Double Death

by Gavin Mortimer

  Van Lew reported to General George Sharpe, head of the Union’s Bureau of Military Intelligence, an organization formed in the spring of 1863 to plug the hole left by Pinkerton’s resignation. Sharpe was a lawyer turned diplomat turned soldier turned spymaster, and he was adept at all four roles. Major General Joseph Hooker had instructed Sharpe, then his deputy provost marshal, to establish an intelligence unit, and a year later there were around seventy agents working as “guides”; some interrogated rebel prisoners, others trawled battlefields for information on dead Confederates and at least ten were killed in action as they roamed the front lines observing enemy positions. Sharpe was later promoted to Grant’s intelligence chief, and his Bureau of Military Intelligence was the model for the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division that was founded in 1885.

  Sharpe described Van Lew as “energetic and active and wise,” an accurate assessment of the Civil War’s most efficacious female spy. Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd (a comely young Southern spy whose looks far surpassed her ability) might be the best-known spies, but that was because in the decades following the war writers and historians mythologized the pair, portraying them as beautiful women who ran rings around the hapless enemy. Unfortunately, the glamour masked the truth. Boyd’s main achievement, in the words of one contemporary newspaper, was to have been a particularly energetic “camp follower”; a prostitute in other words. Greenhow had the potential to be a dangerous and destructive spy, but her undoing was her contempt for the enemy and her arrogance. The two traits coalesced to make her believe she was invincible. Her legacy was perhaps best summed up by Judge Edwards Pierrepont, a member of the wartime military commission that examined the cases of Federal prisoners (he was also the attorney general in the 1870s). Greenhow’s espionage activities weren’t treasonous, he declared, merely “mischief.” Such a dismissive assessment would have broken Greenhow’s heart.

  Though his skills as a military spy had been found wanting, Pinkerton and his agency were still valued for their detective work by Lincoln and Stanton. Throughout 1863 he was employed by the government on various cases of a nonmilitary nature, such as unmasking those responsible for large-scale cotton frauds. Pinkerton also reestablished his links with the railroad companies, and one, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company, hired him to root out an employee who had embezzled nearly twenty thousand dollars in government bonds. Pinkerton caught the man, a conductor, and he was successful in several other cases passed to him by the same railroad company. Pinkerton was happy; not only was he able to spend more time with his family (his eldest son, William, now seventeen, was working alongside his father) in Chicago, but he had rediscovered his métier. He was a criminal detective, not a military one.

  As Lewis and Scully took a cab from the Philadelphia rail terminus to Pinkerton’s headquarters, Lewis crackled with retribution. He had longed for this moment for months; the thought of it had sustained him throughout the days spent shackled hand and foot, the nights curled up in the pitch black of the condemned cell, and the weeks when he hovered close to death under his lousy blanket in Castle Thunder.

  Pinkerton had perhaps been expecting a show of gratitude. After all, he reminded them, he’d done his best to get the men released. And what about the money, the clothes, the shoes, the visit to Mrs. Scully, the letter to Thomas Lewis? Anyway, let bygones be bygones; he was mighty pleased to see them safe and sound.

  Lewis erupted and spewed out nineteen months of torment and rancor. He gave Pinkerton “a hot interview … and did not spare him for his carelessness in getting us into the enemy’s hands.” What exactly Lewis said he never revealed, though doubtless they were fiery words.

  Pinkerton was unaccustomed to rebuke. His conceit led him to retaliate. He had read the reports in the Richmond papers, he shouted, and he knew that Lewis and Scully had “let the cat out of the bag.” He had also listened to Hattie Lawton’s jumbled version, some of which had been given her by General Winder and his Plug-Uglies. Were it not for the treachery of Lewis and Scully, Timothy Webster would still be alive. Oh no, snarled Lewis, there was but one man responsible for the death of Webster. It wasn’t President Davis or General Winder or Anti-Christ Caphart, and it certainly wasn’t Pryce Lewis or John Scully. It was Allan Pinkerton!

  Pryce Lewis never again came face-to-face with Allan Pinkerton after the furious altercation in Philadelphia on the afternoon of Friday, October 2. He returned to Washington and secured an interview with Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, the man whom Lewis had ejected from Rose Greenhow’s house more than two years earlier. If Stanton remembered the incident, he didn’t hold it against Lewis, as he didn’t hold any prejudice for the events in Richmond, despite Pinkerton’s assertion that he had refused to intercede on Lewis’s and Scully’s behalf “because they had betrayed their companion to save their own lives.”

  Stanton arranged for one thousand dollars in Confederate notes to be sent south to Humphrey Marshall and then instructed Superintendent Wood to find Lewis a position at Old Capitol Prison. Wood was only too happy to oblige and gave Lewis a job as a bailiff and detective, responsible for escorting prisoners to and from court. It was menial work, but it allowed Lewis to reintegrate himself into civilized society.

  Despite his rupture with Allan Pinkerton, Lewis remained on good terms with the Scot’s eldest son, William. They exchanged the occasional letter, and in January 1864 the teenager wrote Lewis: “I hope your situation [at Old Capitol] will be of long continuance. You may stand a chance of repaying some of your old Southern friends for some of the many kind favors you received whilst in there [sic] hands. You are now in a position to pay it back with interest. Mrs. Webster called today and she looks very well … the Old Man [Allan Pinkerton] is not here. All the men send Best respects as also does my mother. Wishing you every success. Remains Ever Your Friend, William Pinkerton.”

  Lewis’s rehabilitation was completed in June 1864 when he was recruited by Colonel Lafayette Baker into the military secret service. Baker by this stage of the war was to his enemies in Washington what General Winder was to his in Richmond: a man to be feared, a man who believed any method was permissible if it was in the best interest of the war effort. Born in New York in 1826, the red-bearded Baker had drifted west and become a member of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, a brutal organization that boasted it kept the city clean of human vermin. Baker was back on the East Coast in early 1861 and convinced General Winfield Scott that the Union army needed better information on the enemy. He undertook several missions in the South of his own accord, but none was particularly successful, so Baker turned from positive intelligence to counterintelligence. This was his forte, though his methods were unscrupulous and both Colonel William Wood and Allan Pinkerton deemed him a “doubtful character.” Thomas A. Scott, assistant secretary of war, shrugged off the concerns, saying expediency must sometimes ride roughshod over principle.

  Following the resignation of Pinkerton, Baker’s star rose in Washington, and by 1863 he had over thirty employees working for his National Detective Police, known colloquially as “Lincoln’s Secret Police.” Later he was appointed special provost marshal for the War Department. One of the Southern sympathizers arrested by Baker was Belle Boyd, a woman whose relationship with veracity was as shaky as his, as both would later prove in their overblown memoirs.

  Lewis never ventured South again during the final year of conflict. His time was spent in Washington working for Baker’s secret service, where he was “authorized to arrest deserters, blockade runners and perform such other duties as may legitimately belong to his department.” He had no contact with John Scully, who had returned to Chicago, fathered another child and enlisted in the city’s police force.

  In late 1864 Lewis left the secret service after becoming disillusioned with the corruption he encountered. Too many agents accepted bribes from those they caught trying to carry goods across the Potomac into Virginia, and when he brought this problem to the attention of Baker he wa
s brushed off. When the news broke of Lincoln’s assassination, Lewis was staying with his brother in Connecticut.

  Pinkerton was in New Orleans when he heard of the outrage. Exactly a year earlier he and his operatives had been transferred to the city on the orders of Stanton to investigate widespread cotton fraud. It was an astute move on the part of Stanton, and Pinkerton secured the conviction of numerous venal brokers, in the process retrieving tens of thousands of dollars of government money.

  Through it all, Pinkerton had kept in regular correspondence with McClellan. The Scot still believed that McClellan, who had retired to a quiet life in New Jersey, could be the savior of the Union cause, and in the spring of 1864 others came to share the view. The catalyst was the Battle of the Wilderness in May, the opening salvo in General Grant’s “Overland” campaign against Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The Wilderness battle was a failure, and a bloody one at that, with thirty-two thousand Union soldiers killed, wounded or missing (compared to eighteen thousand on the rebel side, though proportionally the losses were similar). The atmosphere within the Union turned despondent, but Grant continued with his campaign for a further month in what became a brutal war of attrition. Though Grant had scored a strategic victory—one that led to the Richmond-Petersburg campaign and the eventual capitulation of Richmond in April 1865—the cost of the seven-week struggle had been ruinously high for many in the North, with sixty-five thousand of their soldiers listed as casualties. With factions in the government unhappy with the way Lincoln was conducting the war, the Democrats sensed the president could be ousted from power in the autumn election, if the right candidate could be secured. McClellan stepped forward, eagerly supported by Pinkerton, among others, and on August 29 the former general was nominated as the Democratic candidate at the party’s Chicago convention.

  For the next three months Pinkerton championed McClellan’s cause at every available opportunity, but gradually his initial optimism in his friend’s chances of success diminished. The Democratic Party was split between those who favored immediate peace and those who wished to continue war, and McClellan’s political inexperience proved fatal in trying to bridge the gulf. While Lincoln and the Republicans’ aims were unequivocal—“Peace through Victory”—those of McClellan’s appeared to be just peace. This wasn’t what the Union soldiers wanted to hear, not after so much bloodshed, and just 34,000 voted for McClellan while 120,000 put a cross by Lincoln’s name. Civilians shared the soldiers’ view, and Lincoln enjoyed a crushing victory over his former general. Pinkerton had no doubt hoped that if McClellan had won the presidency his loyalty would have been rewarded with an important role within the administration. Instead, Pinkerton returned to New Orleans to continue hunting perpetrators of frauds.

  Despite having been a supporter of Lincoln’s rival in the 1864 election, Pinkerton was nevertheless stunned when he learned of his murder. Immediately he sent a wire to Secretary of War Stanton: HOW I REGRET THAT I HAD NOT BEEN NEAR HIM PREVIOUS TO THAT FATAL ACT. I MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE MEANS TO ARREST IT. IF I CAN BE OF SPECIAL SERVICE, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. THE SACRIFICE OF MY WHOLE FORCE, OF LIFE ITSELF, IS AT YOUR DISPOSAL. Stanton sent a brief reply, instructing Pinkerton “to watch the western rivers” for the assassin. By the time Pinkerton received Stanton’s note, John Wilkes Booth was already dead.

  At the war’s end accusations that he had played a part in sending Webster to his death continued to cling to Lewis. Small wonder he decided to return to Britain for a few months in the summer of 1865.

  He crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool and from there caught a train south to Shrewsbury, where his mother wept at the sight of her back-from-the-dead son. Perhaps he took the time to visit his elder brother Arthur, a sad bachelor in his forties still working as a weaver in Newtown, which after twenty lean years was enjoying a revival thanks to the introduction of steam power in the factories and the completion of three railway lines linking Newtown to towns in England and Wales. There were other changes afoot in Britain, not as tangible as the Newtown railway but far more profound. In 1867 the Conservative government of Lord Derby introduced the Reform Bill, which in effect gave one and a half million workingmen the vote. It was a reluctant bill on the part of the government, but the Civil War across the ocean had demonstrated all too clearly the dangers of trying to suppress a man’s liberty. It was, as one commentator later noted, the moment Britain changed “from a government by aristocracy to one by democracy. A new nation came into being. The friends of the North [of the United States] had triumphed.”

  Lewis didn’t stay long in his native land. He was back in the United States in 1867, and on January 20, 1868, he married Maria Thwaites in Illinois. Lewis had met Thwaites through David Erskine, the store owner for whom he had once worked. Three years later they had a daughter, Mary, followed by a son, Arthur, in 1878.

  Mary didn’t see much of her father in the early years of her life. She and her mother lived in the Thwaites’ family home in Waukegan, Illinois, while Lewis was based in Jersey City. On his return from Britain he and William Scott had gone into the detective business together. Scott was a former agency man—he had escorted Lewis and Scully to the Potomac on that fateful final trip—and he too had grown tired of Allan Pinkerton.

  Lewis had always known that Scott liked his liquor, but it soon became clear he was more than a social drinker; whiskey sustained him. With a partner incapable of performing his duties, Lewis struggled to keep the business going. On one occasion he wrote Maria: “My dear wife, don’t be discouraged. It is true that I have not met with the success that I expected but it might have been worse. There is one thing that I have learned and that is how to love you.”

  By the late 1870s Scott was no longer part of the business; instead Lewis was in partnership with a man named William Oldring, a far more competent (and sober) man, and business boomed. They moved into premises in New York City on 169 Broadway, and Lewis now had enough money to bring his family East and buy his own property. In 1878 Pryce Lewis’s name was once more in the papers when his detective agency became embroiled in a bitter dispute over the will of Alexander Stewart, one of New York’s richest men who, before his death two years earlier, had owned huge tracts of the city’s real estate. With the controversy arising from that case, as well as all Lewis’s other work, the name Allan Pinkerton faded into a distant, if still disagreeable, memory.

  In his letter to Abraham Lincoln on June 5, 1863, requesting his help in liberating Pryce Lewis and John Scully, Pinkerton had referred to Webster as “one of my best and oldest employees.” That was all; there were no fulsome eulogies or mawkish laments for the dead man. In a war that was reaping a bountiful harvest of dead, what was the life of one more unfortunate? In his letters to Lewis and Scully in Castle Thunder, Pinkerton never even mentioned Webster, not because it was a difficult subject to broach but because he was dead and it was the living who mattered.

  In the years after the war Pinkerton’s grief for Webster underwent an astonishing transformation. Perhaps now that the guns were silent, he was able to reflect with solemn piety on a brave man’s sacrifice, or perhaps guilt was gnawing at Pinkerton’s conscience. In 1871 Pinkerton ordered George Bangs to Richmond to bring back Webster’s body. The perennially reliable Bangs located the remains in a pauper’s grave in Oakwood Cemetery in the northeast of the city.

  On June 7 the Onarga Courier reported that “the body of T. Webster, who was hung in Richmond, Va. in 1862, as a Union Spy, was brought home to Onarga on Thursday of last week and interred in the cemetry [sic] at that place. Mr. Webster was well known to many of our readers.”

  Webster was buried alongside his son, who had fallen while fighting as a Union soldier, and Pinkerton paid for the double headstone. He got his former operative’s date of death wrong; it should have been April 29, 1862, not April 26. Pinkerton also fabricated the epitaph, ordering the engraver to carve into the foot of Webster’s headstone: his last words “i die for my country.”

  That
still wasn’t enough for Pinkerton. He wanted people to know about the sacrifice of Timothy Webster, the fearless man who had died at the hands of the wicked rebels. He commissioned a cenotaph to be erected in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery and spent many hours choosing the stone and deciding the wording, but less time on researching his facts. When the cenotaph was erected people flocked to read the somber inscription.

  TO THE MEMORY OF TIMOTHY WEBSTER

  THE PATRIOT AND MARTYR

  BORN IN 1821 IN NEW HAVEN

  SUSSEX CO. ENGLAND

  EMIGRATED TO AMERICA IN 1833 AND ENTERED

  PINKERTON’S NATIONAL DETECTIVE

  AGENCY AT CHICAGO IN 1856.

  ON THE NIGHT OF FEBR. 22, 1861

  ALLAN PINKERTON

  TIMOTHY WEBSTER

  KATE WARN

  SAFELY ESCORTED

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  A CONSPIRACY HAVING BEEN DISCOVERED

  FOR HIS ASSASSINATION FROM

  PHILADELPHIA TO WASHINGTON

  WHERE HE WAS INAUGURATED

  PRESIDENT OF THE U.S. ON

  MARCH 4th 1861

  HE WAS THE HARVEY BIRCH OF THE WAR OF

  THE REBELLION AND WAS EXECUTED AS A SPY

  BY THE REBELS IN RICHMOND ON APRIL 28, 1862.

  HE ENJOYED THE CONFIDENCE OF

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  AND SEALED HIS FIDELITY WITH THE BLOOD.

  Pinkerton still couldn’t get right the date of execution, neither the date of Webster’s birth nor the year he emigrated from England. Kate Warne’s name was misspelled, and there was no mention of the other people who had helped uncover the craven “plot” to kill Lincoln.