Allan Pinkerton Biography

Dromo's Den

PINKERTON, Allan (1819-84). An American detective, born in Glasgow, Scotland., In 1842 he emigrated to Canada to escape punishment for his part in the Chartist movement (see CHARTISM), and the same year settled in Chicago, where he opened a detective agency. Before the outbreak of the Civil War be had become widely known, and in 1861 he guarded President Lincoln during the latter's journey to Washington for the inauguration. Soon afterward he was commissioned to organize the Federal Secret Service Department, of which he was made the head. During all this time he continued his private detective agency in Chicago, and established branch agencies in other important cities. When the changed industrial conditions that followed the war led to strikes and violence, he organized a force of armed men which he hired out to employers and corporations for the protection of their property. This force, known as Pinkerton's Men, played a conspicuous part in some of the most important labor disturbances of the last quarter century, notably in the suppression of the Molly Maguires (q.v.) and in the Homestead strike. (See HOMESTEAD.) Among other well-known cases with which Pinkerton was connected were the capture of the robbers who took $700,000 from the Adams Express Company's safe on a New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad train, on Jan. 6, 1866, and the dispersion of a gang of murderers who for a number of years terrorized all southern Indiana. His sons, Robert A. (died 1907) and William A., carried on their father's work. Allan Pinkerton wrote several books on subjects connected with his experiences, among them: The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877); Criminal Reminiscences (1878); The Spy of the Rebellion (1883); Thirty Years a Detective (1884); History and Evidence of the Passage of Abraham Lincoln from Harrisburgh, Pa., to Washington, D. C., on the 22d and 23d of February, 1861 (1891).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XVIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 646.