Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,801

This is the grave of Kate Warne.

Born around 1833 in Erin, New York, we know almost nothing of Warne’s youth. She grew up poor, married young, and was widowed at the age of 23. That is quite literally everything we know about her life until 1856.

That year, Warne walked into the office of the private detective Allan Pinkerton. He had placed an ad in newspapers for a detective and she wanted to be hired. We don’t know what she was thinking here, but it was certainly unusual for a woman to do this. Pinkerton definitely did not know what to think. Most of what we know about this is from his own memoir. He had previously stated he was not going to hire women. He told Warne that too. Warne started arguing with him. According to him, she told him “women have an eye for detail and are excellent observers.”

Well, Pinkerton decided that it couldn’t really hurt, so he made an exception. Now, the Pinkertons were evil in terms of their terrible labor record. There was some of this in the Allan days, but the iconic days of the Pinkertons serving as strikebreakers happened after he had died and his odious sons ran the company. In the mid-19th century, most of the nation really didn’t have any law enforcement to speak of. One of the openings this created was for mass counterfeiting schemes. The utter insanity of the American banking system contributed to this. Since the nation did not have a centralized currency, banks around the nation could issue paper currency that theoretically meant something. But there were so many banks doing this that no one really knew what any of it meant once you got far enough away from the home bank. Did this bank even exist? Did it ever? Stephen Mihm’s excellent book A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, goes into this in detail. The stories in that book are just insane.

Well, Pinkerton took over a lot of this early law enforcement against counterfeiters. He assigned Warne to these cases. Her very first case had to do with someone embezzling money from the Adams Express Company. Warne became friends with the guy’s wife. She then said some stuff to Warne in confidence, which she took back to Pinkerton and they busted him. This all reminds me of Sarah Paulson’s role in Deadwood as the Pinkerton who is playing the teacher to the squarehead child taken care of by Alma Garrett. Once Pinkerton and associates realized what women could do to advance their operations, they became pretty valuable. In fact, Pinkerton created a whole Female Detective Bureau within his larger company and put Warne in charge of it.

Warne’s stories are pretty crazy over the next decade. She portrayed herself as a pro-secessionist woman during the Baltimore Plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on his way to Washington and was able to infiltrate secessionist meetings. In fact, she found out more than any other of Pinkerton’s agents about this, uncovering key details of the plot that may well have allowed Lincoln to stay alive. Warne helped guard Lincoln on the train to Washington by sitting as an innocent woman and just watching. In fact, it was from her all night vigil that the “We Never Sleep” slogan was formed, so infamous to what became the biggest, though far from only, union-busting company in the country a little later.

In fact, to me that looks like a woman’s eye, which I had never noticed before.

The government then hired Pinkerton to do detective work during the Civil War and, again, he brought Warne as his right-hand woman. Now, Pinkerton’s Civil War intelligence gathering is routinely mocked. He thought the Confederates had far more troops than they actually did and be feeding this “intelligence” to George McClellan, it gave a vain asshole who thought he was the only man who could save the country from the twin evils of secession and Abraham Lincoln even more reason to not fight. Warne did a lot of undercover work during the war, posing as various women to get information. It’s unclear whether what she did in this period made that much difference. It is also widely speculated that she and Pinkerton were having an affair and we know that the Pinkerton sons didn’t like her. But we can’t know the affair business, not really. However, it is probable.

After the war, she went back to her murder and robbery cases, again using Victorian gender norms to her advantage to get information out of people that Pinkerton himself or other male detectives simply could never get. She also continued to run Pinkerton’s department of women, which proved useful to the agency for decades.

Warne died in 1868. She was only 35 years old. Pneumonia. Common enough at the time. Pinkerton was devastated, as much personally it seems as professionally. He lauded her in his autobiography as a great detective and a great human being.

Then Pinkerton made sure she would be buried with him. Kate Warne is buried in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois. He bought the plot and had his giant grave planned to be right next to her much smaller one. He kept up enough propriety that his wife is who is actually with him and his sons are right there too. But Warne is the next plot over and that plot ended up being a whole section of Pinkertons, so if you want to see some of the people who unquestionably engaged in behavior to destroy the American working class’ ability to organize, well, you can probably find them there.

So here’s your First Woman Pioneer that everyone loves so much. Yep, the first woman to be a Pinkerton. Yay? As for Warne’s involvement in anti-labor cases, we can’t really know. Pinkerton records from this period were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. The agency was most certainly involved in anti-labor work in these years too. I have absolutely no doubt that she would have relished the opportunity to engage in that work. The desire to find First Women who have done everything has spawned a bunch of pro-Pinkerton propaganda based around her, from children’s books to TV shows. I think we can probably do better for First Women.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with the goddamn Pinkertons, you can donate to cove the required expenses here. Charlie Siringo, one of the most notorious labor busting pieces of shit, is in Inglewood, California and James McParland, the Pinkerton who infiltrated the Molly Maguires, is in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. What a couple of great guys there…. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.