To further bring Timothy Webster to wider attention, Pinkerton decided to write a book. He called it The Spy of the Rebellion, and in the preface he explained that he had been “tempted to the recitals which follow … by a desire to acquaint the public with the movements of those brave men who rendered invaluable service to their country, although they never wore a uniform or carried a musket.” In reality what followed were mostly half truths and falsehoods, wrapped in maudlin prose.
Pryce Lewis had been warned that the Chicago Times contained an article about a book Pinkerton was writing. The newspaper finally fell into Lewis’s hands on February 29, 1884, and on page 11, under the headline the final clew, was a thrilling summary of Pinkerton’s impending book. It was mostly laughable guff, but what infuriated Lewis was the fifth paragraph. “Near to Webster’s grave is that of Price Lewis, but the other actor in the tragedy, John Scully, is still living, and is now employed at the [Chicago] city hall.” Lewis wrote at once to Pinkerton.
Dear Sir
In an article first published in the Chicago Times Oct 9th 1883 entitled “The Final Clew,” which is still going the rounds of the press I find myself dead and buried in the Pinkerton burial plot, and the reporter claims he gets his information directly from you. If this was the first time such statements were published I should say nothing about it, but it is not. Under the circumstances I don’t think it is fair treatment to bury a man in Chicago and resurrect him as occasion requires to brace up statements which are only in part true, when you ought to know he is still in the flesh. I think it is only fair to ask that you have the Times make the necessary correction.
Respectfully Yours
Pryce Lewis
Pinkerton’s reply was a flippant dismissal of his former employee’s concerns. Lewis was incensed. He knew Pinkerton and the way his mind worked; he had circulated the scurrilous rumors to put a rival detective agency out of business. On March 21, 1884, Lewis wrote again to his former boss.
Mr. A Pinkerton Esq.
Dear Sir
Yours of the 3rd was received and contents noted. From your stand point you are doubtless right in thinking that the publication of my death was not material but when such a story as published in Chicago is reprinted in this locality I assure you it is of vital importance to me, as I have been engaged in some very important cases in this city, and it is not at all agreeable to me to be under the suspicion of being other than whom I claim to be. The facts regarding the circumstances that led to the capture and execution of Tim Webster are best known to myself and the time might come when I will give them to the public. If daring exploits should be the stock in trade of our business, it is but fair that those who passed through the ordeal should reap the benefit, particularly while in this world. I fully appreciate your goodwill, but nevertheless I realize that in this progressive age business is business and if one would live to have a fair share of the earth’s products he must blow his own horn.
Please have the inclosed inserted in the Chicago Times and forward me a copy
Yours very truly
Pryce Lewis
The enclosed, whatever it was, was never published in the Chicago Times. Six weeks later The Spy of the Rebellion was published. It was 666 pages, illustrated, and the cost was $2.50. The Chicago Inter Ocean called it “more profoundly interesting and exciting than any romance of the year.” The book beatified Timothy Webster, lionized Allan Pinkerton and mortified Pryce Lewis.
Pinkerton had all but single-handedly saved the president from assassination (“I had informed Mr. Lincoln in Philadelphia that I would answer with my life for his safe arrival in Washington, and I had redeemed my pledge”); his description of Timothy Webster bordered on the homoerotic (“The mouth, almost concealed by the heavy brown mustaches which he wore, and the square, firm chin evinced a firmness that was unmistakable. His nose, large and well-formed, and the prominent cheek bones all seemed in perfect harmony with the bold spirit … his shoulders were so broad, his feet and hands so shapely, and the lithe limbs so well formed … [that] a casual observer on meeting this man would almost immediately and insensibly be impressed”). George McClellan was unrecognizable from the dithering neurotic who had so frustrated Lincoln (“Self was his last and least consideration … McClellan pursued his course with unflinching courage and with a devotion to his country unsurpassed by any who have succeeded him, and upon whose brows are entwined the laurels of the conqueror”).
Pinkerton misspelled Lewis’s name throughout the book, a curious oversight for someone so meticulous. “Price” Lewis’s mission into western Virginia was well chronicled, though with one or two alterations. The Lord Tracy persona was carried through right to the end, and there was a romantic interlude when Lewis fell for the ravishing daughter of Judge Beveridge, though in fact these people existed only in Pinkerton’s fertile imagination. Pinkerton related how Lewis had saved the young woman from certain death after her horse had taken fright and bolted. That evening Lewis was invited to take supper with the Beveridges, and the beautiful woman greeted her gallant “with rare grace … and her expressions of thankfulness were couched in such delicate language that the pretended Englishman felt a strange fluttering in his breast, which was as novel to him as it was delicious.”
Such flights of fancy just made Lewis laugh, but then the calumnies began to mount. Pinkerton told how Lewis and Scully had accepted the mission to Richmond “without the slightest hesitation”; a couple of pages later he added, “I had made extensive enquiries … and learned that Mrs. Morton and her family had departed for their home in Florida.” Everyone in Washington had known the Mortons were estranged.
But it was what Lewis read on page 529 that made him reel. Pinkerton had described on the previous pages how Scully unburdened himself to Father McMullen, who in turn persuaded the Irishman to make a statement. Then Pinkerton wrote that “finding that the worse had occurred, and that further concealment was of no avail, Lewis, too, opened his mouth.” But Pinkerton didn’t blame them; oh no, how could any Christian gentlemen “express an unjust sentence? They were simply men who, after having performed many brave acts of loyalty and duty to their country, failed in a moment of grand and great self-sacrifice. I cannot apologize for them—I cannot judge them.”
It had taken Pinkerton twenty years, but he had got his revenge for the “hot interview.” Lewis was devastated. But Pinkerton didn’t survive long to gloat over his victory. A month after the publication of his book the already poorly Scot fell and bit his tongue. Gangrene set in, and for three weeks the devout Pinkerton lingered, each day getting closer to his own Judgment Day. On July 1, 1884, Pinkerton died at age sixty-five. He was buried in Graceland Cemetery, and in time a towering obelisk was erected over his grave on which was inscribed: a friend to honesty and a foe to crime.
. . .
Lewis’s business declined as Pinkerton had hoped. He still took odd jobs around the country, but his heyday was over. He was getting old, too, though he retained his strong physique and lively mind. One January afternoon in 1888 Lewis left his New York office and caught the ferry boat across the Hudson to New Jersey. He got to talking—as was his custom—to a well-dressed gentleman of around the same age. His name was David Cronin, an artist and writer now but a former officer in the First New York Mounted Rifles. They swapped war stories, and suddenly Cronin clicked his fingers and exclaimed, “I heard the story of your escape from Henrico County Jail!” Cronin told Lewis he should write his memoirs. Lewis didn’t like to blow his horn. Damn it, said Cronin, it’s time you did. He offered to edit them, and soon an agreement was drafted and signed for “Pryce Lewis: his adventures as a union spy during the war of the rebellion. A historical narrative.”
Cronin paraded the manuscript around publishing houses for the first six months of 1889, but there was little enthusiasm. Civil War stories were now a little passé, unless they came from the pen of a general or a statesman. One publisher after another turned down Cronin, but then a house appeared t
o bite. Cronin was called for an interview and informed by the company that it was interested in publishing but there needed to be some “padding.” What sort of padding? The book would be a greater success if Lewis portrayed himself as one of Lincoln’s bodyguards during the tumultuous days of 1861. Cronin relayed the conversation to Lewis, who angrily retorted that he was not prepared “to include a lot of lies about his experiences with Lincoln … he never met the man.” The publishers decided not to pursue the project.
As Lewis’s manuscript gathered dust at the family home in New Jersey, he continued to take whatever detective work he could find despite being in his sixties. In 1892 the New York Life Insurance Company hired him to track down a gang of counterfeiters operating throughout the United States. The case took him to Texas, and across the border into Mexico, where the gang was arrested. From El Paso he wrote to his daughter, enclosing a money order for seventy-five dollars and telling her he “was very sorry to learn of ma’s relapse and hope by the time this reaches you she will be better.” Two years later he passed through Kansas and lodged for the night with his brother-in-law Albert.
Lewis always dropped in on his brothers, George and Matthew, whenever he was in Connecticut. Matthew, who was widowed with a grown-up son, was a successful farmer, and George had a battery of grandchildren who loved to hear their great-uncle’s war stories. It was his brothers’ job to fill him in on news from home: the passing of their wonderful, loving, indomitable mother, Elizabeth, at the age of ninety, in 1889; the death seven years later of Arthur, George’s twin, in the Newtown workhouse, a man whose demise mirrored that of the Newtown woolen industry. By the end of the nineteenth century the great towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire dominated Britain’s woolen industry; they possessed the capital and resources to mass-produce on a scale beyond the capabilities of Newtown. They also had the temerity to pass off their inferior-quality wool as “real Welsh flannel,” the supreme insult to Newtonians.
Thomas, however, the brother who had sent the sorrowful letter to Charles Adams all those years earlier after reading of Pryce’s “death,” was a success. He lived in the south of England with his wife and four children, and earned a good living as a town clerk.
When the new century dawned the Lewis family was in troubled straits. Pryce’s eyesight wasn’t what it was, and his seventieth birthday was looming; he was too old to be a detective. Mary Lewis, now age twenty-nine, was teaching pottery and clay modeling and living in New York City, but twenty-two-year-old Arthur was still at home. On January 12, 1900, his frail mother wrote to William Drake, principal of Jersey City Business College, Arthur’s alma mater, asking if he might be able to help Arthur find some work. By the time Drake replied, Maria Lewis was dead.
Arthur Lewis found a job, but it killed him two years later at the age of twenty-four, at least it did in the eyes of his sister, who believed he “died because he overworked in the printing business.” Pryce was distraught at the loss. In the doleful months that followed, his spirit seeped out. He stopped writing to his two brothers in Connecticut and lost touch with his circle of friends.
When Lewis received a chatty out-of-the-blue letter from David Cronin in 1905, he did respond, writing that “I lost my wife 4 years ago and my son nearly 3 years ago. My daughter lives in New York City. So I am alone and I don’t care how soon I shall be magnified into an angel.”
The words upset Cronin, who was now living in Philadelphia. This wasn’t the dauntless Pryce Lewis he so admired. In a follow-up letter he begged his friend not to get downhearted and offered encouragement: “Making allowance for what you have been through since I last saw you, I trust that you will cling to what has been written from your own lips until I am in a position to put the whole narrative in print at my own expense, and I trust that time is not far off.” Cronin’s letter revived Lewis, as did his promise to visit him soon in New York. Lewis wrote and told his old friend that he looked forward to seeing him and not to worry too much as “I have never needed the services of a doctor, and hope never to. I know I shall never need the service of a priest or minister. As you say they know no more about the future than we do and that’s nothing. I don’t believe in survival of consciousness after death of the body.”
Cronin neither showed in New York nor found the money to pay for the publication of the memoirs. He did, however, put Lewis in touch with W. Anson Barnes, a lawyer friend of his in New York whom he thought might be able to help. Barnes sent the manuscript to the New York publisher Funk & Wagnalls, but it replied, “After considerable discussion the opinion prevailed that we could not secure results which would be satisfactory alike to the author and to ourselves.”
Barnes pushed some odds and ends of employment Lewis’s way; it wasn’t much, serving subpoenas and running messages, but it paid. Barnes also cast a legal eye over the letters Lewis wrote to the War Pensions Bureau in Washington, advising Lewis to make the staff understand quite clearly his unique situation: he was not an American citizen (though he had lived in the country for more than half a century), nor had he fought as a soldier in the Civil War. Thus while he wasn’t legally entitled to receive a pension, he deserved one as a reward for the outstanding service he had given the U.S. government.
But no matter how many letters Lewis sent, the response was always the same: he failed to meet the criteria for a war pension. Barnes urged Lewis to apply for American citizenship, that way he would be entitled to receive help, but the Englishman refused to countenance the idea. It would be a betrayal. “I’ve served this [American] government well and taken the Secret Service oath of loyalty over and over again,” he told Barnes. “But when it comes to swearing that I’ll take arms against my own sovereign, I’ll see them damned.”
There was one piece of good news that cheered Lewis, whose pride remained, if nothing else. In November 1906 Allan Pinkerton’s son William, who had taken over the agency following his father’s death, published a small pamphlet titled Timothy Webster. It ran to just a handful of pages—another paean to the dead spy—but toward the end there was a sentence that was William’s way of apologizing for his father’s heinous lie: “Scully made a confession, implicating Webster as the head of the Richmond Secret Service for the United States Government. Lewis remained staunch, and did not confess.”
Lewis appreciated the public vindication, but it came twenty years too late. By 1911 he was drawing on his well of pride. The letters he wrote his daughter were short and rinsed of self-respect. In one, sent on August 19, he asked for a little loan, nothing much, and promised to pay it back as “my memoirs will soon be published in book or magazine form … I hope it will be published in a magazine, as we will get paid on its publication. I am anxious to stop the drain on you.” Nothing was published.
His last letter to his daughter was written on November 25.
My Dear Mary
Yours of yesterday is recv’d. Thanks. I made no arrangement with the Salvation Army. I expect to make a new arrangement in a few days of wish [sic] I have written to Mr. Barnes today and the letter goes in the same mail with this.
Your affectionate Father
Pryce
There was to be no second reprieve for Pryce Lewis, no ghost of Father McMullen standing in the doorway. Instead when he returned to his lodgings on the evening of Tuesday, December 5, 1911, it was his landlady he encountered. She handed him the letter from the War Pensions Bureau, and he read the words that stared at him, cold and harsh, like the gaze of General Winder.
The next morning Lewis rose early. He put on the same dark blue suit and the same scuffed leather shoes from the night before. For a final touch he fastened a black bow tie to his white cotton shirt. It had stopped snowing, and the sky was a deep clear blue. At midmorning Lewis left the house unseen, covering his bald head with his boater, and made his way to Jersey City station. A couple of hours later Oscar Corbett heard a rushing sound. Not bothering to look up from his desk in the filing room of the World Building, he remarked to a colleague, “Ther
e goes a big slide of snow.”
E P I L O G U E
“A Faithful Servant to His Country”
ON THE SAME AFTERNOON that Pryce Lewis leaped to his death, a woman called at the office of Anson Barnes. She introduced herself as Mrs. Lew Gibson from Waterbury, Connecticut, and told Barnes that she had been given his address by Mary Lewis. Gibson then explained that she was the third cousin of Pryce Lewis and was in New York at the request of his younger brother.
When Pryce had stopped writing to Matthew Lewis after the death of his son a decade earlier, Matthew presumed his brother was dead. Only when he received a letter from Mary a few days earlier had Matthew realized Pryce was alive but indigent. He asked Lew Gibson to go to New York and bring his brother back to Waterbury to live with him. Barnes and Gibson arranged to visit Pryce Lewis the next day to break the good news.
But as they set out for Jersey City on Thursday, December 7, the World carried a report on its inside pages under the headline SUICIDE LEAPS FROM TOP OF SKYSCRAPER. It described Lewis “as a man of about fifty-five years of age” who was “bald, had a white mustache and was poorly dressed.” The paper added that the business card of one of its reporters, Isaac D. White, had been discovered in the deceased’s pocket, but that White was unable to put a name to the face that had been smashed on the fender of an automobile.
The New York Times and the New York Herald also covered the tragedy in their editions of December 7, with the former commenting that the first physician on the scene, a Dr. Russell, “found that the man’s skull had been shattered and that practically every bone in his body had been broken.”
The description of the man sounded familiar to Charles Newkirk, even though his friend Pryce Lewis was eighty years old, not fifty-five. After breakfast on Thursday morning he called at 83 Jefferson Avenue and, in the company of the landlady, entered Lewis’s small and drafty room. There on the table was the note, but they found no body in the garret. Newkirk caught a train to New York City and visited the morgue of the Hudson Street Hospital. For several seconds he stood staring at the battered face “and after some hesitation declared that it was that of Mr. Lewis.” Later, when a reporter from the Herald pressed Newkirk for more details of the dead man, he was too upset to say much, other than that Lewis was a Civil War veteran “who saw much active service as a scout.” Asked why Lewis had killed himself, Newkirk told the Herald that his friend “had realized he had outlived his usefulness and that he was too old to continue a fight for existence.”
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