0:00 On a deserted island in the Fox River, a Scottish barrel-maker stumbled on the ashes of a campfire.0:08 It was 1847, and Allan Pinkerton wasn't looking for trouble — but he found it.0:14 The ashes led him to a band of counterfeiters, and his dogged pursuit of them launched the career of America’s first private eye.0:24 Last week, we saw how the French ex-convict Eugène Vidocq invented the detective from the shadows of the criminal underworld.0:34 But across the Atlantic, a different kind of investigator was being forged, one who would serve not the state, but the new kings of capitalism.0:46 Pinkerton’s own story begins with a secret.0:49 Before he was a detective, he was a radical.0:53 A Chartist in Glasgow, fighting for workers' rights, so fervent in his beliefs that he fled Scotland in 1842 with a warrant out for his arrest.1:05 He arrived in America a political fugitive.1:08 He settled outside Chicago, became a cooper — a maker of barrels.1:13 A respectable, quiet life.1:15 But the man who ran from the law couldn't help but be drawn to enforcing it, on his own terms.1:23 After he helped local authorities capture those counterfeiters, the jobs kept coming.1:30 He had a knack for it.1:32 A patience.1:33 A relentless, methodical approach that others lacked.1:37 By 1850, he’d opened his own shop in Chicago: the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.1:44 Its motto was “We Never Sleep.” Its logo was a single, unblinking eye.1:49 It was a promise, and a threat.1:52 Pinkerton pioneered methods that are now standard.1:56 He created the first centralized database of criminal records, with descriptions and rap sheets.2:04 He hired operatives to go undercover, a practice almost unheard of in public law enforcement.2:11 He even hired the first female detective in American history, Kate Warne.2:17 He wasn't just solving cases; he was building an information empire.2:23 The legend was cemented in the winter of 1861.2:26 The president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, was traveling by train to his inauguration in Washington D.C.2:34 Pinkerton, hired by a railroad executive, uncovered a plot to assassinate him as he passed through Baltimore.2:43 The details were chilling.2:45 A cabal of secessionist conspirators, a plan to strike as Lincoln changed trains.2:52 Pinkerton’s report was emphatic.2:54 The danger was REAL.2:56 So he devised a counter-plan.2:58 It was pure spycraft.3:00 He cut the telegraph wires out of Harrisburg to prevent any word from leaking.3:06 He had Lincoln, disguised in a soft felt hat instead of his famous stovepipe, board a secret, late-night train.3:15 Kate Warne, his star operative, played the part of Lincoln’s invalid sister, tending to him, keeping him hidden in plain sight.3:26 Pinkerton himself was on board, armed and vigilant, his agency’s motto made flesh.3:32 They slipped through Baltimore in the dead of night.3:37 They made it.3:38 Lincoln was safe.3:39 Pinkerton was a national hero.3:41 The man who saved the President.3:44 But here’s the turn.3:46 Here is what the legend leaves out.3:48 The man who began as a radical fighting for the working man built his agency into the private army of industrialists.3:58 Pinkertons became notorious, and feared, as union busters.4:03 His operatives infiltrated labor organizations, reported on organizers, and engaged in violent clashes with striking workers.4:13 The same undercover tactics that protected a president were used to crush the very kind of movement Pinkerton had once championed in Scotland.4:24 So what does it all add up to?4:27 The hero and the hired gun.4:29 The immigrant fugitive who became the ultimate symbol of private authority.4:35 Even the Lincoln plot… some historians now question how serious the threat truly was, suggesting Pinkerton, a master of self-promotion, may have inflated the danger to secure his own fame and fortune.4:51 He was right.4:52 He was also, in ways he didn't yet understand, creating a template for private power that would long outlive him.5:01 The unblinking eye he turned on criminals would soon be turned on anyone who stood in the way of American industry.
