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

of the plan. “When I had the price set on my head, she found me where I was hiding,” Pinkerton recalled, “and when I told her I was all set up to making American barrels for the rest of my life and ventured it would be a pretty lonesome business without my bonnie singing bird around the shop, she just sang me a Scotch song that meant she’d go too, and God bless her she did.”
    In Pinkerton’s memory of the event, he and Joan were married secretly and then—after a hasty good-bye to his mother—smuggled aboard a ship bound for America, under the wing of the kindly Neil Murphy, the family friend who had given Pinkerton his start as a ten-year-old errand boy. “Within a few hours,” runs one early recounting of the drama, “he was both a married man and a wanted criminal fleeing to the New World.”
    This is an agreeably dramatic story, but Pinkerton’s account would not have withstood the scrutiny of a sharp-eyed private detective. If the Glasgow police had truly been determined to arrest him, they would have had ample notice of his whereabouts. According to parish records, Pinkerton and Joan Carfrae were married in a public ceremony in a Glasgow church on March 13, 1842. No hint of secrecy or subterfuge is evident in the marriage register, and the Scottish tradition of the “proclamation of the banns”—a public announcement of the intent to marry, posted on three consecutive Sundays so as to allow any lawful impediments to come to light—was duly observed. In fact, the only unusual feature of the wedding appears to have been the bride’s age. Though she claimed to be eighteen, Joan Carfrae was, in fact, just two months past her fifteenth birthday.
    If Pinkerton romanticized some of the details, his reasons for seeking a fresh start remained clear: “I know what it is to strive and grope along, with paltry remuneration and no encouragement save that of the hope and ambition planted in every human heart,” he wrote many years later. “I have been a poor lad in Scotland, buffeted and badgered by boorish masters. I have worked weary years through the ‘prentice period, until, by the hardest application, I conquered a trade. I know what it is, from personal experience, to be the tramp journeyman; to carry the stick and bundle; to seek work and not get it; and to get it, and receive but a pittance for it, or suddenly lose it altogether and be compelled to resume the weary search. In fact, I know every bitter experience that the most laborious of laboring men have been or ever will be required to undergo.”
    Privately, his memories of his start in life were harsher still. In a letter written nearly twenty years later, at the start of the Civil War, Pinkerton expressed a sentiment that would color every aspect of his new life in America. “In my native country,” he declared, “I was free in name, but a slave in fact.”
    Slave was not a word Pinkerton bandied about lightly. Within three years of his flight from Scotland, he would be running a station on the fabled Underground Railroad, helping runaway slaves make their way north to freedom.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    HOW I BECAME A DETECTIVE
     
I am a success today because I had a friend who believed in me, and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.
—quote attributed to ABRAHAM LINCOLN
    THE SHARP-DRESSED STRANGER wore a heavy gold ring on his left hand. He was tall, perhaps six feet or so, sixty-five years of age, and “very erect and commanding in his appearance.” As he rode his horse through the center of the village on a fine, clear day in July 1847, it was obvious that trouble was coming.
    Henry Hunt, the owner of a general store at the center of town, knew all too well what would happen next. Few outsiders ever troubled to visit Dundee, a quiet Illinois farming settlement about fifty miles northwest of Chicago. Lately, the appearance of a visitor signaled that a ruinous flood of counterfeit coins and notes was about to wash over the town. Hunt’s