From the Gorbals to the Wild West, the detective who never slept

The Herald Scotland

04-05-2025

As the exhausted Isabella gathered her newborn into her arms, she may have wondered what the future might hold.
She'd already buried three children – a Glasgow bairn in those days only had an 88 per cent chance of seeing its first birthday.
f Allan Pinkerton's birthplace at Muirhead Street and Ruthergen Loan in the Gorbals. (Image: Library of Congress/Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones)
And although her son was from an old Gorbals family, with relatives who had become prominent citizens, this was early 19th century Glasgow; there was terrible poverty, violence, disease and slums.
What would become of her newborn baby?
As it turned out, Isabella need not have worried too much about Allan Pinkerton.
For his destiny lay 3500 miles across the Atlantic where he'd rub shoulders with the richest and most famous in the world, become acquainted with political giants and earn his living from snaring the dregs of the criminal underworld.
From humble beginnings, he would become one of America's most famous men and entertain presidents to capitalists at a lavish home that paid tribute to his roots.
Called The Larches, it featured 85,000 larch trees imported from Scotland to remind him of home, a golf course and resident Scottish artist to paint historic scenes from Scottish history.
By his death in 1884, the founder of Pinkerton's National Detective Agency (PNDA) had achieved near legendary status, with crime-bashing skills that attracted praise from the none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Allan Pinkerton was the real deal – the world's most famous detective.
As Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of a new book that explores Pinkerton's life in forensic detail, points out, it was down to him that plans to assassinate Abraham Lincoln as made his way to be inaugurated President of the United States, were thwarted.
At Antietam, Maryland, site of the 1862 Civil War battle. From left to right, Allan Pinkerton, President Abraham Lincoln, and General George B. McClellan. (Image: Library of Congress, LC- B817-7949/Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones)
While intelligence he later supplied to President Lincoln and helped plan strategy in the early stages of the Civil War.
And Pinkerton operatives famously chased down outlaws like Butch Cassidy and Jesse James at a time when American public policing was in its infancy, bounties were generous and the west was definitely wild.
With his agencies dotted around the country's major cities, Pinkerton advertised his services for hire with a poster featuring an all-seeing eye and the slogan: "We never sleep".
But as well as crimefighter, Pinkerton was also a fierce abolitionist who helped runaway slaves travel the Underground Railway to reach freedom and safety in Canada.
While his undercover agents and sometimes brute force were employed to keep the wheels of American industry turning in the face of crippling and violent strikes.
Pinkerton's agency would become a byword for criminal detection, spying and undercover operations.
But now Rhodri has turned detective on Pinkerton, to plough through rare documents and recently digitised historical records that reveal fresh detail of the man, his crime-fighting agency and his Gorbals roots.
He has now gathered his findings into a new book which explores the impact of his Gorbals upbringing and his astonishing rise to fame as the most famous detective of his times.
Rhodri's curiosity over Pinkerton was ignited years ago as he carried out PhD research into US industrial violence. But uncovering important documents that would tell his whole story involved the sleuthing skills of a PNDA agent.
'For years, I was frustrated by evidential gaps,' he explains.
'The Great Fire of 1871 gutted every building in Chicago except the fire station. The PNDA had its HQ in that city.
'When that building went up in flames, so did many of the Pinkerton records.
'In the mid-1930s, there was a more wilful destruction of evidence.
'The US Senate opened an investigation of labour espionage. The response of Allan Pinkerton's great grandson, Robert A. Pinkerton II, was to destroy as many records as he could before federal investigators seized them.
'Finally, in 1999 Pinkerton, Inc., as it was now called, was taken over by Securitas and donated its remaining archives to the Library of Congress.'
The records dated from the company's founding in 1850 to 1938, spanning mug shots and criminal files, to Pinkerton family photographs with the likes of Abraham Lincoln.
Among them were documents relating to Jesse James, one of the wild west's most notorious outlaws. A prime target for railroads and banks desperate to halt his crime spree, Pinkerton and his ruthless agents were hired to track him down.
With some of the records at risk of being lost, paperwork rich in detail was shared with Rhodri via Pinkerton historian and archivist Jane Adler.
He then scoured online material made available by ProQuest, which digitises historical records, including Pinkerton archives.
'I set out to be the first scholar to exploit this facility in a systematic manner,' adds Rhodri.
'My research yielded some surprising findings.'
Author Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones has explored rarely seen material to uncover new insight into the life of Allan Pinkerton (Image: Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones)
Among it, evidence of sometimes devious methods to catch criminals, crush workplace rebellions and thwart strikes.
'From private collections, I had letters written by employers complaining that private detectives played both sides: the detectives exaggerated the likelihood of strikes and disorder to win contacts from employers, then ensured that the unions survived, serving as eternal sources of revenue,' says Rhodri.
And, says Rhodri, his surprisingly liberal approach to giving women the opportunity to work alongside his agents in roles fraught with risk.
Although Pinkerton rose to fame and fortune in America, it as the Gorbals that moulded him.
Pinkerton's father William was a blacksmith's son who stood six feet tall – unusual for the times – and who passed on his muscular physique to his son.
Read more by Sandra Dick:
A handloom weaver, when demand slumped, he found another job that may have influenced the young Pinkerton's future role, as a prison officer at Glasgow City's jail.
His son inherited his towering presence, tall and muscular, he was more than able to hold his own in a Gorbals fistfight.
'All accounts agree that Allan was endowed with a strong will, nerves of steel, deductive powers, and a shrewd capacity to understand his fellow human beings,' writes Rhodri.
His half-brother James, however, may also have shaped Pinkerton's future career - a 'wastrel who took regular advantage of the local whorehouses and drinking.'
Gorbals' poverty and hardship no doubt inspired Pinkerton to join the extreme left Chartist movement that demanded a more democratic political system.
He joined rowdy protests and supported the use of physical force to obtain their objectives.
When the movement shifted to less violent protest, he set up the Northern Democratic Association with the motto: 'peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must.'
Having been a visible figure within the movement, Pinkerton then fades from view for two years, eventually re-emerging in 1842 heading from the Broomielaw bound for Canada with his young bride, Joan.
While some theories suggest he went into hiding from the police, Rhodri suspects Pinkerton may have been lying low after being suspected of informing on his former Chartrist comrades.
'He arrived in America equipped with the baggage not just of revolution, but also of counter-revolution,' he adds.
Pinkerton and his wife settled at a Scottish community near Chicago called Dundee.
Allan with his wife Joan Pinkerton. (Image: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-07127/Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones)
He was running a cooperage business when by chance, he came across an encampment of counterfeiters dealing in forged coins.
It ignited a passion: the toil of making and repairing barrels scarcely compared to the thrill – and cash bounties – that came with hunting down criminals and bringing them to justice.
A major boost for his new detective agency was Chicago's role as a railway hub, where Pinkerton was employed to root out swindlers and robbers.
While the growing city was also home to one Abraham Lincoln. Pinkerton would later claim the president would never have been assassinated had his agents been employed to look after his security.
Among the most intriguing facets of Pinkerton's character, is that while he was a gruff son of the Gorbals and a strict disciplinarian at home, he was also an early feminist who championed the role of women in his rapidly expanding agency.
Read more by Sandra Dick:
'Within his family, he was a patriarch in what was then the usual manner,' says Rhodri.
'But he was a feminist who had a women's division in his agency.
'For those times, it was pretty forward-thinking.'
The women often worked as undercover agents, with one taking a leading role.
'In the Graceland Cemetery on Fair View Avenue, Chicago, the Pinkerton family plot has a corner in which are buried his two most esteemed operatives,' says Rhodri.
'One is Kate Warne.
'It was Kate who befriended the wives of pro-slavery elements in Baltimore, discovering by this indirect means details of the plots to assassinate Lincoln.
Kate Warne pictured in 1866 became a key figure in Allan Pinkerton's detective agency (Image: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-075012/Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones)
'Thereafter, she spied with consummate skill having been secretly insinuated into the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia.'
Kate became the head of the female detectives' division of the PNDA.
'Allan later explained his decision to place his trust in a woman with the words, 'we live in a progressive age, and in a progressive country'.'
Perhaps part of his support for women came from his tough Gorbals roots where women faced challenging lives revolving around childbirth and child loss, poverty and hard work often, like Isabella, at one of the area's weaving mills.
Meanwhile, Rhodri adds that another underappreciated element of Pinkerton's legacy is his contribution to the modern security state.
'Both the FBI and the CIA borrowed his methodologies, for example his nationwide rogues' gallery and the Pinkertons' habit of kidnapping suspects without regard to habeas corpus.
'More than this, Pinkerton foreshadowed that striking post-9/11 development, the privatisation of American national security.
'By 2006, 70 per cent of the $28 billion spent on US national intelligence went on private contracts.'
But his reputation is also smeared by anti-labour approaches in a nation renowned for them, which seem at odds with his earlier years of protesting for greater rights for working people.
'His 'operatives' penetrated unions, advocating rash strikes and identifying troublemakers who were then fired and blacklisted,' adds Rhodri.
Pinkerton's interference in workers' efforts to fight for better conditions sometimes had deadly consequences.
'Pinkerton operatives worked as armed 'guard' intimidating workers on the picket lines.
Pinkerton advert with the slogan We never sleep (Image: Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE/Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones)
'In the 1870s, on the pretext of combatting a secret society, the Molly Maguires, that supposedly carried out acts of terrorism in the Pennsylvania coal mining region, Pinkerton's operative James McParland penetrated local workers' unions.
'He gathered what the courts accepted as evidence and 20 men, today regarded as martyrs, went to the gallows.'
After his death Pinkerton's agency, by then managed by his sons, continued to attract criticism.
In one case, a Pinkerton detective's testimony that led to the execution of four protesters following an explosion during a workers' rights rally, was discredited.
Then in 1892, 300 armed Pinkerton agents clashed with workers at the Homestead Steel mill, near Pittsburgh, the pride and joy of Dunfermline-born steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie.
The battle made a villain of Carnegie and sealed the reputation of the Pinkertons as enemies of the working class.
Wild West outlaw Jesse James was hunted by Allan Pinkerton's detectives (Image: Library of Congress, 2005682818./Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones)
He died in 1884, after a fall when– perhaps ironically for someone whose agents often relied upon loose lips - bit his tongue, leading to gangrene.
A 'Marmite' character, says Rhodri, he was forged in Scotland and moulded by America's wild frontier, slavery, feminism, workers' rights and carceral reform.
'He was rich, his home had all the trappings of grandeur, and he was a household name.
'But there was a dark side to his character,' he adds.
'He had an incredible life.'
Allan Pinkerton: America's Legendary Detective and the Birth of Private Security by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is published by Georgetown University Press.