This week’s entry: Kate Warne
What it’s about: America’s first female detective. In 1856, 23-year-old Kate Warne walked into the Pinkerton Detective Agency—which had never hired a woman for anything other than clerical work—and walked out with a job as a detective. She had a successful career with the Pinkertons that included uncovering and foiling a plot to assassinate then-President-elect Abraham Lincoln, who she later worked for as a spy during the Civil War.
Biggest controversy: Virtually nothing is known of Warne before joining the Pinkertons. The only biographical details Wikipedia has is that she was born in Erin, New York, today a town of less than 2,000 people; and that she was already a widow at age 23 when she joined the Pinkertons. She never remarried, but is widely believed to have had a long-running affair with her married boss, Allan Pinkerton, founder of the detective agency that bore his name. (They often posed as husband and wife while on assignment.)
Strangest fact: While Warne may have been an accomplished detective and spy, her aliases were strictly at the Clark Kent-wearing-glasses level of deception. Wikipedia lists 12 aliases; every one of them is a very slight variation on her actual name. Her choice of first names were limited to Kate, Kay, and Kitty, and her fake last names included Warren, Waren, and her actual last name. Despite this, she was a remarkably successful detective and wartime spy, possibly because no one suspected a female detective in a world that rarely saw one.
Thing we were happiest to learn: Warne opened the door for other women. When she applied to the Pinkertons, she made a case not just for herself but also why women were well-suited to the job in general, asserting that they could go places men couldn’t, had an eye for detail, and that “men become braggarts when they are around women who encourage them to boast.” Within a few years of Warne’s hire, Pinkerton began a Female Detective Bureau, which Warne was the head of, and Pinkerton himself named her one of his five best detectives. Despite the success of Warne and other women working for the Pinkertons, America wouldn’t see its first female police officer until 1910.
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: While Warne thrived in a dangerous profession, she only lived to be 34. The cause of death given on her gravestone is “congestion of the lungs.” She was buried in the Pinkerton family plot, and Allan Pinkerton ensured in his own will that her plot would never be disturbed.
Also noteworthy: Mildly noteworthy was that Warne saved the life of Abraham Fucking Lincoln, and possibly the Union itself. In 1861, the Philadelphia, Wilmington And Baltimore Railroad hired the Pinkertons to investigate secessionists threatening the railroad. Pinkerton sent five agents, Warne among them. At this point, she had discovered aliases that weren’t her own last name, and under the guise of a Southern belle alternately named Mrs. Cherry or Mrs. M. Barley, she infiltrated pro-secession social gatherings and discovered that the plot wasn’t only against the railroad but also one of its passengers—President-elect Lincoln.
Warne was able to uncover key details about the plot, which involved Lincoln’s journey from his home of Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration. All southbound trains heading into D.C. made a transfer in Baltimore, which involved moving between the Calvert Street and Camden Street stations, a mile’s journey by carriage. Secessionists planned to stage a fight as Lincoln was boarding the carriage, distracting police (this was decades before the Secret Service would be formed), leaving Lincoln unprotected from a mob that planned to overrun his carriage and do their worst.
Lincoln took some convincing that his life was in danger, and even when he accepted the plot was real, refused to change his travel plans, which included a string of public appearances between Springfield and D.C. So Warne and Pinkerton hatched a plan. Lincoln excused himself early from his last public appearance, disguised himself as an invalid, and boarded a private train car Mrs. Cherry had booked for her “invalid brother.” Warne stayed up all night standing watch over the new president, whose identity was never suspected. Rather than transfer via carriage, Lincoln’s sleeping car itself was shifted to another train, which arrived in D.C. first thing in the morning. Warne’s overnight vigil is believed to have inspired the Pinkerton Agency’s slogan, “We never sleep.”
If the plot had succeeded, would vice-president-elect Hannibal Hamlin have been able to steer America through its darkest hour? Thanks to Warne, we didn’t have to find out.
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: With Lincoln in office, Warne went to work for him as part of a network of American Civil War spies (one of whom we’ve already covered in this space). As soon as war broke out, General George McClellan asked Pinkerton to set up a military intelligence service—he enlisted Warne and two other agents to work directly with McClellan. As she did during the assassination plot, Warne would go undercover as a Southerner (often with Pinkerton posing as her husband) and mingle with Confederate society, digging for information she could then report back to McClellan.
Further down the Wormhole: One of the public events Lincoln refused to cancel involve raising the American flag in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Built in 1753 as Pennsylvania’s colonial statehouse, the Hall became one of America’s first landmarks, as it housed the writing and signing of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The latter was written in 1787 after America’s original system of governance, the Articles of Confederation, signed in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, proved unworkable.
Tenuously connected to the Revolutionary War, but listed in Wikipedia’s related topics, is the 1780 Gordon Riots. Lord George Gordon had passed the Papists Act of 1778, intended to reduce anti-Catholic discrimination, but London’s anti-Catholics were not pleased, and the country—already under the strain of fighting America, France, and Spain simultaneously with no major allies—erupted into violence. We know we’ve written about several British riots in recent columns, but it’s hard not to keep returning to the subject when some of them have names like the Nottingham Cheese Riot. While the Gordon Riots were the most destructive in London’s history, the riot 14 years earlier in Nottingham involved hundreds of cheese wheels being angrily rolled down the streets of town, so we’ll be revisiting the Great Cheese Riot next week.
74 Comments
It’s heartening to hear that, even in the misogynistic days of of the 19th century, there were women striving to break the glass ceiling and prove they could break unions, murder workers, and enact brutal, extrajudicial oppression on behalf of the ruling classes just as well as men. The “Biggest Controversy” section should read: “She worked for the fucking Pinkertons”.
Liberal misogamy on display – Redbar, atlanta, United States, early 2018
LOL, agreed on the “biggest controversy” angle.
Mostly came to the comments section to make sure someone pointed out that the Pinkerton Detective Agency occasionally solved crimes or protected presidents. But far more often they seemed to have pursued a much more lucrative practice: protecting the interests of the wealthy by beating in the heads of workers trying to strike.
Also that time they killed a relative of Jessie James, leading to him probably killing more people. I can’t say a lot of nice things about the Pinkertons. Its why they are almost a cliche bad guy group in any western.
Biggest controversy should be, how real was the plot? Was it as real as John Wilks Booths multiple attempts to kidnap or kill old Abe? Or is it Business Plot real, which is one guy says it totally was real without showing evidence.
Yes, surprised it’s not mentioned. The whole escapade completely hounded Lincoln for years and was one of his big regrets (though one gets the feeling that much like today, his political opponents would have seized on something to discredit him, regardless).
Oh yeah he would have been mocked for something. This is the event that made the Pinkertons quite well known. Was Alan Pinkerton really above exaggerating threats in order to look good?
To quote a certain 19th century saloon owner:
The movie The Long Riders makes a compelling case against the Pinkertons too, though the James-Younger gang wasn’t a whole lot better
Lovejoy speaks the truth!
To be fair-ish, the Pinkertons didn’t start their anti-union thing until after Warne had died.
Yeah. She was a detective and spy. Don’t throw her in with union-busting assholes.
Are you saying a Weezer album was breaking 19th century unions and cracking skulls? There really needs to be a lawsuit to differentiate the two because I have no idea which you mean.
She definitely extrajudicially murdered a bunch of folk.
What strikes me is how uncontroversial her hiring seemed to be, at least in this account. The article makes it seem as simple as, “here is a logical case as to why you should hire women and me in particular.” “Your argument is sound. You are hired.” And I’m sure there was more to it than that. I can’t imagine Pinkerton wanting to fuck Warne didn’t have something to do with it, but she also seems to have very quickly become one of the Agency’s most trusted and respected agents. I’m not sure it’s possible to know how much resistance Warne did or didn’t face unless she kept a journal about her work life and left it lying around, which, as a spy, she almost certainly didn’t.
This is all fascinating (I’ll be waiting for the Netflix original) but I have a little trouble imagining Warne passing as a Southerner. Maybe a northern sympathizer.
We may have found our plot for Elona Holmes 2!
I haven’t seen that show but it’s the first thing I thought of, lol.Is it any good?
Yes. Fantastic and fresh.
Flashy fights sync it with the RDJ/Guy Ritchie-approach to Sherlock storytelling (which could be considered cringe-worthy for purists), but if you’re in a forgiving mood, we’ll just say it was… cute. Personally, I feel they should have gone all-in on letting the movie skew towards a younger audience, but it definitely wants to be grown up and taken seriously. An easy watch if you like the cast, though. And great production design.
I.Hate.That. Ritchie’s take drove me bananas, lol.I’ll watch it anyway, tho (on non-seizure day).
Drunk History had a segment on the foiled Lincoln assasination plot, but I can’t remember if Warne was included.
She was, played (very funnily) by Adrianne Palicki, a 5’10” Amazon who couldn’t blend in if she tried.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4089276/I watched just that thing last year, in the first part of lockdown. Probably Netflix, maybe prime. If you can find it for free still, it’s worth your time.
Look what you found! So cool. Thanks, re.
It makes a lot of sense to use a fake name thats very similar to your real name. That way if people say the fake name it will sound close enough that you will respond.
And its not like they had any way of quickly verifying someones identity back then. There was no need to go overboard with disguises and such. As long as you were not on the front page of newspapers nobody would know or be able to find out who you were.
I also get the sense that nobody was too concerned about the spelling or even the pronunciation of their names until fairly recently. Ellis Island was basically a random name generator, and few immigrants ever bothered to correct anything. In the days of manual labor ”hey you” probably sufficed for most purposes.
Ever done genealogy? Figuring out how many ways you can spell ‘Basil’ has been one of my most engaging hobbies.
Ellis Island did nothing of the sort. That’s an urban
(and/or family) myth. Ellis Island didn’t register immigrants. It just
verified shipping manifests and passenger lists. They never wrote down
the names or filed any immigration papers.
There
were no laws at the time about name change or spellings, so immigrants
were free to change their own as they saw fit, many doing so to fit
their new alphabets (for example: German ß becoming the English b, so
“Strauss” became “Straub”) or to hide heritage due to prejudice (such as
McDaniels ->Daniels or Cohen->Cone)Edit: link refused to embed properly, so here it is:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-island
Don’t confuse us with your ‘facts’, man!
Yeah, she probably didn’t often run across people who carried a device in their pocket that could snap a picture of her or call their friend in Georgia to confirm that she had worked with him 2 years before or access public records anywhere in the world in 5 seconds.
That would have been Plan B onwards if only Google Images reverse searches failed to throw anything up.
“…Lincoln’s journey from his home of Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration[…](this was decades before the Secret Service would be formed)“Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the Secret Service formed just months after Lincoln’s assassination? Granted, it wasn’t tasked with presidential protection until right around 1901-’02 and it initially was formed to battle counterfeiting for the Treasury, but I believe the Secret Service was actually created in the summer of 1865.
Yes, it was the summer of ’65, also incidentally when I got my first real six-string.
Nice.
Woah kismet my grandfather got his first Gibson es125tdc in 65′. To hear it told, in those days you could work on cars, get in fights or play in a band. Gramps was smart.
“Yes, it was the summer of ‘65, also incidentally when I got my first real six-string.”Perchance, was said item purchased at a Nickel & Dime Emporium?
I always kind of assumed that the reason the Treasury guys ended up in charge of protecting the presidents was because they had just been enacted the same year the nation realized that hey, maybe we should have someone protecting the presidents.
You’re absolutely right. I had heard somewhere that the Secret Service was formed by FDR, more to protect the secret of his handicap than his safety, and I was so sure that was the real story I didn’t think to check.
An Act intended to reduce anti-Catholic discrimination but named (short title anyway) with a term for Catholics I have only ever heard used pejoratively? Was he trying to trick Protestants into voting for it?
There’s a concept called the “euphemism treadmill”, in which terms used to replace terms thought to be offensive eventually become offensive themselves. The classic example is terms for the disabled: “crippled” was replaced by “handicapped” which was replaced by “disabled” (and somewhat by “differently abled” but that’s not taken entirely seriously). In the case of the Papists Act, realize that it was replacing the earlier anti-Catholic act named the Popery Act, so the term was an improvement.
Popery ActDammit, Yanks, is there no word you won’t misspell?
Or perhaps popery is the smell of the Holy Father’s own BO.
But where was she when it counted, though…? 😉
Not to belittle her career, but I feel like it would be extremely easy to go undercover in the 1800’s. It would take a good chunk of time to verify someone’s identity and you could be in and out before that happened.
The flip side is that you had to be able to talk your way into situations and couldn’t con your way in with fake credentials. “Private security” companies will set up fake websites, have someone waiting with a script at a designated phone number, and have other ways of fooling people who now just believe a credential or do a cursory followup.
I think a lot of “ye olde” security was based on who you knew. So yes, a lot easier in some ways, but you might have to fake or spoof your way through an inherent mistrust of strangers. Plus you might have to study a lot of class/social signifiers that are harder to learn without the ability to watch a youtube tutorial.
To me, the most shocking revelation was that there was a Canadian TV show about the Pinkertons, co-produced by the Pinkertons, and all the cases they worked on during the 1800s.That’s wild.
This is a pretty cool story I’m surprised hasn’t been capitalized. All I see are $$
But it was! As I mentioned here, and I think another poster mentioned when this topic was mentioned as a preview last time, there actually was a movie about the Baltimore Plot — 1951’s The Tall Target.
I’ll look for it, thanks!
I met a female PI once. She was a short, average looking woman, maybe in her 40s, and she said it was a big advantage that nobody ever suspected her. She did a lot of work for divorce lawyers and said it was easy for her to follow guys suspected of cheating on their wives because they would never notice or remember her.
It seems like Mary Todd Lincoln would have freaked out if she knew this woman spent the night with Lincoln
You’d know, wouldn’t you?
Nice.
Not sure who to cast as her…. maybe Maisie Williams?
I think this is definitely a case where an actor doesn’t need to look anything like the original person, since the public at large has no idea what she looked like.
Still though, if you can find an excuse to cast Maisie Williams I wonder how good this woman was with swords
Don’t need to be good, just know the basics: stick ‘em with the pointy end.
“the pointy end goes in the other guy”
That’s also the birds and the bees talk I got.
Maisie Williams in a fake moustache?
Three Maisies Williams in a trench coat?
1951’s dramatization of the story (The Tall Target) had her (or at least a character based on her) portrayed by Katherine Warren, which practically sounds like a pseudonym Warne would use. Also fun fact. Warren was also in the bad 1957 movie Zero Hour!, best known now as the movie Airplane! was parodying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Warren
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tall_Target
The answer is Rami Malek. It’s always Rami Malek.
She was played by Martha MacIsaac in the TV show.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pinkertons
“….Abraham Fucking Lincoln…”As if it was necessary to be a dumb cocksucker about Lincoln’s name. You should be fired.
Two things. One there is a lot of debate over how real the Baltimore Plot was and in how much danger Lincoln was in. Second, as badass as this lady was, she worked for the goddamn Pinkertons. The organization not best known for actually investigating crimes, but as the private army of the rich. The ones who burned Jessie James nephew to death, the ones who shot strikeworkers at Homestead. The ones still pissed that modern day citizens think they were trash? Again good for her, but those people were awful.
Hannibal Hamlin is a great fucking name.
Sadly, history does not record his feelings regarding plans coming together.
Sorry, but ACAB, even pioneering lady private detectives. Fuck the Pinkertons forever.
Way to half-ass it, ladies!