When someone says secret agent, who do you think of? James Bond? Jason Bourne? Austin Powers? What about “detective”? Sherlock Holmes, I’ll bet. Any others? The Hardy Boys? Magnum PI? Batman? If you had to pick someone who was both? Tough one.
But wait, have you ever heard of Kate Warne?
Kate Warne was arguably the first professional female detective in history, professional detectives being a rather novel profession in and of itself that only came to be in the last century. More than that she was also a secret agent at a time when there really was no such thing as a profession. And she was one of the best in her field.
Public domain photo via Library of Congress depicts Pinkerton (sitting, right), with what is believed to be the only known photo of Warne (in disguise, standing behind), during the 1862 Battle of Antietam.
Kate Warne became a detective and a secret agent because she became a Pinkerton agent. She did this at a time when a woman working at all that wasn’t related to domestic duties or secretarial duties was almost unheard of. She walked into the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1856 – for what original purpose history doesn’t know. But that soon became irrelevant since she so impressed Allan Pinkerton so much that he hired her as one of his agents on the spot.
First, a word about the Pinkerton Agency.
The Pinkerton Detective Agency was founded by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant, in 1850 in Chicago. At the time, there were no formal detective agencies such as what Pinkerton created, so it was a unique company. They provided investigative services and protection for companies and individuals in the still growing and sometimes lawless country.
Later in the 19th century and early 20th century, they became involved in breaking up Labor and Union disputes, but in the mid-19th century, they were the premiere law enforcement force (albeit a private one) outside of the Federal Marshal service that had a nationwide reach. Some of their more famous exploits were their efforts against Jesse James and Butch Cassidy.
Now, back to Kate Warne.
When Pinkerton hired Warne, he was breaking a great deal of social conventions and mores. She was a 23-year-old widow with no prior working experience, but something about her struck him. In fact, his intuition proved correct because she became so successful that he went on to hire more women private investigators. She was so successful as an agent that in 1860 he put her in charge of his new Female Detective Bureau as the Supervisor of Women Agents, and declared to new female hires:
“In my service you will serve your country better than on the field. I have several female operatives. If you agree to come aboard you will go in training with the head of my female detectives, Kate Warne. She has never let me down.”
This was a significant event in history since in America women were not allowed to be a part of the police force until 1891 and could not be police detectives until after 1900.
The rarity and novelty of a female detective in that time actually helped Warne. Because nobody expected a woman to be a detective, she was able to go undercover with ease. As he tells in his book, The Spy of the Rebellion: Being a True History of the Spy System of the United States Army During the Late Rebellion, Pinkerton described Warne as:
“a commanding person, with clear cut, expressive features … a slender, brown-haired woman, graceful in her movements and self-possessed. Her features, although not what could be called handsome [beautiful], were decidedly of an intellectual cast … her face was honest, which would cause one in distress instinctly [sic] to select her as a confidante.”
These “plain but trustworthy” attributes were ones that are most useful for a detective or a secret agent. In fact, her best works were done when she donned a disguise to gain the confidence of an informant or someone associated with a target. She was so good at mimicking accents and acting whatever part was required to ingratiate herself into social situation that Pinkerton often used her to gain information for cases that would be almost impossible any other way.
An example of this was the Adams Express embezzlement case. The prime suspect, a man named Nathan Maroney, the manager of the branch office in Montgomery, Al, stole $50,000 from the company’s equity fund. The company and the Pinkertons had their suspicions due to the fact that he was the last person to have been in possession of the locked bag the money was transported in, but no hard evidence. That is until Warne was able to befriend the suspect’s wife. She convinced the wife to show her where the money was hidden, and thanks to Warne’s sleuthing, $39,515 was returned and the case against Mr. Maroney solidified. He was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison in Alabama.
Perhaps Kate Warne’s most significant case was her involvement in “the Baltimore Plot”. Before the creation of the Secret Service, there was no Federal agency tasked to protect the chief executive. It was outsourced. Before the Civil War began, the Pinkerton Agency was hired to serve as protection and bodyguards for President Lincoln. When Pinkerton was tasked with this, he quickly discovered a plot to assassinate the President. Who did he turn to in order to protect him? Kate Warne.
In 1861, the Pinkerton agency had been hired to look into secessionist actives on the Maryland railroads. The agency’s investigations revealed that there indeed were threats to the new president. Pinkerton had discovered that there would be an attempt made on the new President’s life by a cabal of Southern sympathizers while he was passing through Baltimore on his whistle-stop trip to the inauguration. So he sent Warne to Baltimore to ingratiate herself with the wives and daughters of the suspected plotters.
Now, Warne was originally from New York, but she had spent time in the South for the Adams Express Company case and thus was able to pass herself very convincingly as a Southerner. This was the skill that Pinkerton leveraged when he sent Warne to infiltrate the Baltimore conspiracy.
Warne did her job well. She inserted herself into the social circle of the wives and daughters of the suspected Southern sympathizers. She discovered that the attempt on the new president’s life would be made while he stopped in Baltimore to give a speech. She discovered that the plotters would stage a fight to distract the few policemen that would be at the Baltimore station as Lincoln’s train passed through. Using this distraction another group would swarm Lincoln’s car and murder him.
Lincoln would not change his schedule despite the threat to his life, so the agency got to work to thwart the plot. Kate Warne was instrumental in making most of the arrangements to smuggle the president himself onto a train and safely through Baltimore undetected. She did this by having Lincoln disguise himself in an overcoat and hat (not his signature stovepipe) and playing the role of Warne’s invalid brother. Warne then purchased tickets for herself and her “brother”, making sure that the rear sections of their sleeping car were secure. She then charmed the conductor into keeping the back door of the sleeping car open so that her “sick brother” could enter in privacy. Other Pinkerton agents would be stationed along the President’s route, but she and one other agent were the only ones that would be with the president the entire way. Bond-level cloak and dagger stuff.
An interesting aside: it’s said that Warne never slept a wink during the entire train ride to protect Lincoln. From this the Pinkerton agency derived their motto – “we never sleep”. And from the Pinkerton Agency’s motto and logo, we get the term “private eye”.
When months after the “Baltimore Plot” the Civil War actually broke out, Warne worked as a Union spy on behalf of the Pinkertons. Pinkerton was a staunch abolitionist and his agency served as an unofficial military intelligence bureau for the Union cause. And given Warne’s talent in undercover work and her track record of ferreting out secrets from oblique sources, she was often sent into the South to obtain valuable intel. She would go to Virginia and Tennessee posing as a Southern belle, befriending other ladies of the South who spoke freely about their husbands’ and boyfriends’ regiments. She would loiter in camp towns and ingratiate herself with the local soldiers where she would pick up info on what army corps was stationed where, who the commanders were, what and where the fortifications were, and the strength of the artillery and the morale of the troops. All of this she would feed back to Pinkerton and through him, to the Union army.
Many of her cases would indubitably make excellent movie material. Unfortunately, a lot of the unpublished Pinkerton records were lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, so it’s difficult to find actual details of her cases except for the praises and compliments that came afterward in other people’s correspondences.
Unfortunately, her amazing life was cut short in 1868 when she died at the age of 35 or 38 due to a sudden illness. But in her short career, she blazed an amazing trail for the future agents of justice and law to come. For her work in protecting the president, she is considered by many to be a trailblazer for the female agents of the Secret Service who would later come to guard the president on his detail. And she proved without a shadow of a doubt, that detective and secret agent work is not just in the domain of the Sherlocks and Jameses and Jasons of the world.
Now, at this point, I think it’s important to state a caveat. Everything that I’ve written here is about 90% true. Or, put it in another way, there are very few documented evidence of Kate herself. Her work and exploits can be verified via secondary correspondences and mentions of her in other people’s journals and records. The story of her life has much rumor surrounding it – that she was Pinkerton’s mistress, that she dressed as a man (gasp!) during the Civil War to do her spying work and the like. Heck, we aren’t even sure if her name was Warne, Warn, or something else. And we don’t even have any good pictures of what she looked like, just a washed out watercolor.
Perhaps this is just as well. She was, after all, famous as a master of disguise and a master chameleon. And as anyone from MI6 or the CIA can tell you, the hallmark of a truly great secret agent is that information about them stay, well, secret.
Postscript note: Given the amazing tale that is Kate Warne’s life, it is rather surprising that she hasn’t had more of a pop culture footprint. In 2011 there were talks of a USA Network doing a show about her life, but that never actually happened. There was the awesome web comic by Lauren R Silberman, Kate Warne, Pinkerton Detective, but this also ended in 2013. In 2014 John Derrig published a fiction about Warne called Kate Warne, Pinkerton’s Lady. But that’s about it. It’s 2017. Hollywood, I think he life story is calling to you.
References:
http://truecrime.io9.com/how-americas-first-female-detective-helped-foil-an-assa-1705958938
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Warne
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2015/03/celebrating-womens-history-americas-first-female-p-i/
https://blog.fold3.com/kate-warne-americas-first-female-detective/
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/kate-warne
http://crimefeed.com/2017/03/29005/
http://www.pimall.com/nais/pivintage/katewarne.html
https://www.civilwarwomenblog.com/kate-warne/
http://truecrime.io9.com/how-americas-first-female-detective-helped-foil-an-assa-1705958938