Pinkertons

The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was the first nationwide investigative organization. It was started in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant who had been Chicago's first police detective, and E. H. Rucker, a Chicago attorney who left the partnership after a year. The Pinkerton trademark was an open eye, with the slogan below, "The Eye That Never Sleeps." Besides working with local police, the Pinkertons were hired by railroads to patrol their trains and set up security systems--including the Illinois Central Railroad, through which Pinkerton met its lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. After Lincoln was elected president, Pinkerton helped plan his trip through Maryland en route to Washington, D.C., in February 1861, since there had been rumors of a "Baltimore Plot" to assassinate the president-elect.

Gen. George B. McClellan, whom he also knew from the Illinois Central, added Pinkerton to his staff under the name "Maj. E. J. Allen" to handle intelligence for the Army of the Potomac. Pinkerton and his men, who included fugitive slaves, gathered information on Southern spies and slipped behind Confederate lines to learn Southern military plans. But they also significantly overstated the number of Confederate soldiers, confirming McClellan's chronic belief that he faced overwhelming numbers. His slowness to attack for fear he was seriously outnumbered harmed his reputation and ultimately cost him his command.

After the war, the agency again concentrated on railroad robberies and security and "rode shotgun" on stagecoaches in the West, helping pursue the James and Reno gangs. The agency built a huge file of pictures and facts on criminals that was the only such repository until the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the Pinkertons also helped industrialists battle labor, countering strikes and violence by the Molly Maguires of the Pennsylvania coal country and often initiating violence themselves, as in the Homestead strike of 1892 against Carnegie Steel Company.

In later years the Pinkerton agency concentrated on providing guard service for individuals and detectives for corporations.

See also Espionage; Homestead Strike; Molly Maguires; Police Forces.