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Allen Pinkerton

Norman Ervine

Allan Pinkerton was born in Scotland in 1819. He apprenticed with his father as a cooper until he immigrated to the United States in 1842. After several years as a plain-clothes detective in Cook County, near Chicago, he began the Northwestern Police Agency. The name was later changed to Pinkerton's National Detective Agency.

George McClellan hired the Pinkertons as security guards for his Ohio Railroad investments, and there began a long friendship that lasted well into the Civil War. Pinkerton, himself, became Abraham Lincoln's personal bodyguard on the long train trip to his inauguration in Washington in 1860, and was successful in thwarting several assassination attempts along the way. He continued plainclothes, undercover work for the Federal Government for a number of years during Lincoln's administration.

His agency, and often Allan Pinkerton himself, was responsible for the capture, and imprisonment of many Confederate spies, including Rose Greenow, the famous "Rebel Rose". The work of Allan Pinkerton and his detectives was considered so valuable to the government, that it led to the formation of what is now called The Secret Service. His business - Pinkerton's International Detective Agency- operates today as a worldwide security agency, and still uses as it's logo " The Eye That Never Sleeps"

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