The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War Read Online Free PDF Page A

enemy soldiers, but this only sharpened the edge of his ambition. Decades later, while commenting on labor unrest in America, Pinkerton offered a rare public glimpse of the beliefs he had forged in Scotland: “I believe that I of all others have earned the right to say plain things to the countless toilers who were engaged in these strikes. I say I have earned this right. I have been all my lifetime a working man.” Life in America, he insisted, presented common workingmen with opportunities he had been denied in his homeland, with a chance to “rise above their previous conditions, and reach a nobler and happier condition of life.”
    If Pinkerton’s words sound naïve and self-serving to the modern ear, it was a sentiment Abraham Lincoln would have recognized. “Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer,” Lincoln once declared. “The hired laborer of yesterday labors on his own account today, and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow. Advancement—improvement in condition—is the order of things in a society of equals.”
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    ALLAN PINKERTON WAS BORN in a two-room tenement flat on Muirhead Street in Glasgow, Scotland, in the summer of 1819. His family lived in the area on the south bank of the River Clyde known as the Gorbals, infamous at that time for its crime, brothels, and “persons in narrow circumstances.” Named for his grandfather, a well-known blacksmith, Allan was one of eleven children, at least four of whom died in infancy. His father, William, a hand-loom weaver, died when Allan was barely ten years old, forcing him to leave school and take a job as an errand boy. He worked “from dawn to dusk for pennies,” as he later recalled, in the shop of a pattern maker named Neil Murphy, who had been a friend of his father. After work, the boy would stand on the street, waiting for his mother, Isabella, to return from her job at a spinning mill. A high point during this cheerless period—and a memory he would often recall in his old age—was the night she came home cradling a single fresh egg for their evening meal.
    Pinkerton soon grew restless with what he called the “dreary existence” of an errand boy. At the age of twelve, he took the bold step of resigning in favor of an apprenticeship with a Glasgow cooper named William McAuley, learning the craft of making watertight casks, barrels, and kegs. By the age of eighteen, Pinkerton had earned his journeyman’s card and joined the Coopers’ Union, but by this time McAuley had no further work for him. Pinkerton took to the road and became a “tramp cooper,” traveling the country to pick up piecemeal work at breweries and distilleries. He sent whatever money he could spare back to his mother in Glasgow, but he often found himself living so close to the bone that he slept outdoors and went without food.
    Friends from this period described Pinkerton as quiet and rather serious, with penetrating blue eyes beneath a coarse thatch of reddish hair. Most accounts refer to him as a short or “diminutive” man, though his height is sometimes listed as five eight—by no means small for the time. A famous photograph taken many years later shows Pinkerton standing with Abraham Lincoln at the Antietam battlefield. The image gives an initial impression of Pinkerton as undersized and somewhat hunched, though in fact he appears to be only half a head shorter than Lincoln, who was six four. In a second image taken at the same time, however, Lincoln has shifted his stance and Pinkerton appears to have lost several inches in stature. Pinkerton would likely have been pleased by the disparity; in later years, he made a point of masking his appearance by frequently changing his style of dress and facial hair, making it easier to go undercover. At a time when Lincoln cultivated a beard to make his appearance more distinctive, Pinkerton sought to go unnoticed.
    As a young barrel maker, Pinkerton earned a reputation as a hard worker, but he was also