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

themselves in harm’s way—he himself carried scars along the length of his left arm from the night he had been shot in the back. He had grave misgivings about exposing a woman to such dangers.
    Mrs. Warne, seeing the indecision in his face, tried to continue pleading her case, but Pinkerton held up a hand to stop her. “Thank you, madam,” he said. “I must consider the matter in private. If you will return tomorrow afternoon, I will give you my decision.” Mrs. Warne clearly wished to say more, but after a moment’s pause, she thought better of it. She gave a polite nod, thanked Pinkerton for his time, and swept from the room. Pinkerton spent several moments gazing at the empty doorway, an uncharacteristic look of puzzlement on his face.
    Pinkerton spent a restless night weighing the “moral costs” of employing a female detective, but he admitted that “the more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that the idea was a good one.” When Mrs. Warne returned the next day at the appointed time, Pinkerton signed her up as America’s first female private eye.
    There was no precedent for Kate Warne. The work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had barely begun in 1856, and their National Woman’s Suffrage Association was more than ten years in the future. The New York City Police Department would not have a female investigator in its ranks until 1903. Nevertheless, Kate Warne at once became an integral part of the Pinkerton agency, and she proved to be a versatile and utterly fearless operative. In one investigation, she posed as a fortune-teller—“the only living descendant of Hermes”—to lure secrets from a superstitious suspect, and on another occasion she forged a “useful intimacy” with the wife of a suspected murderer. “She succeeded far beyond my utmost expectations,” Pinkerton admitted, “and I soon found her an invaluable acquisition to my force.” Mrs. Warne proved so indispensable that Pinkerton encouraged her to recruit other female operatives. Soon, the Pinkerton agency had a female detective bureau running out of the Chicago office, with Mrs. Warne acting as superintendent.
    In later years, Pinkerton chafed at criticism that he should never have hired women to do work that was not only dangerous but also morally compromising. “It has been claimed that the work is unwomanly, that no respectable woman who becomes a detective can remain virtuous,” he wrote. “To these theories, I enter a positive denial. I have no hesitation in saying that the profession of a detective, for a lady possessing the requisite characteristics, is as useful and honorable employment as can be found in any walk of life.”
    At the time of Mrs. Warne’s hiring, however, Pinkerton was more concerned with solving cases than with social convention, and his new operative was soon given a chance to test her mettle. In the early months of 1858, Pinkerton received a letter from Edward S. Sanford, vice president of the Adams Express Company, describing the theft of several thousand dollars from a locked courier pouch. The money had been in transit from the Adams Express offices in Montgomery, Alabama, to a branch depot in Augusta, Georgia. Oddly, Sanford did not want Pinkerton to launch an investigation; he simply wanted the detective’s advice on how to proceed. After describing the circumstances of the theft in some detail, Sanford expressed a hope that Pinkerton might be able to shed light on how the theft had been managed—based solely on the information contained in the letter—and, if possible, point his finger at the thief.
    To Pinkerton, this appeared to be a fool’s errand. For all his skill and resourcefulness, he had little hope of cracking the case at a remove of six hundred miles, without ever seeing the crime scene or interrogating the suspects. After reading the letter a second time, however, he found that the challenge stirred his professional pride. Setting aside his reservations,