ALLAN

See also:

• ALLAN PINKERTON (1819–1884)
• PINKERTON, JOHN (1758–1826)

PINKERTON (1819–1884)  , American detective, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on the 25th of August 1819 . His father, a sergeant of the Glasgow municipal police, died in 1828 of injuries received from a prisoner in his custody . In 1842 .al]an emigrated to Chicago, Illinois . In 1843 he removed to Dundee, Kane county, Illinois, where he established a cooper-'age business . Here he ran down a gang of counterfeiters, ,nd he was appointed a deputy-sheriff of Kane county in 1846 and immediately afterwards of Cook county, with headquarters in Chicago . There he organized a force of detectives to capture thieves who were stealing railway property, and this organization developed in 1852 into Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, of which he took sole charge in 1853 . He was especially successful in capturing thieves who stole large amounts from express companies . In 1866 his agency captured the principals in the theft of $700,000 from Adams Express Company safes on a train of the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway, and recovered all but about $12,000 of the stolen money . In February 1861 Pinkerton found evidence of a plot to assassinate President-elect Lincoln upon his arrival in Baltimore on his way to Washington; as a result, Lincoln passed through Baltimore at an early hour in the morning without stopping . In April 1861 Pinkerton, onthe suggestion of General George B . McClellan, organized a system of obtaining military information in the Southern states . From this system he developed the Federal secret service, of which he was in charge throughout the war, under the assumed name of Major E .

J .

Allen . One of his detectives, James McParlan, in 1873–1876 lived among the Molly Maguires (q.v.) in Pennsylvania and secured evidence which led to the breaking up of the organization . In 1869 Pinkerton suffered a partial stroke of paralysis, and thereafter the management of the detective agency devolved chiefly upon his sons, William Allan (b . 1846) and Robert (1848–1907) . He died in Chicago on the 1st of July 1884 . He published The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877), The Spy of the Rebellion (1883), in which he gave his version of President-elect Lincoln's journey to Washing-ton; and Thirty Years a Detective (1884) .