A couple of years ago I wrote about Caledonian antisyzygy, which, in addition to being a word that makes me wish I still played Scrabble, reflects the duality of the Scottish people.
Writings by Scots on their country’s national psyche and literature often point to what has been called a “Caledonian antisyzygy” - a conflict between rational and romantic, canny and reckless, moralistic and violent, an idea of dueling polarities within one entity that finds fictional expression not just in Stevenson but in Scottish writers such as James Hogg and Walter Scott.
Maureen M Martin,
The Mighty Scot: Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity
(SUNY Press 2009, pg 84)
This duality came to mind as I read the history of Allan Pinkerton in Daniel Stashower's
The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War. Born on the wrong side of the tracks (actually, the River Clyde) in Glasgow in 1813, Pinkerton was involved in the Chartist movement for full suffrage in Britain and participated in the Newport Rising of 1839 in Wales. That riot left twenty-two men dead and Pinkerton to make his way back to Glasgow by back roads. He came to America, opened his Illinois home as a stop on the Underground Railway, became a close friend of, and raised money for, John Brown, and hired the first female private investigator.
But today, his name is remembered as the one atop the outfit of the anti-union, strike-breaking goons who framed Bill Heywood for the murder of Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho in 1905. And that was not the only time that history records their brutal presence on behalf of the railroad and mine owners.
As Stashower writes:
The lessons of the Newport Rising, as the unhappy episode came to be known, would remain with Pinkerton to the end of his days. Within a few years, he would gain international fame as the leading figure of a new type of law enforcement, followed by no small measure of infamy as a strikebreaker, but Pinkerton never entirely fell out of step with the Newport marchers in his efforts for social justice. The tension between the ideals of his youth and the obligations of the career he created for himself— like the split between the moral-force and physical-force Chartists —created a strain in his character that he never entirely resolved.
Stashower, Daniel (2013-01-29). The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (p. 19). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.
Those of us familiar with the Scottish psyche recognize it as pure Caledonian Antisyzygy.
The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War
by Daniel Stashower
Published by Minotaur Books
January 29th 2013
368 pages
Since most Americans realize that President-elect Lincoln was not assassinated in Baltimore on his way to the nation's capital in 1861, I guess it is no spoiler to acknowledge that reality up front. But knowing the final outcome does little to suppress the suspense that Stashower very effectively creates in this non-fiction account that traces Lincoln's movements to DC, and the investigation of Allan Pinkerton into the activities of the Maryland secessionists.
Stashower takes us back to Scotland to pick up the trail of Allan Pinkerton.
Pinkerton had traveled hundreds of miles from his home in Glasgow to take his place amid a swelling band of protest marchers as they prepared to descend on the Welsh town of Newport. These ““crazed and misguided zealots,” as one newspaper called them, were the vanguard of the Chartist agitation, a working-class labor movement struggling to make its voice heard in Britain. Pinkerton, though barely twenty years old, thought of himself as “the most ardent Chartist in Scotland.”
Stashower, Daniel (2013-01-29). The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (p. 17). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.
After the Newport Rising was crushed, Pinkerton returned home to Scotland where he continued his work for the Chartist movement. In 1842, fearing that the British government had put a price on his head, he quickly married and fled to America. "'In my native country,' he declared, 'I was free in name, but a slave in fact.'"
Trained as a cooper in Glasgow, he moved to Dundee, Illinois, built a cabin and a cooperage and established himself as a successful businessman in the small community northwest of Chicago. Deeply moved by the experiences of Frederick Douglas, Pinkerton's cabin became a regular stop on the Underground Railway. It was while he was still in Dundee that, after joining a posse to capture a group of counterfeiters, Pinkerton was approached with the offer of an undercover job. His life would never be the same.
In 1861, Pinkerton was hired by the president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, Samuel Morse Felton. By January of 1861, Felton had become increasingly uneasy with the heated rhetoric that was coming out of the South after Lincoln's election. And then he received a visit from Dorothea Dix, who provided detailed information about a plot to overthrow the federal government and cut off the District of Columbia from the North by severing the rail lines. Including his. He forwarded this information to General Winfield Scott in DC, and then called upon Allan Pinkerton to go to Baltimore and learn what he could about the plot to destroy his Maryland railroad track.
By this time, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency had a well-earned reputation that was firmly cemented by the case they had built against a forger and employee of the Agency Express Company, the year before. In 1856, Allan Pinkerton hired the first woman to serve as a detective, Kate Warne, a young widow in her early twenties who convinced him that there were cases in which a woman could more effectively "worm out secrets" than could a man. She successfully illustrated that in the Agency Express case and would do so again in her undercover work in Baltimore.
It is believed that this poster provided
the origin of the term,
Private Eye
Kate Warne, and her work, both undercover and as an intermediary between Presiden-elect Lincoln and Pinkerton, is one of the highlights of this tale. Sixty-five years before women were enfranchised, and almost fifty years before the NYPD would hire a female investigator, she was a private eye. She was so good at what she did, so effective in uncovering what others wished to hide, that Pinkerton had her recruit and run a female detective bureau out of Chicago.
She went to Baltimore, at Pinkerton's side and acted her role as a Southern belle who had nothing but time to listen sympathetically to other Southern women of the city. In those days, Baltimore was the fourth largest American city, and its nickname of 'Mobtown' reflected the gangs that ruled the streets and formed political alliances that withstood all efforts at reform. What Pinkerton, Warne and the other detectives found was a plot that had as its aim, not the destruction of the railways, but the assassination of Abraham Lincoln as he passed through the city of Baltimore on the way to his inauguration.
Meanwhile, the train carrying Lincoln and his entourage to DC was making its planned and published stops all along the route. Stashower uses this journey to build the suspense as the detectives race to contact Felton and then try to reach Lincoln's advisors and convince them that they needed to change their plans.
Daniel Stashower
at MWA U, San Diego, CA
October 2013
There is such a strong sense of place and character in this work that it felt like I was watching a major motion picture. I could almost see the big screen filling with an image of a steam locomotive, of two or three people walking close together down a dark cobblestone street in shades of blue and black, and the bright color of the crowds who gathered to see their new President in the late winter sunlight. It is no surprise that this book has won both the Edgar and the Agatha awards. It is a treat to read.
In my case I both listened and read. The narrator of the edition I listened to, Edoardo Ballerini, did a very good job of pacing and intonation. He has also narrated The Swerve, How the World Became Modern and quite a few mystery/thrillers by James Patterson and Jeffery Deaver.
Daniel Stashower is a former magician, turned writer, not just of non-fiction, but also of "five mystery novels featuring Harry Houdini as a detective, Sherlock Holmes, and an original magician detective based on Stashower’s own performing experience." His non-fiction work includes his Edgar, Anthony and Agatha award winning works on Arthur Conan Doyle, Teller of Tales. and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters which he co-edited with Jon Lellenberg.
A recipient of the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction Writing, Stashower is a frequent lecturer for the Mystery Writers of America University program. I was able to attend one of these programs last October and wrote about here. While the seminar was geared toward fiction writers, his lecture, on Setting & Description, had clear application in the non-fiction world of writing.
After reading Hour of Peril, I wish more non-fiction writers would learn from him just how much good description and setting contributes to the telling of any story, true or not.
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