biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1819–84)
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| biography:
| Detective and Union secret service chief, born in Glasgow, W Scotland, UK. The son of a policeman, he became a barrel-maker before emigrating to the USA (1842) and settling in Illinois. His abolitionist sympathies led him to aid the ‘underground railroad’ for escaping slaves. After helping to capture a gang of counterfeiters, he was elected a deputy sheriff of his county (1846), and in 1850 he moved to Chicago and became the deputy sheriff of Cook County and a detective on the Chicago police force. In 1852 he formed his own private detective agency and gained considerable fame for solving a series of train robberies. He discovered a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln (1861) while he was to travel by railroad to the inauguration in Washington, DC, and he personally guarded Lincoln on this trip. As a result, General George McClellan named him to head the Federal army's new secret service. Under the alias ‘Major E L Allen’, he came up with some intelligence, but its quality was so poor that it was said to have contributed to McClellan's failed Peninsula Campaign, and when McClellan lost his command Pinkerton also lost his post. He continued, however, to investigate damage claims against the government (1862–5). After the Civil War, he went back to Chicago and expanded his own detective agency to other cities. It became known for organizing groups of armed men and hiring them out to help management break strikes by the new labour unions. (In 1892 it was Pinkerton men who were called in for the infamous Homestead affair.) He published 10 volumes about his experiences as a detective. |
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