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

known for his quick temper and aggressive manner. An avid reader, he grew passionate about social reform, and it was known that he would not back down from a fight over the political issues of the day. His years of work with heavy tools, including a ten-pound cooper’s hammer, gave him a thick torso and powerful arms. Friends sometimes remarked on his top-heavy gait; he tended to tilt forward, as if prepared at any moment to wade into a brawl.
    After the Newport Rising, the youthful strain of radicalism in Pinkerton’s character hardened into something dark and implacable. He knew that he had been lucky to escape Newport with his liberty. The death sentences handed out at the time were later commuted, but dozens of his fellow Chartists would be transported to Australia. Still, Pinkerton was undaunted, and he threw himself back into the fight with even greater vigor. Within weeks, after some “rather disagreeable talk” at a gathering of the Glasgow Universal Suffrage Association, Pinkerton stalked out of the meeting hall and launched a group of his own, the Northern Democratic Association, for the purpose of ratifying the People’s Charter—“peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must.”
    Pinkerton soon fell under the sway of a controversial activist named Julian Harney, later a friend and supporter of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who was often described as the Chartist movement’s “enfant terrible.” In January of 1840, when Pinkerton invited Harney to address an overflow crowd at Glasgow’s Lyceum Theatre, there were loud jeers and catcalls from the rank and file, many of whom found the young firebrand’s views too extreme. Outraged, Pinkerton sprang to his feet—his face scarlet and his fists clenched—ready to take on all comers. After a few tense moments, cooler heads prevailed and the lecture went ahead as scheduled.
    Not all of Pinkerton’s political meetings were so contentious. In the summer of 1841, he called on the choirmaster of a local Unitarian church to arrange a night of song at a neighborhood pub as a “whip round” fund-raiser for his Northern Democratic Association. Pinkerton attended the Thursday-night concert with his mother, and as the music began, he found himself unable to take his eyes off the choir’s young soprano. Though only fourteen years old at the time, she had the bearing and polish of a seasoned performer, and she soon brought the crowd to its feet with a spirited rendition of a forbidden Chartist song. Hopelessly smitten, Pinkerton took his friend Robbie Fergus aside to learn all he could about the young singer. She was a bookbinder’s apprentice from the nearby town of Paisley, Fergus told him, and her name was Joan Carfrae. At future concerts, Pinkerton made a point of sitting in the front row, wearing his best and perhaps only suit. He soon took it upon himself to escort Miss Carfrae home after each appearance. “I got to sort of hanging around her, clinging to her, so to speak,” Pinkerton later wrote, “and I knew I couldn’t live without her.”
    Looking back on his courtship of Joan Carfrae in later years, Pinkerton recalled his distress, during the winter months of 1842, when a king’s warrant was issued for his arrest as a prominent leader of the Chartist movement. “I had become an outlaw with a price on my head,” he wrote. A number of his fellow Chartists were rounded up, but by the time the police sought out Pinkerton at his mother’s flat, the young cooper had fled. For several months, Pinkerton’s friends helped to hide him from the law, but he knew it was only a matter of time before he landed in jail, awaiting transportation to Australia. By this stage, many of his friends and Chartist colleagues had already decamped for America, including his friend Robbie Fergus, who had recently established himself in Chicago. Realizing that his options in Scotland were narrowing, Pinkerton resolved to follow Fergus and the others.
    Joan Carfrae soon got wind