Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. LC-USZ62-136277

(1819–84). Scottish-born detective Allan Pinkerton was the founder of a famous American private detective agency. Its successes included capturing the criminals in a $700,000 railway theft in 1866 and the thwarting of an assassination plot against President-elect Abraham Lincoln in February 1861 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Pinkerton was born on August 25, 1819, in Glasgow, Scotland. His father, a police sergeant, died when Allan was a child, and the family was left in great poverty. Allan found work as a cooper (a wooden barrel-maker) and soon became involved in political and social reform. His activities resulted in a warrant for his arrest, and in 1842 he fled to the United States. Pinkerton settled in Chicago, Illinois, before moving the next year to the nearby town of Dundee in Kane county. There he set up a cooper’s shop. While cutting wood on a deserted island one day, he discovered and later captured a gang of counterfeiters. Following this and other similar achievements, he was appointed deputy sheriff of Kane county in 1846 and soon afterward deputy sheriff of Cook county, with headquarters in Chicago.

In 1850 Pinkerton resigned from Chicago’s new police force in order to organize a private detective agency that specialized in railway theft cases. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency became one of the most famous organizations of its kind. In 1861, during the American Civil War, Pinkerton worked for the Union. Using the name E.J. Allen, he headed an organization whose purpose was to obtain military information in the Southern states.

After the Civil War Pinkerton resumed the management of his detective agency. From 1873 to 1876 one of his detectives lived among the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania and secured evidence that led to the breakup of this organization of coal miners supposedly engaged in terrorism. During the strikes of 1877 the Pinkerton Agency’s harsh policy toward labor unions caused it to be severely criticized in labor circles, although Pinkerton stated that he was helping workers by opposing labor unions. Pinkerton wrote The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877), The Spy of the Rebellion (1883), and Thirty Years a Detective (1884). He died on July 1, 1884, in Chicago.