1861: Secessionists hosted a party in Baltimore, and a woman named Mrs. Cherry attended. She spoke with a lilting Southern accent and wore a pin designating her affiliation with the Confederacy.
The woman overheard plans to assassinate the newly-elected President of the United States. Abraham Lincoln traveled by train from his home state of Illinois to his inauguration in Washington, DC, and his route would go through Baltimore. That’s where conspirators planned to kill him before he could take office.
The woman who called herself Mrs. Cherry was in fact a Pinkerton Detective named Kate Warne. She informed her employer, Allan Pinkerton, of the Baltimore Plot. Multiple reports confirmed dangerous conspiratorial threats.
The Secret Service did not yet exist, so Abraham Lincoln hired the Pinkertons as his guards before and during his presidency.
Allan Pinkerton devised a plan. He had Warne book passage on another train for her, Pinkerton, Lincoln, and the President-elect’s bodyguard. Lincoln was disguised as an unknown ill passenger in a sleeping berth, while Warne posed as his sister and nursemaid. As a result, Lincoln arrived in the nation’s capital unharmed.
Warne remained awake and vigilant in case of an attack throughout the journey. From her actions came the detective agency’s motto: We Never Sleep.
The Pinkerton Agency was founded in 1850 in Chicago. Initially, all of the employees were men.
1856: Kate Warne, then 23 years old and a recent widow, visited Allan Pinkerton’s office in response to a newspaper advertisement. The agency sought new detectives, but Pinkerton mistakenly thought she was applying for secretarial work. To his surprise, she vied for a position as a detective. Warne pressed the case that she could uncover information in situations no male counterparts could hope to access.
Pinkerton hired her on the spot. Kate Warne became the first woman detective in American history.
Women wouldn’t be hired as police officers for many more decades.
Among her earliest assignments: Traveling to Alabama and striking up an acquaintance with a known thief’s wife in order to suss out where they had hidden stolen loot.
On another occasion, she posed as a fortune teller to get information from a suspect.
Pinkerton then formed a division, which Kate Warne supervised, called the Lady Pinks. They used gossip to glean facts from their targets. Warne hired some of those women herself. Pinkerton sent her to New Orleans to head up a branch there.
She also spied for the Union Army and was Allan Pinkerton’s most trusted aide throughout the Civil War.
Her key involvement in helping to thwart the Baltimore Plot, though, was the high point in her career.
1868: Kate Warne contracted pneumonia, which would claim her life. She lived to age 35.
Allan Pinkerton made sure she was buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago where her headstone remains to this day.
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