General George McClellan, commanding the (Union) Army of the Potomac, the largest Federal force in the East, established the Union Army’s first intelligence organization. To lead it, he selected Allan Pinkerton, who had been actively involved in the underground railroad and whose National Detective Agency was then the largest in the country.
General George McClellan, commanding the (Union) Army of the Potomac, the largest Federal force in the East, established the Union Army’s first intelligence organization. To lead it, he selected Allan Pinkerton, who had been actively involved in the underground railroad and whose National Detective Agency was then the largest in the country.
The two men were already acquainted, as Pinkerton once provided protection for the Illinois Central Railroad when McClellan was its vice president. Pinkerton had also earned McClellan’s respect several months prior to the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, when he and a number of his detectives foiled a plot to assassinate President-elect Lincoln.
The Spy Who Saved a President
Infiltrating a group of Southern secessionists in Baltimore, Maryland, Pinkerton’s operatives learned the group was planning to kill Lincoln as he traveled from his Illinois home to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration, a journey that would take 13 days and cover nearly 2,000 miles across eight states. Pinkerton advised Lincoln to alter his arrival time in Baltimore, and the President-elect, whom he had codenamed “Nuts,” complied. Pinkerton, who had taken the codename “Plum,” posted agents along the route for security, and the telegraph lines had also been cut to stifle news of Lincoln’s departure. The plan was a success, which Pinkerton relayed in a telegraph to Philadelphia that simply read: “Plum arrived here with Nuts this morning—all right.”
This ruse was executed with the help of a female Pinkerton detective, Kate Warne, who first approached Pinkerton in 1856, assuring him she could gain access to secrets that male detectives could not. Indeed, the New York-born Warne, feigning a southern accent and pretending to be recently arrived from Alabama, was among the detectives who penetrated the group of secessionists and discovered the plot to assassinate Lincoln—a plot that may well have included the local police force’s complicity in failing to provide security for the delegation. Warne also accompanied a disguised Lincoln, whom she claimed to be her sick brother, to a private train car, in which he safely completed his journey to the capital.
Though Pinkerton often referred to himself as “Chief of the United States Secret Service”—an agency that did not yet exist—he managed to develop a network of more than two dozen undercover agents operating throughout Washington, D.C., the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and other Southern territories.