The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (50 page)

His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore,

And be the battle queen of yore,

Maryland! My Maryland!

The poem went on to revile Lincoln as a tyrant and a vandal, and exhorted Maryland to stand with her Confederate sisters: “Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!” It became wildly popular in Maryland and throughout the South, and was soon set to music, achieving even greater acclaim as “the Marseillaise of the Confederacy.” In time, “Maryland, My Maryland” would be adopted as the official state song, and it remains so to this day.

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IN THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE WAR,
Allan Pinkerton believed that his service to the Union would be a natural extension of the work he had done in Baltimore. As he wrote in his letter to Lincoln, he had unbounded faith in the “courage, skill & devotion” of his operatives, and believed that they could supply vital information as to the “movements of the traitors.” From the beginning, Pinkerton tied his fortunes to those of Gen. George B. McClellan, his dear friend and colleague from his days on the Illinois Central Railroad. As McClellan took command of the Army of the Potomac, Pinkerton signed on as his chief of intelligence. Operating as “Major E. J. Allen,” Pinkerton attempted to adapt the skills he had pioneered in his civilian detective work to the gathering of military intelligence. Many of his undercover operatives, both male and female, now plied their trade behind enemy lines, sending back detailed reports on troop movements and artillery emplacements. In the capital, Pinkerton apprehended the notorious “Wild Rose of the Confederacy,” Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a prominent society figure who had been passing along vital information to Southern officers. Pinkerton even conducted an unprecedented wartime aerial reconnaissance, sending his fifteen-year-old son, William, aloft in a hot-air balloon to scout enemy positions.

Not all of his efforts were successful, though his failures were perhaps not as absolute as commonly believed. For generations, Pinkerton has been the target of blame and ridicule for his “wildly inflated” estimates of enemy troop strength in the early years of the war. It is often claimed that Pinkerton’s faulty intelligence was almost wholly responsible for the failures of McClellan’s command. The “Young Napoleon,” critics charge, hesitated at crucial moments and failed to press his advantages because he believed—on Pinkerton’s information—that the forces arrayed against him were far greater than they actually were. If not for Pinkerton’s blundering, it is suggested, the war would have ended much sooner, and with dramatically reduced casualties. In fact, though Pinkerton is far from blameless, a number of modern scholars have argued that his failures have been subject to their own form of exaggeration. McClellan’s correspondence and official records make it clear that the general himself was prone to inflate the size of the forces arrayed against him, even before Pinkerton’s operations were up and running. It is also apparent that Pinkerton’s voice was only one in a chorus of advisers, whose information McClellan at times embroidered to advance his own agenda. It remains clear that Pinkerton’s reports were flawed, but it is also evident on occasion that he exaggerated the Confederate numbers with McClellan’s knowledge and approval, as fleetingly glimpsed in the detective’s writings at the time. “The estimate was founded upon all information then in my possession,” Pinkerton reported to McClellan in one instance, “and was made large, as intimated to you at the time, so as to be sure and cover the entire number of the enemy that our army was to meet.” If Pinkerton cooked the numbers, he was not the only one stirring the pot.

In spite of his private admissions, Pinkerton never wavered in his public insistence that there had been “no serious mistake in the estimates” he presented to McClellan. “Self-constituted critics, whose avenues of information were limited and unreliable, have attempted to prove that the force opposed to General McClellan was much less than was really the case,” he wrote near the end of his life, “and upon this hypothesis have been led into unjust and undeserved censure of the commanding general. From my own experience, I know to the contrary.” History disputes him on this point—John Hay and John Nicolay would write of the general’s “mutinous imbecility”—but Pinkererton’s conviction is understandable. He was defending not only McClellan’s honor—and, by extension, his own wartime service—but also the reputation of Timothy Webster, his “most capable and brilliant detective,” who had met a horrifying death while helping to gather the disputed intelligence.

In the early months of the war, Webster had leveraged his undercover work in Perrymansville and Baltimore into a growing reputation as a Southern patriot. Soon he was working a perilous trade as a Confederate courier, carrying information back and forth to Richmond, where he won the confidence of no less a figure than Judah Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of war. Webster filled the role so successfully that he was once arrested by Union patrolmen and thrown into a federal prison, leaving Pinkerton with the delicate job of securing his release without arousing suspicion. From his base of operations at a Richmond hotel, Webster smuggled out reports to Pinkerton at McClellan’s headquarters, detailing the placement of Confederate gun batteries and breastworks.

At the start of 1862, Webster fell mysteriously silent. “I heard nothing further from him directly, and for weeks was utterly ignorant of his movements or condition,” Pinkerton reported. “I began to grow alarmed.” Only later would Pinkerton learn that Webster had become seriously ill, the result of a plunge into icy waters to assist the passengers of a foundering boat. For weeks, Webster lay close to death in his Richmond hotel room, barely able to move.

“As the days and weeks passed, and brought no tidings from him, my apprehensions became so strong that I resolved to send one or two of my men to the rebel capital,” Pinkerton recalled. It was a decision he would soon regret. Up to this point, Webster had carefully avoided any association with known Northern sympathizers, to avoid exposure as a federal agent. Pinkerton was well aware of the risks, and to avoid compromising his valuable operative, he selected two men—Pryce Lewis and John Scully—who had established themselves as “ardent secessionists” during the operations in Baltimore.

Lewis and Scully, having been made “fully conscious of the danger before them,” set off on their delicate mission in February, promising to send word to Pinkerton as soon as they made contact with Webster. “Tortured by the uncertainty of their fate, I passed many an anxious hour,” the detective wrote. It was not until April, as he paged through a captured Richmond newspaper, that he came across a chilling bulletin: Lewis and Scully had been arrested as Union spies and sentenced to death by hanging. Worse yet, their arrival in Richmond had also exposed Webster. “I cannot detail the effect which this announcement produced upon me,” Pinkerton wrote. “For a moment I sat almost stupefied, and unable to move. My blood seemed to freeze in my veins—my heart stood still—I was speechless.”

Pinkerton worked frantically to secure the release of his men, pleading with both McClellan and Lincoln to offer an exchange of prisoners under a flag of truce. A message was sent to Jefferson Davis, reminding him that the Union had thus far been “lenient and forbearing” toward captured Confederate spies. If the death sentences were carried out, the message implied, the North would “initiate a system of retaliation.”

In the end, the efforts were to no avail. Lewis and Scully would eventually be released after a long and harrowing imprisonment, but not before Scully had provided his captors with damning evidence against Webster. Scully was widely denounced as a traitor, but Pinkerton refused to join in the recriminations: “Who can blame this man? Who, that has stood before the frowning scaffold, and with a free world before him, can utter words of censure? Only those who have suffered as he did, prostrated as he was, can know the terrible agony through which he passed ere the fatal words were forced from his trembling lips.” Pinkerton was far less forgiving of his own actions. “For myself,” he said bitterly, “I have no judgment to utter.”

Weakened by illness and scarcely able to stand, Timothy Webster climbed the gallows at Richmond’s Camp Lee on April 29, 1862. An inept executioner bungled the first attempt to hang him, leaving Webster horribly injured as he mounted the platform a second time. “I suffer a double death!” he cried as the noose tightened once again. “In a second the trap was again sprung,” Pinkerton wrote. “Treason had done its worst, and the loyal spy was dead.”

A heartsick Pinkerton appealed to have the body sent north across enemy lines, but Webster would instead be buried in a pauper’s unmarked grave in Richmond. This indignity drew a pained response from Pinkerton, who echoed the words of Sir Walter Scott in eulogizing his fallen colleague as “a martyr to the cause of the Union, who lies in unhallowed soil, unwept, unhonored and unsung.” After the war, Pinkerton would recover Webster’s body and erect a huge memorial at the Pinkerton family plot in Chicago. The inscription praised the fallen operative as a “patriot and martyr,” and gave him a full measure of credit for his role in the Baltimore episode:

ON THE NIGHT OF FEBR. 22, 1861,

ALLAN PINKERTON,

TIMOTHY WEBSTER

and
KATE WARNE

SAFELY ESCORTED

ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

A CONSPIRACY HAVING BEEN DISCOVERED

FOR HIS ASSASSINATION, FROM

PHILADELPHIA TO WASHINGTON,

WHERE HE WAS INAUGURATED

PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.

on

MARCH 4TH, 1861

Soon enough, Kate Warne would also have a memorial alongside Webster’s. Mrs. Warne succumbed to a lingering illness in January 1868, at the age of thirty-five, with Pinkerton himself at her bedside. In the coming years, as Pinkerton collaborated on a series of books drawn from celebrated cases, he repeatedly praised Mrs. Warne as “an intelligent, brilliant, and accomplished lady.” His high regard for her, together with the fact of her internment in the Pinkerton family plot, has led some to suppose that relations between them had progressed beyond the confines of business. This remains a matter of speculation. If Mrs. Warne’s final resting place is to be counted as suggestive, however, it should be mentioned that she is only one of several Pinkerton employees who came to be buried there.

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BY THE TIME TIMOTHY WEBSTER
and Kate Warne were laid to rest in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, Pinkerton had resolved that their roles in “sparing our President’s life” would not be forgotten. Barely four years after the drama in Baltimore, as Lincoln fell to an assassin’s bullet at Ford’s Theatre, the detective would be moved to a rare burst of emotion over the “great man who now sleeps in a martyr’s grave.” Pinkerton, his son William recalled, wept bitterly at the news of Lincoln’s death. By that time, he had long since departed as chief of intelligence, following McClellan’s dismissal, and had returned to Chicago to resume his detective operations. The unhappy bulletin from Washington reached him in New Orleans a full five days after the fact, in a newspaper account that detailed not only the events at Ford’s Theatre but also the attack on Secretary of State Seward and his son Frederick, whose skull had been fractured as he struggled to defend his father. Based on the early, incomplete reporting, Pinkerton concluded that Seward was also dead.

Even now, Pinkerton could not seem to accept that his “Secret Service” days were over. Adopting his familiar wartime alias of “E. J. Allen,” he dispatched a telegram to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. His message, however well intentioned, carried a note of ill-timed posturing:

This morning’s papers contain the deplorable intelligence of the assassination of President Lincoln and Secretary Seward. Under the providence of God, in February 1861, I was enabled to save him from the fate he has now met. How I regret that I had not been near him previous to this fatal act. I might have been the means to arrest it. If I can be of any service please let me know. The service of my whole force, or life itself, is at your disposal, and I trust you will excuse me for impressing upon you the necessity of great personal caution on your part. At this time the nation cannot spare you.

By the time Pinkerton received Stanton’s halfhearted reply, with advice to “watch the Western Rivers and you may get him,” John Wilkes Booth was already dead.

Pinkerton mourned Lincoln as a friend and as a statesman. Though he had grown thoroughly disenchanted with Washington by this time, he continued to regard Lincoln as a man of noble principle. “If only I had been there to protect him,” he declared wistfully, “as I had done before.”

In the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, there would be a brief resurgence of interest in the Baltimore plot, amid rumors of a link between Booth and the earlier plotters. At least one memorial service for the fallen president forged a connection between Lincoln’s assassin and those who had “organized a band of murderers to take [his] life while on his way to the seat of Government.” On the surface, there were many provocative parallels. Booth was known to frequent Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore, where Cypriano Ferrandini plied his trade as a barber, and the actor even held meetings there with fellow conspirators Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen. There were also unverified accounts that placed Booth in Baltimore at the time of the rioting. Worthington Snethen, of Lincoln’s “gallant little band” of supporters in Baltimore, accused the actor of heading one of the groups of “desperadoes” that had set fire to Maryland’s railroad bridges after the April riot. “He escaped condign punishment,” Snethen wrote, “through the mistaken leniency of the government.” Snethen’s account is almost certainly fanciful, one of many wild theories thrown up in the tumult that followed the assassination. No concrete link between the two events would ever be established.