Free The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower

Pinkerton, acting on impulse, offered him a job on the spot and handed him train fare to Chicago.
    Timothy Webster soon became Pinkerton’s best and most resourceful detective. “He was a man of great physical strength and endurance,” Pinkerton said, “skilled in all athletic sports, and a good shot.” Above all, in Pinkerton’s view, Webster possessed “a strong will and a courage that knew no fear.” Two other Englishmen, Pryce Lewis and John Scully, soon followed. Pinkerton also brought on a “shrewd hand” named John H. White, who had the useful manner and appearance, in Pinkerton’s estimation, of a con man rather than a detective. White completed a core team of eight employees—five detectives, two clerks, and a secretary. Apart from Webster, none of Pinkerton’s original operatives came from a law-enforcement background, but each had a quality that Pinkerton felt could be turned to his advantage. The men trained on the job, learning how to shadow suspects and gain the confidence of otherwise tight-lipped criminals. Like Vidocq, Pinkerton encouraged his men to adopt whatever persona would be useful for the task at hand, as he himself had done at the Chicago post office, and to inhabit that identity as fully as possible—“acting it out to the life,” as he described it. One account of the Pinkerton operation describes the Chicago office as resembling the backstage of a theater, complete with a large closet full of disguises so that the men could easily transform themselves into bartenders, gamblers, horse-car conductors, or newly arrived “greenhorns” fresh off the boat from the old country.
    In another corner of the office, Pinkerton pinned up sketches and daguerreotypes of wanted men, the rudimentary beginnings of what would become a storied “rogue’s gallery” of hunted criminals. Over time, Pinkerton refined his record keeping to take account of a criminal’s modus operandi, distinguishing characteristics, handwriting samples, and known associates. He cultivated an extensive correspondence with police captains and county sheriffs across the country, transforming the Chicago office into a national hub of criminal data. It was a project that would absorb him to the end of his life.

The ever-vigilant Pinkerton “Private Eye.”
    In time, the soon-to-be famous Pinkerton logo—a stern, unblinking eye—made its appearance on the agency’s correspondence and legal documents. For Pinkerton, this aptly chosen symbol expressed the rigid work ethic and eternal vigilance he demanded from a prospective agent: “At an instant’s warning, he must be ready to go wherever he may be ordered. Sometimes, for weeks, he may have little or no rest; and he may be called upon to endure hardships and dangers which few men have the courage to face.”
    Only a few years earlier, a scheming criminal had delivered a stinging rebuke to Pinkerton: “Old John Craig is never caught napping, young man.” Now, as he took his place at the head of a rapidly expanding detective empire, Pinkerton turned these words into a statement of purpose, and he had the boldly lettered line placed beneath the image of the watchful, all-seeing eye. He had boiled it down to three simple words: “We Never Sleep.”

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    PINK LADY
     
A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
    IN OCTOBER OF 1856, Pinkerton took a momentary break from the reports and correspondence piled on his desk and dashed off a quick note to his friend Henry Hunt, the Dundee shopkeeper who had set him on the track of “Old John Craig” a decade earlier. Much had changed since the day Pinkerton stood barefoot in Hunt’s store and admitted that he had never seen a ten-dollar bill. The Pinkerton agency now stretched across the region, with branch offices in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. The previous year, Pinkerton had signed a contract with the Illinois Central Railroad, undertaking to guard its