The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (52 page)

The more serious charge, however, was that Pinkerton had set out for Baltimore with every intention of discovering an assassination conspiracy, whether one existed or not. “The process of investigation began,” Lamon wrote, “with a strong bias in favor of the conclusion at which the detective had arrived.” He went on to ridicule Pinkerton’s methods, as well as his grammar, tearing apart the record books that had passed into his hands by way of Herndon. He complained that the daily reports were nothing more than accounts of “when the spies went to bed, when they rose, where they ate, what saloons and brothels they visited, and what blackguards they met and ‘drinked’ with.” In these circumstances, Lamon insisted, there could be little wonder in the fact that several willing informants soon appeared to Pinkerton and his operatives. “One of them ‘shadowed’ a loud-mouthed, drinking fellow, named Luckett, and another, a poor scapegrace and braggart, named Hillard,” he reported. “These wretches ‘drinked’ and talked a great deal, hung about bars, haunted disreputable houses, were constantly half-drunk, and easily excited to use big and threatening words by the faithless protestations and cunning management of the spies.”

Lamon appeared to score a telling point in highlighting the fact that Cypriano Ferrandini, the supposed ringleader, was never brought to account for his role in the conspiracy. “If it had had any foundation in fact, we are inclined to believe that the sprightly and eloquent barber would have dangled at a rope’s end long since,” he wrote. “He would hardly have been left to shave and plot in peace, while the members of the Legislature, the police-marshal, and numerous private gentlemen, were locked up in Federal prisons.”

Finally, having laid out his charges with lawyerly skill, Lamon delivered his summation:

For ten years the author implicitly believed in the reality of the atrocious plot which these spies were supposed to have detected and thwarted; and for ten years he had pleased himself with the reflection that he also had done something to defeat the bloody purpose of the assassins. It was a conviction which could scarcely have been overthrown by evidence less powerful than the detective’s weak and contradictory account of his own case. In that account there is literally nothing to sustain the accusation, and much to rebut it. It is perfectly manifest that there was no conspiracy—no conspiracy of a hundred, of fifty, of twenty, of three; no definite purpose in the heart of even one man to murder Mr. Lincoln at Baltimore.

Lamon’s indictment, all but glowing with righteous indignation, would take an enormous toll on Pinkerton and his reputation. Initially, however, Lamon’s book was widely condemned for its portrait of Lincoln himself, which critics judged to be overly derogatory. “It is an oft repeated proverb that no man is a hero to his valet,” said one reviewer. “It would seem from the character of this volume that no man is a hero to his law partner.” Over time, however, the book would be reexamined for instances in which Lamon’s long friendship with Lincoln gave him a unique perspective. The Baltimore episode appeared to be one such case. Lamon had, after all, been at Lincoln’s side during the fateful journey, and perfectly positioned to take a clear and informed view of the matter.

Or so it seemed. In time, it became known that Lamon had not written the book himself; his “authentic biography of Mr. Lincoln” was, in fact, the product of a ghostwriter, who later asserted that “Lamon did not compose a line.” His poor choice of a collaborator explained many of the book’s shortcomings, but even so it remained evident that the personal venom directed at Pinkerton had originated with Lamon himself. Soon, the remarks concerning the Baltimore plot were seized upon and amplified by others. Mayor Brown of Baltimore was one of many who found vindication in Lamon’s views, highlighting in his own memoir that Lamon had pronounced the conspiracy to be a “mere fiction.” Maryland historian John Scharf, writing in 1879, quoted Lamon’s account at length to show that there was “absolutely not a particle” of truth in Pinkerton’s conspiracy. For generations to come, Lamon’s “mingled disgust and astonishment,” in Scharf’s phrase, would fuel a lasting debate over Pinkerton’s actions and motivations, and create an atmosphere of uncertainty as to whether any danger had ever existed in Baltimore.

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PINKERTON HIMSELF WAS TAKEN ABACK
when he read Lamon’s denunciation. He fired off a letter demanding an explanation, but once again Lamon declined to reply. The best Pinkerton could do was to plan a book of his own, more detailed than his
History and Evidence
pamphlet, in which he could defend not only his actions in Baltimore but also his subsequent service to General McClellan. By providing a “truthful record,” he claimed, he could “leave to the impartial reader, and historian, the question whether the course I pursued, and the General whom I loved and faithfully served, are deserving of censure, or are entitled to the praises of a free and enlightened people.”

Pinkerton’s memoir would be a long time in coming. Lamon’s attack had been only the latest in a series of setbacks that would mark his declining years. “I feel no power on earth is able to check me,” he had told George Bangs at the end of 1868, “no power in Heaven or Hell can influence me when I know I am right.” It soon began to appear as if he had been tempting fate. A few months later, while dictating letters at his desk, Pinkerton suffered a devastating stroke, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. Through sheer determination and an aggressive, radical course of treatment—including mud baths and painful leg braces—Pinkerton managed to drag himself out of his wheelchair and onto a pair of walking sticks. Over time, he slowly regained the use of his legs, forcing himself to take rigorous morning walks, and eventually covering distances of more than ten miles on a daily basis.

Further troubles lay ahead. The Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed Pinkerton’s home office, taking his treasured case files and records with it, at a cost he estimated to be $250,000. Determined to battle back after this latest blow, Pinkerton found himself at odds with his sons William and Robert, who had assumed control of much of the business during his long convalescence. For some time, the agency had been contending with a new and more daring breed of train robbers, such as the Reno Brothers Gang, leading to violent clashes and increasingly heavy-handed tactics. An explosive standoff with the James-Younger Gang in 1875 resulted in the death of an eight-year-old boy—the half brother of Frank and Jesse James—and public opinion turned sour. Pinkerton’s methods were now reviled as “needlessly barbarous,” and he himself was branded a vigilante. Pinkerton was unrepentant, and he continued to claim, as he had done so often before, that “the ends justify the means, if the ends are for the accomplishment of Justice.”

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DURING THE SAME PERIOD,
as the nation struggled with the effects of a crippling economic downturn, Pinkerton interceded in a vicious ongoing dispute between mine workers and local tycoons in the coal districts of eastern Pennsylvania, becoming entangled with a secretive society of Irish immigrants known as the “Molly Maguires,” whose tactics were said to include arson, kidnapping, and murder. They were men without “an iota of moral principle,” Pinkerton was told, and the entire region struggled in the “vise-like grip of this midnight, dark-lantern, murderous-minded fraternity.” Pinkerton sent a rugged Ulster immigrant named James McParland, posing as a fugitive named James McKenna, whose Irish-Catholic background gave him the best chance of success in infiltrating the organization. In time, McParland gave dramatic testimony in a sensational murder trial that resulted in the execution of several alleged “Mollies,” thereby sparking an enduring controversy. Pinkerton believed McParland’s “noble effort” had brought a just and fitting verdict, but others saw the condemned men as martyrs to the cause of organized labor, and they dismissed Pinkerton as a tool of an emerging class of robber barons. The detective who had marched with the Chartists in his native Scotland, wrote one critic, now “preyed upon social freedom in America.”

It was a charge that would stick. Pinkerton and his men came to be reviled as strikebreakers and skull-crackers, an image that would be cemented in years to come by the ghastly carnage during a strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in which ten people died. This unhappy episode occurred during the tenure of his sons, several years after Pinkerton’s death, but history has attached the blame to the agency’s founder.

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AMID THE TURMOIL OF HIS LATER YEARS,
Pinkerton would have been especially sensitive to Ward Lamon’s debunking of his efforts in Baltimore. He had come to regard the episode as the highlight of his career, and it would have been particularly galling to find himself accused of having stacked the cards in advance, determined to find an assassination plot upon arrival in Maryland. “From my reports you will see how accidentally I discovered the plot,” he had candidly admitted when passing over his records to Herndon. “I was looking for nothing of the kind, and had certainly not the slightest idea of it.” By the same token, in light of the tragedy at Ford’s Theatre, he would have been shocked to find himself ridiculed for focusing his efforts on a small band of plotters, rather than on a rumored conspiracy of thousands. The “scapegrace” Otis Hillard, who likened his dilemma to that of Brutus, would not have been out of place in the company of John Wilkes Booth.

There is a measure of justice, however, in Lamon’s criticism of Pinkerton’s methods. As the detective admitted to Samuel Felton, he and his operatives were forced to cut corners due to limited time, and they adopted a course of action that amounted to entrapment, using alcohol and pledges of money to draw out revelations about the conspiracy. Pinkerton himself had written, in his agency’s founding documents, that any confessions of guilt that relied on alcohol should not be trusted, as they tended to fall apart in court. It is fair to wonder how many of the statements made in the saloons of Baltimore would have held up to that scrutiny. By that standard, however, Pinkerton would have been in good company. Lincoln’s own adherence to legal procedure had become a subject of debate by this time, following the summary arrests throughout the state of Maryland.

Lamon was also correct in pointing out that no one was ever arrested for having a direct connection to the plot. The fact that Cypriano Ferrandini returned to Barnum’s Hotel and carried on with his barbering as if nothing had happened appears to weigh heavily against Pinkerton’s accounting of the case, and remains one of the most bizarre features of the episode. Lamon described Ferrandini as an innocent, if foolishly outspoken, dupe, a “poor knight of the soap-pot,” falsely accused and stitched up by Pinkerton to cover the weaknesses of the evidence. It is entirely possible that Pinkerton exaggerated and embellished Ferrandini’s many operatic pronouncements, but it is disingenuous to suggest that the “noble Captain” was nothing more than Pinkerton’s witless patsy. Nowhere did Lamon mention that Ferrandini’s secessionist activities had already brought him before the select committee in Washington—before Pinkerton ever met him—or that a fiery Italian barber had featured in other, independent accounts of the drama. Similarly, when Lamon insisted that Ferrandini “would have dangled at a rope’s end” if there had been any truth in the charges, he overlooked Lincoln’s own agenda. Lincoln had been eager to put the matter behind him as he entered the White House, and soon enough the plot and its aftershocks would fade from the public mind, overtaken by the fast march of events on the battlefields of the Civil War. By the time the war had finished, when attention might have returned to the plot in Baltimore, Lincoln had fallen to an assassin’s bullet. A photograph of the accused conspirators—including Mary Surratt—dangling at the ends of ropes soon became one of the indelible images of this dark chapter, amid lasting controversy. At a time when Washington was eager to move forward, there could not have been much political incentive to stir the ashes of a conspiracy that had failed.

Lamon intended to put the seal on his argument by charging that Pinkerton had fabricated the danger. There never was a threat, he insisted; the notion existed only in Pinkerton’s mind, a product of ambition and an overheated imagination. Even if one sets aside Lamon’s personal grudge, however, the conclusion is absurd. While the degree of the threat remains a legitimate subject for debate, the existence of a threat is beyond dispute, even by the measure of Lamon’s own statements. Though Lamon admitted that Lincoln had made his decision based on independent warnings from William Seward and General Scott—and even acknowledged the vast scale of those warnings—he finally rejected the possibility of murderous intent, “in the heart of even one man,” for fear that it might reflect credit on Pinkerton. This is nothing more than the expression of a small man’s petty grudge. There is much to criticize about Pinkerton’s efforts in Baltimore, and we can never know if Lincoln would have died had he attempted to pass through the city openly, but the coming years would bring a number of hard lessons on the subject of presidential security. By today’s standards, it is hard to fault Pinkerton’s conclusion that a small band of glory-seeking malcontents—men who vowed in the presence of witnesses that Lincoln would die in Baltimore—posed a viable threat. History has shown that such men are dangerous.

It was a point that Lamon appeared to reconsider in later life, though not without a characteristically oblique twist. A second volume of his collected writings about Lincoln appeared in 1895, assembled after Lamon’s death by his daughter, who admitted that the result might appear “fragmentary and lacking in purpose.” The new volume brought no fresh insight to the Baltimore plot, but Lamon touched on the matter briefly in his discussion of the journey from Springfield. In his manuscript, Lamon wrote, “There was never an hour from the time he entered Washington on the 23rd of February, 1861, to the 15th of April, 1865, that he was not in danger of his life from violence.…”