The Pinkerton Files Five-Book Bundle (7 page)

He fell forward, unconscious at the controls. The arms went slack. I twisted them around each other, easy as a pair of shoe laces. Before the gauntlets lost their tension, I drove the front end of the machine into the floor.

It wrenched to a halt and its back end lifted into the air. Lincoln's guards, good soldiers all, jumped on board even as it flipped over and crashed into the far end of the dining car. The impact tore a hole in the wall and separated our car from those ahead.

A gap opened where the crippled train had come apart. Hunt crawled from the wreckage. His gang was in disarray. Many were burned in the kitchen. None could use the Union equipment he had provided. They were swarmed by Lincoln's men.

Worse for Hunt, he could see that the President was obviously not on the train. His assault had failed.

Hunt scanned the room with bulging eyes. I stepped forward, gauntlets wound, to take him. He clenched his fists and frowned, ready for a fight.

Beyond the gap, a sound caught Hunt's attention. He turned his back to us and yelled down toward the tracks below. I ran at him. He took one last scowling look at me then jumped off the train before I could reach him.

I seized the frame of the dining car in the gauntlets and leaned far over the edge. For a fraction of a moment, I saw what I believed to be an interceptor vehicle racing away from us under the track.

It was gone. So was William Hunt.

*   *   *

Allan Pinkerton, Principal

April, 1861

In my message to President Lincoln, I promised to shake his hand when he arrived at Philadelphia. It was a great pleasure to see my friend step onto the platform and into the protection of a security detail. At last, he was safe.

Newspaper reports the following day stated that Superintendent Kennedy accompanied President Lincoln on the journey. He was even quoted in the article; something about not leaving the President's side in a time of crisis.

Strange, that I did not see Kennedy among those milling about on the platform. It was unlike the man not to seek me out for one of our chats, particularly with Robert's trial still looming.

Kate Warne could not confirm, with absolute certainty, that she saw Kennedy during the final confrontation with Hunt and the Golden Circle. Nor could she provide a concrete description of the person or persons who escaped on the interceptor.

There is nothing to be gained by pressing the matter. Kate Warne's credibility has taken a severe blow.

Rumors about her behavior the night before Hunt's raid became fodder for gossip papers in Chicago, then around the Union. For a time, it seemed any nonsense related to the assassination attempt was fit to print. The President's attache, Harry Vinton, has challenged any claims of impropriety against her. The damage is done.

I have assured Ms. Warne that she has my complete confidence. Nevertheless, we have no basis to challenge Kennedy.

Amid these conflicting reports, I remain skeptical as to the role Ernie Stark played in the Golden Circle affair. One of Hunt's co-conspirators, Saul Mathews, has made wild allegations against Stark from his prison cell.

The accusations of a convict can never be trusted yet his claims mirror my own distrust. Stark hijacked our investigation. He did nothing to prevent Webster's murder and stepped out of the line of fire prior to Harrisburg.

Robert insists that I have judged Ernie Stark unfairly. Time will tell.

My son has larger worries. After a brief stay in hospital, Robert has surrendered to the court. I trust our barrister to have the charges against him dismissed.

Regardless, I expect he will stay in New York. His ambitions are well known. I am inclined to let him pursue his career in that city, even if I have no intention of turning the operation over to his control. Our relationship will benefit from some distance.

As to my violation of Agency rules and my invasion of private case files, I am now convinced that circumstances leave me no choice. It galls me to betray my people in this manner but every effort must be made to ensure that William Hunt is apprehended.

Hunt's attack against the President was financed and supported by collaborators in the Union north. It also set events in motion that threaten the future of my Agency.

Something Robert said to Felton during our meeting in Philadelphia comes to mind. He said that our problems were only beginning. On this point, Robert and I are agreed.

I will continue using every measure at my disposal, including the files of my detectives, to uncover the truth of a plot that has been launched against us all.

These thoughts were on my mind as I listened to President Lincoln's inaugural address in Washington. His comments to the entire nation echoed my deepest fear.

“This country belongs to the people. Whenever they grow weary of the Government, they can exercise their constitutional right to amend it, or their revolutionary right to overthrow it. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue.”

- Abraham Lincoln, March 1861

Repository Note:

Allan Pinkerton's secret portfolio comes to an abrupt end with this entry. I am convinced that others exist but the same steps he took to conceal them from his agents now prevent us from learning more about his activities during this important period. It is a peculiar account. Either these pages reflect the mistaken views of an elderly man losing touch with current events or they are an important find of historic significance. The reference to Timothy Webster is remarkable enough. The suggestion that President Lincoln opposed slavery on Constitutional grounds is also noteworthy. It supports the view of a small and radical fringe among modern academics. I have requested additional staff to help search through remaining documents. If there is more to Pinkerton's cache, I will find it.

- Diane Larimer, Chief Archivist – United States Library of Congress

Copyright © 2010 by David Luchuk. All rights reserved.

Published by Audio Joe Inc.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

FIRST DIGITAL EDITION

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request

ISBN 978-0-9867424-0-8

Repository Note:

The first set of secret files discovered among records of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency describes how Allan Pinkerton and his operatives prevented the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1861. Publication of this material sparked keen interest. Academics across the country have contested the truth of Pinkerton's account. Coverage in the media has, for the most part, been skewed toward reporting on the controversy rather than the actual content. This attention prompted the Justice Department to seize the entire collection, interrupting an archival project that has run without pause since the 1950s. They claim that government relations may be damaged if more of Pinkerton's controversial claims are made public. I find that outlandish and have submitted an objection to Justice's interference in Library operations. Access to the material will be barred until the conflict between our offices is resolved. The following may be the last of Pinkerton's papers we are ever able to release.

- Diane Larimer, Chief Archivist—United States Library of Congress

*   *   *

Allan Pinkerton, Principal

July, 1861

The same day my son was convicted as a criminal our country descended into civil war. I am no admirer of coincidence. The timing would not be worth mentioning except that, after the verdict against Robert, there was no way to keep us out of the conflict.

I wanted no part of that fight. We sacrificed enough to save President Lincoln from the Golden Circle. Timothy Webster was killed. Kate Warne's name was smeared. After paying such a toll, I believed we could leave politics alone.

We are not actors in history. We are detectives.

I was wrong. So wrong, that I now see no option other than to continue reading my agents' private files. It pains me but too many questions remain unanswered.

First among them, why was the old miser Henry Schulte murdered? Odd as it seems, even months later, that case drew us into the war.

The conflict began in earnest on April 12th of this year. Fort Sumter was attacked.

The army base sitting atop an island off the shore of Charleston, Carolina, was a focal point for escalating tensions. Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas declared themselves separate from the United States.

Southerners may lack technology. They have no want of audacity.

President Lincoln promised to reinforce all Union bases within the so called Confederacy. He sent merchant ships, rather than military vessels, to deliver supplies yet his decision was still interpreted as a hostile act. The boys at Fort Sumter went to bed as representatives of lawful government and awoke to find cannons pointed at their heads.

Fort Sumter could have repelled any attack had President Lincoln been willing to deploy its full arsenal. It guards two shorelines. Its foundation is mounted on pistons that lift the installation off the peninsula a hundred feet in the air and tilt the battery's firing platform to near 45 degrees. The result is a vast firing range that allows the cannonade to strike near and far.

Cannons in the battery rotate in a continuous ring. After one cannon fires, it swings off the platform to be reloaded and have its bearings adjusted. By the time nine other cannons discharge, the first is ready to blast again.

Fort Sumter can fire without pausing, and with great accuracy, on multiple targets. There is no Confederate weapon capable of matching its firepower.

President Lincoln did not make this strength available to Sumter's commanders. He never authorized the use of such weapons against the rebels. I have come to understand his decision.

The President believed that the Constitution did not recognize any right for States to secede. He sought to ensure that no legitimacy was granted to the rebels as a breakaway nation. If his army exerted its full strength in skirmishes such as Fort Sumter, how could President Lincoln deny that the Union was at war with another nation? He could not.

Lincoln ordered Major Robert Anderson, commander at Fort Sumter, to stand down while waiting for supplies. Merchant ships sailed from New York on April 10th.

The leader of Confederate forces in Carolina was General Gustave Beauregard. AnH engineer by trade, Beauregard had built bases like Fort Sumter.

On April 11th, Beauregard turned fifty guns toward the island. Under the shadow of this artillery, he sent a messenger to offer Major Anderson terms for a peaceful surrender.

According to this messenger, who spoke to journalists after the attack, Anderson received him with full military rites even though the boy had been a common Union rifleman before the rebellion. The soldier placed a sheet of paper on Anderson's desk, outlining terms that Beauregard would honour if Fort Sumter were turned over without a fight.

Major Anderson never read it. Instead, he placed his own paper over the Confederate terms. It was an offer of amnesty.

“Come back to us.” Anderson said. “You will face no court martial. You may yet salvage your military career. At minimum, your life will be spared.”

“But you are surrounded, Sir.”

“Young man, the President's patience has limits. Before this is done, I will raze these hills and dine with your General as my prisoner.”

The messenger returned to Beauregard with a polite refusal from Anderson. That evening, ships from New York assembled around Fort Sumter. At 4 o'clock in the morning, the fighting started.

Shells slammed Fort Sumter from all sides. Intense mortar fire targeted the battery platform.

Anderson's soldiers took cover behind stone walls reinforced with iron plates. Beauregard knew there was no point trying to penetrate them. Wood buildings beyond the barrack walls, on the other hand, made good targets. They could be set ablaze.

When the fires broke out, Union soldiers were forced into the open. If the Fort was engulfed, they would be cooked alive. Anderson sent teams to suppress the flames. Most were cut down in the hail of shot.

Anderson could only watch so many die. He ordered the battery platform raised and the cannons deployed. He would show these rebels the magnitude of the fight they had started.

This was what General Beauregard hoped would happen. Sustained shelling weakened the foundations around the pistons. Crumbling outer walls were exposed. The platform stalled ten feet off the surface. Its underbelly was open to heavy guns.

Direct hits rattled the platform. Pistons cracked and Fort Sumter disappeared in a cloud of steam, hot as boiling oil. Residents of Charleston claimed the screams were louder than the guns. The soldiers' torment only lasted a moment before the steam chamber exploded.

That blast drowned all other noises for miles. It sent a shock across the bay that blew half the merchant fleet over. A deep fissure opened in the bedrock. The top of the island broke away and tipped into the foot of the peninsula.

Soldiers inside were lost. Their bodies were never recovered. It was not known what became of Major Anderson.

Fort Sumter was in ruin. Lincoln was savaged in Congress and by the press. Most people in the Union wanted the army to pummel southern cities. The President responded to the attack by sending ships to blockade Confederate ports.

Lincoln's opponents in the North howled against what they viewed as a half measure. His enemies in the South tried to have the blockade declared illegal.

Americans clamoured for war. Lincoln chose to do his fighting in court.

When Fort Sumter fell, I was bogged down in the courts as well. Robert's trial came to a close on the same day in New York City.

The charges stemmed from his attempt to prove that a former client of ours, Northern Central Railroad, financed southern extremists with money they embezzled but claimed was stolen. To prove it, Robert broke into their office. This was mischief and trespassing.

Following his arrest, Robert was authorized to leave New York City on promise of returning for trial. Despite this agreement, Superintendent John Kennedy sent officers to Chicago to seize him without legal notice. Robert fled to help Kate Warne prevent President Lincoln's assassination. His escape amounted to resisting arrest.

Robert's actions helped prevent William Hunt from killing the President but he was still guilty of the charges. That was the crux of the trial.

I put my faith in our Agency lawyer, Byron Hayes. I believed the absence of a valid warrant, considered in the light of our cooperation with police and the threat against President Lincoln, would win a dismissal in Robert's favour.

Mr. Hayes took a different tack. There were times when it seemed he had no intention of answering the charges against my son. He brought every question back to how Kennedy's police responded to Robert's alleged break in with such speed.

These tangents were a constant annoyance to Judge Terrence Mansfield. They turned the trial into a farce.

I am tempted to read Robert's notes just to understand what he and Hayes thought they would accomplish. There is more than curiosity driving me to open the files.

I wanted to keep us out of the war. I wanted to protect us from the conspiracy gaining strength around us. After Robert's trial, there was no way for me to do so.

*   *   *

Robert Pinkerton

April, 1861

Hayes is a genius. He saw that there was no chance of acquittal. At first, he advised me to plead guilty and avoid the trial altogether.

“Out of the question” I said.

Kennedy had more to answer for than me. Kate Warne saw him on the train at Harrisburg. Kennedy claimed to have accompanied Lincoln to Philadelphia. He could not have been in both places.

The attempt on Lincoln's life was a national story. Kate was slandered by journalists who spread Kennedy's version. They also published wicked rumours about her conduct after being drugged on the train before Hunt's assault.

I do not put it past Kennedy to have planted the opiates and the stories. There was no doubt in my mind that he played some role in supporting William Hunt and the Golden Circle. He may also have helped provide Union equipment to agitators in the south. I was determined to expose this man. How could I, in good conscience, plead guilty to his charges?

At Northern Central, I had used a mechanized lock pick to walk through the front door. No one suspected I was anything other than a railway employee. I entered the file room and fed records into the punch card machine. I was barely there a quarter of an hour when police stormed the room. It is not possible for Northern Central officials to have recognized me as an intruder, for police to have been contacted and for officers to have intervened in that time.

How did Kennedy's men respond so fast? Why was safeguarding those railway manifests such a priority for police? Those were the real questions.

“We shall raise them.” Hayes said.

The little man wiped his hand over a moustache obscuring the lower half of his face. I could not say whether he was smiling but his eyes were bright with enthusiasm.

“A trial has two outcomes. We agree that the verdict is not in doubt?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will make our stand at sentencing.”

A plan was devised. Our biggest challenge was Papa. We needed him to exert a certain kind of pressure on Kennedy but I could not risk telling him the truth.

I am a bad son. With William for a brother, I'll still come out ahead.

I had new suits tailored for the trial, dark and severe, cut to the height of today's fashion. My job was to play a privileged brat who believed himself above the law. We gave newspapers a proper villain. The ones who attacked Kate Warne caricatured me as her lothario counterpart.

I hated seeing her name savaged in the press again. Kate has not been herself since the Lincoln investigation. She has no memory of what took place in the hours after she was drugged.

While she was out of her right mind, William Hunt and his Golden Circle overtook the President's train. Newspapers reported that she fell from one man to another. She traded clothes, undergarments and jewellery with other women. Other rumours are too shocking to repeat.

Kate regained her senses in time to save Lincoln's life. The allegations against her have been vehemently denied by Lincoln advisor Harry Vinton. Kate felt ruined all the same.

She has not taken an assignment since. Only Ginny Higgs at the Chicago office has been in regular contact with her.

My only comfort was in knowing that Hayes and I had Kennedy in our sights. If we succeeded, Kate might be avenged.

It was important that my trial be a public event. For the truth to come out, we needed the newspapers.

It is a wonder that Hayes did not end up in jail. From the first day, he tried to have every piece of evidence thrown out. He came close to accusing New York Police of colluding with Northern Central.

“Exhibit Three: a lock picking mechanism used by the defendant . . .”

“I object.” Hayes said. “That machine is under patent to a Northern Central competitor. Its presence in this courtroom violates federal and state laws that protect industrial innovation.”