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Pinkerton Agency founder Allan Pinkerton with his team and Kate Warne, above, leaning against the pole.
In 1856, a woman appeared at the offices of Pinkerton, the newly born private detective agency in the United States. She was looking for work. But she was not going to settle for an administrative position or a cleaner. She was totally determined: she would investigate crimes.
Thus, Kate Warne became the first female detective.
His career lasted only 12 years but in that time he achieved great milestones, including saving the life of President Abraham Lincoln.
Although this would already be enough to make her a widely known figure, we know little about her, especially before joining Pinkerton’s ranks, except that born Angie M. Warne in 1833, Erin, a town in Chemung County (New York).
And what is known about her as a researcher comes to us, above all, from the books written by his employer, Allan Pinkerton.
A new office
At the age of 23, Allan Pinkerton (1819, Glasgow), emigrated from his native Scotland to the United States. There he opened a barrel-making business. But fate had another course in store for him.
When he was looking for wood for his company, he came across what he suspected was a gang of counterfeiters Informally he began to watch them until they were captured. Thus they began to call him for matters “requiring detective skill”, as he himself recalls in the various books he wrote.
He soon gained a worked as a sheriff’s deputy until in 1849 he became Chicago’s first detective. In that same city and just a year later, at 80 Washington Street, he opened the private investigation firm first known as the North-Western Police Agency, which eventually became the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. one of the first of its kind in the United States.
image source, Chicago History Museum
Kate Warne entered the Pinkerton Agency at the age of 23 and worked there as a private detective until her death at the age of 35.
The services it offered were varied, although all within the same branch: private detectives, spies and private security.
they used innovative and effective techniques to develop their activities and, although today some of them seem obvious to us, such as that people of different types are used to infiltrate certain sites to go unnoticed, at the time they were an innovation.
Innovative was also its code of conduct, which stipulated do not take bribesnot compromise with criminals or always partner with the local institution responsible for law enforcement.
If this seems normal to us today, we must remember the context in which the agency was born, when in places like the “Wild West” the law of the strongest prevailed.
His first assignments were Hunt down outlaws and protect trains from potential raiders.
Six years later the demand for his services increased so much that Allan Pinkerton he had to place an ad in the Chicago newspaper with a job offer.
That was how Kate Warne knocked on her door.
Allan Pinkerton tells how a young woman “of above average height, slim, graceful in her movements, and perfectly serene in her manners” she showed up at his office one afternoon “saying she was a widow and had come to ask if he wouldn’t hire her as a detective.”
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Advertisement from the Pinkerton Agency.
Pinkerton recounts his first impressions of Warne:
“I observed that his features, while not what I would call beautiful, were of a decidedly intellectual cast. His eyes were very attractive, dark blue and full of fire. He had a broad, honest face, which might make someone in distress instinctively I chose her as a confidante, someone to trust in a moment of painin whom to seek consolation”.
According to Pinkerton’s account, although he remarked that it was not customary to employ women as detectives, He asked what he thought he could do in that role.
Kate Warne did not hesitate: she, because of her status as a woman, she could go and extract secrets in many places that were impossible for male detectives to have access to.
“He gave excellent reasons why it could be useful,” says the Scotsman in his notes.
And, of course, let’s not forget that this was 1856, so it is not surprising that Allan Pinkerton, in response to the bluntness of his interlocutor, said that “he seemed to possess the masculine attributes of firmness and decisiveness, only that He had put all his faculties under control.”
Kate Warne achieved her goal. “I decided to at least give it a try,” Pinkerton said.
A short but brilliant career
It didn’t take long for Kate Warne to stand out.
“She was beyond my expectations and I soon found her to be an invaluable asset,” Pinkerton said of her after assigning her a first case.
More came, and with them the ploys to get information such as changing identities, costumes and accents that took her to be from a southern socialite, a fortune teller or the sister of an incognito President Lincoln.
It was easy for Warne to get men to brag to her about their criminal exploits. And another of her techniques was befriend the wives and girlfriends of the suspected criminals. He gained their trust and extracted information from them that their partners had previously revealed to them.
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Allan Pinkerton, a Scotsman who created a barrel company and ended up founding a private detective agency in the United States.
One of its milestones was in 1858, when the Adams Express Company began to suffer a series of embezzlements and they couldn’t find the culprit, who had already made off with more than US$50,000.
The head of the company wrote to Allan Pinkerton:
“Can you send me a man, half horse and half alligator? I’ve been ‘bitten’ once again! When can you send him?”
The owner of the company ordered Warne that, for the occasion, adopted the identity of Madam Imbert, southerner and with a husband in prison. With this story, Kate befriended the suspect’s wife, managed to collect the necessary evidence and ensure the return of a good part of the booty.
Seeing the value of the female perspective in the field of research and the good results that the work of Kate Warne was giving, Allan Pinkerton created in 1860 a Bureau of Female Detectives and put her in front.
Thus, she helped many other women to learn the private detective trade until her death, in 1868, from pneumonia.
The Baltimore Plot
In addition to being in charge of the agency’s women’s section, Kate Warne he continued his field work in the following years.
Something that led her, for example, to being an intelligence officer during the American Civil War on the Union side, the northern strip of the country that remained on the side of Abraham Lincoln when he was elected president and abolished slavery.
But before that, he had his best-known mission: prevent the assassination of Lincoln himself.
After his election in November 1960, the inauguration It was scheduled for March 4 of the following year. But a group of southern people I was willing for that not to happen.
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Pinkerton on the left with Abraham Lincoln, center.
Before arriving in Washington DC, he scheduled a trip where he would pass through several cities leaving from his home in Springfield (Illinois). The journey lasted 11 days, I would do it by train and he had to go through a point where Lincoln would not exactly take a mass bath: Baltimore, in the slave state of Maryland.
Knowing the presidential route, a group plotted to kill him at the exact moment he set foot in Baltimore.
Allan Pinkerton learned of this, went to Baltimore to investigate.ry made it known to Norman B. Judd, a member of the entourage of the president-elect. “He did not divulge this information to anyone so as not to cause undue anxiety, knowing that I was on the ground and could be trusted to act at the right time,” he recounts in one of his books.
Along with the men he already had in the area, he also there was warnewho at that time he held the position of superintendent in the agency.
The group made a covert operation time trial not only to discover the details of the plot, but also to protect Lincoln. They used false names and disguises and managed to infiltrate the subversives.
“I had arrived several days before and already he had made notable progress in cultivating relationships with the wives and daughters of the conspirators” Pinkerton wrote of Kate Warne.
They obtained the evidence, schedules and modus operandi of the conspirators. A city ordinance prevented the train from passing through downtown Baltimore in order to avoid noise. So, between the Presidente Street and Camden Street stations, the passengers were in the carriages, but the carriages were drawn by horses. In that transfer, which implied unhitching wagons, hitching horses, traveling the tracks and starting over, they would attack.
Now it was time to protect Lincoln.
An old invalid and a protective sister
Hours before leaving for Baltimore, Lincoln had an unavoidable appointment in Pennsylvania to pay tribute to George Washington. There he proclaimed in a speech: “If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle… I would rather be killed in this place than hand it over.”
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Abraham Lincoln knew of the plot against him and did not hesitate to disguise himself to go unnoticed.
The president knew the plot. But also the solution.
That night, while in a meeting, someone tapped him on the shoulder. The signal. He left the room where he was speaking with the Governor of Pennsylvania, Andrew G. Curtin, who was aware of the plan to hide it.
they disguised the most recognizable and charismatic person in America at the time and they passed him off as an elderly man, an invalid.
Warne had paid to have the final part of a sleeping car with a perfect excuse: he needed it for his invalid brother. The carriage was separated by a curtain so that no one could see who was in it.
When Lincoln arrived at the scene, Pinkerton recounts, “Warne stepped forward, greeted the President familiarly as his brother, we entered the sleeping car by the back door without undue delay, and without anyone noticing the distinguished passenger who had arrived“.
To make sure even more, Baltimore’s telegraph lines were cut to prevent any communication between the conspirators and they devised that the president would travel at night.
All the way, Kate Warnes was by his side. Legend has it that he did not sleep a wink on the entire trip to Washington DC and that’s where the slogan of the Pinkterton Agency comes from: “We Never Spleep” (we never sleep).
Kate Warne was part of the achievement: with her costumes, Lincoln arrived safe and sound a Washington DC.
The president would not suffer the same fate just 4 years later at the Ford Theater where he was finally assassinated.
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