CHAPTER ONE

THE APPRENTICE

Let none falter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Springfield, Illinois, 1839

THE PECULIAR MARCH OF EVENTS that carried Allan Pinkerton to Baltimore had begun twenty-two years earlier—on the night of November 3, 1839—on a rain-soaked field in South Wales. At that time, Abraham Lincoln was still a young legislator in Illinois, voicing early concern over voting rights and the “injustice and bad policy” of slavery. An ocean away, Pinkerton was also throwing himself at what he called “the higher principles of liberty,” even at the risk of his own freedom.

Pinkerton had traveled hundreds of miles from his home in Glasgow to take his place amid a swelling band of protest marchers as they prepared to descend on the Welsh town of Newport. These “crazed and misguided zealots,” as one newspaper called them, were the vanguard of the Chartist agitation, a working-class labor movement struggling to make its voice heard in Britain. Pinkerton, though barely twenty years old, thought of himself as “the most ardent Chartist in Scotland.”

Ragged and footsore, Pinkerton moved among the demonstrators as they huddled beside campfires, listening to firebrand speeches and waiting for reinforcements that would never come. They were, as Pinkerton himself would admit, a sorry-looking group. A few had tattered blankets pulled tight around their shoulders for protection against a chilling rain; others went barefoot in the squelching mud.

The Chartists’ demands, as spelled out in the “People’s Charter” of 1838, included universal suffrage, equitable pay, and other democratic reforms for Britain’s “toiling class.” Lately, the movement had been split by internal conflict, with one faction espousing nonviolent “moral force” to achieve its goals, and another comprised of “physical force men,” who were prepared—perhaps even eager—to take up arms. Matters came to a crisis in July 1839, when the House of Commons rejected a national petition bearing over a million signatures. The following month saw the charismatic Chartist leader Henry Vincent convicted on conspiracy charges, spurring the physical-force wing of the movement toward a large-scale uprising.

Henry Vincent had been imprisoned at Monmouth Castle, outside of Newport, and it was thought that several other Chartist leaders were being held in the town’s Westgate Hotel. As thousands of marchers, many of them miners and mill workers, massed on the outskirts of town, it became clear that they intended to demonstrate their “fervid passions” to the country at large. Exactly how they intended to do so remains a subject of debate. Many believe that the marchers planned to storm the Westgate Hotel and free the prisoners they thought were inside. Others contend that a massive demonstration was planned to secure the release of Henry Vincent from his castle cell, perhaps signaling a nationwide uprising in support of the Chartist agenda. In any event, there were iron pikes and muskets in the hands of many of the marchers, suggesting that their intent could not have been entirely peaceful.

The original plan called for the marchers to advance on Newport under cover of darkness, but it was past nine o’clock in the morning before they finally descended on the town. The delay proved costly: Military forces from a nearby royal regiment had used the time to reinforce the hotel and surrounding buildings. As the rain-soaked, disorganized laborers massed in the village square, they found themselves facing off against a small but well-armed company of battle-trained soldiers.

The details of what followed are not entirely clear. According to some accounts, the Chartists surged forward and banged at the shuttered windows of the hotel to demand the release of the prisoners, only to be met with a withering volley of musket fire. Within minutes, the ranks broke and the marchers fell back in wild disorder, leaving their weapons scattered on the ground. The defending soldiers now turned their guns on a handful of Chartists who had managed to force their way inside the hotel. In moments, said a witness, “there was a scene dreadful beyond expression—the groans of the dying—the shrieks of the wounded, the pallid, ghostly countenances and the bloodshot eyes of the dead, in addition to the shattered windows, and the passages ankle-deep in gore.”

When the smoke cleared, some twenty-two men lay dead, and many others were grievously injured. Most had scattered as the first shots rained down on their heads, fleeing back to their homes, as one witness recorded, like “so many yelping dogs gone to ground.” In the aftermath, many of the Chartist marchers would be captured and their leaders condemned to be hung, drawn, and quartered.

“It was a bad day,” recalled Allan Pinkerton. “We returned to Glasgow by the back streets and lanes, more like thieves than honest working men.” The lessons of the Newport Rising, as the unhappy episode came to be known, would remain with Pinkerton to the end of his days. Within a few years, he would gain international fame as the leading figure of a new type of law enforcement, followed by no small measure of infamy as a strikebreaker, but Pinkerton never entirely fell out of step with the Newport marchers in his efforts for social justice. The tension between the ideals of his youth and the obligations of the career he created for himself—like the split between the moral-force and physical-force Chartists—created a strain in his character that he never entirely resolved. He understood the impulses of the poor and disenfranchised, whether they were criminals or enemy soldiers, but this only sharpened the edge of his ambition. Decades later, while commenting on labor unrest in America, Pinkerton offered a rare public glimpse of the beliefs he had forged in Scotland: “I believe that I of all others have earned the right to say plain things to the countless toilers who were engaged in these strikes. I say I have earned this right. I have been all my lifetime a working man.” Life in America, he insisted, presented common workingmen with opportunities he had been denied in his homeland, with a chance to “rise above their previous conditions, and reach a nobler and happier condition of life.”

If Pinkerton’s words sound naïve and self-serving to the modern ear, it was a sentiment Abraham Lincoln would have recognized. “Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer,” Lincoln once declared. “The hired laborer of yesterday labors on his own account today, and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow. Advancement—improvement in condition—is the order of things in a society of equals.”

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ALLAN PINKERTON WAS BORN in a two-room tenement flat on Muirhead Street in Glasgow, Scotland, in the summer of 1819. His family lived in the area on the south bank of the River Clyde known as the Gorbals, infamous at that time for its crime, brothels, and “persons in narrow circumstances.” Named for his grandfather, a well-known blacksmith, Allan was one of eleven children, at least four of whom died in infancy. His father,...