suffered from remorse, somewhat as Macbeth did after the murder of Banquo.”
When Pinkerton returned the following week he summoned Lewis to his office and asked if he had read the book. He had, and enjoyed it very much. They discussed the book’s contents for a while, and then Pinkerton came to the point. A murder had been committed in Jackson, Tennessee, the previous year, and the culprit was still at large. It was rumored that the suspected murderer was a respected citizen in Jackson, and Pinkerton’s plan was that Lewis should go there “as a gentleman of leisure and gradually form an intimacy with him. In time he should be able to detect the mental characteristics which were developed in Eugene Aram and obtain clues that might lead to the full exposure of the criminal.” Lewis was soon on his way to Jackson, scrutinizing the case notes of what the New York Times had called “a most atrocious murder.”
On the morning of Friday, February 4, 1859, George Miller, head cashier of the Jackson branch of the Union Bank of Tennessee, failed to open the bank, a most unusual occurrence for a most diligent man. Friends visited his lodgings, which were connected to the bank by a passageway, but found no trace of him. They forced the door to the bank, and there he was, “murdered in the most shocking manner.” He was seated at a table, a checkbook before him and a pen in his hand, the back of his head caved in by two mighty hammer blows. “Two or three leaves had been torn from the check-book,” reported the New York Times, “and either destroyed or carried away. The bank was robbed of some $16,600 in coin, and a very considerable quantity of small coin scattered over the floor. The murderers unbarred the front door and passed out, and pulled the door after them.” The Times added that Miller was considered a “worthy and exemplary” young man, always exceedingly careful not to admit anyone into the bank at improper hours. He had last been seen at eight p.m. the previous evening; thus it seemed likely that Miller knew his killer, or at least his accomplice, and was in the process of writing a check when he was struck from behind.
Lewis arrived in Jackson in January 1861 “and stopped at the principal hotel and mingled freely with the people, adopting the role of an English gentleman looking for an opportunity to invest capital in business.” Lewis soon discovered that a man awaiting trial for horse stealing was boasting that he knew the killer. An interview was arranged, and the prisoner told Lewis that one of the murderers lived in Memphis and called himself “the doctor.” Lewis relayed the information to Chicago, but Bangs replied in a telegram of February 18 that he didn’t believe the horse thief’s claims; one of the early suspects in the case had been a man named Dr. Gibbs, but he’d been cleared of any involvement. Bangs proceeded to say that
he had communicated with Pinkerton, who was out of town, and the latter remained convinced that the guilty party was the “leading citizen” first suspected. “He [Pinkerton] reviews the life of the man since the murder which every act goes to show that there is a load of guilt upon his mind, almost too much for him to bear, and like Macbeth with his diseased mind and vision he sees Blood, Blood, Blood, whichever way he turns, upon everything—and scents it everywhere. And like Aram he seeks vent for his thoughts, and consequently fears to trust himself in contact with others. He fears the face of man, having in his soul the brand of Cain, and its effects are daily visible, controlling every act of his life and embittering every movement of his existence.”
Nevertheless Lewis persevered in the case, although day by day it became harder to make any headway. What now concerned the good citizens of Jackson, Tennessee, wasn’t the fate of the unfortunate Mr. Miller but the fate of the Union. There was rebellion in the air, and in the town’s hotels and saloons “fire-eating Southerners boasted of their superiority to the ‘mudsills of the North’ and predicted that the Southern States would easily establish a separate independence.” Lewis considered himself lucky not to be a Yankee in such circumstances, and when accosted in a bar or saloon, he raised his glass and promised that the English people would stand side by side with their Southern brethren if war broke out. He soon found that “he readily fell in with the ways of the warm-hearted Southerners and liked them socially irrespective of their political notions.” As Lewis toasted the Southern states and damned the Federal government, his boss was eight hundred miles east in Baltimore, attempting to break up a gang of Southern assassins intent on murdering president-elect Abraham Lincoln.
Double Death Page 3
