The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower
Authors: Daniel Stashower
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against abolitionists, and a signal of his unflinching stand against the weak and conciliatory policies of the North. The “Pottawatomie Massacre,” as the assault came to be known, established Brown’s grim resolve to tear apart the increasingly fragile relations between North and South.
Now, warming his hands at Pinkerton’s fire, Brown appeared more than ever to be, as Frederick Douglass described him, a man whose “soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” For all his ferocious passion, he came to Pinkerton as a wanted outlaw. The governor of Kansas was reported to have offered a three-thousand-dollar reward for his capture. President Buchanan had ordered his arrest, and had added $250 to the bounty. As one newspaper declared, John Brown had become “the most notorious brigand our land has yet produced.”
Brown’s fugitive status did nothing to undercut the support offered him by Pinkerton, America’s top lawman. If anything, Pinkerton’s growing fame had added heat to his convictions. Even as he gained national renown as a tough and ruthlessly efficient lawman, Pinkerton continued to operate as an agent of the Underground Railroad. Having established himself as a detective, albeit a private one, Pinkerton found that his clandestine activities now carried a serious threat of legal consequences. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, intended to bolster earlier legislation that had fallen into disuse, sought to force federal marshals and other officers of the law in the free states to return runaway slaves to their masters. The new law overturned many of the “personal liberty laws” that had been passed in Northern states, and carried a one-thousand-dollar fine for any official who failed to enforce it. At the same time, any person charged with providing food or shelter to a fugitive would be subject to six months in prison and a one-thousand-dollar fine. As the stakes rose, Pinkerton found that he had become a lawbreaker with a badge—“half horse and half alligator,” in Edward Sanford’s phrase. The contradiction did not trouble him. “I have not a single regret for the course I then pursued,” he wrote in later years. To Pinkerton, John Brown was a hero to be emulated, a courageous figure “who almost single handed threw himself into a fight against the Nation.” So long as Brown was in Chicago, Pinkerton made sure he would not fight alone.
Pinkerton’s two-room clapboard house on Adams Street was now crowded with children, and not as well-suited to Underground Railroad traffic as the cooperage in Dundee had been. There were two sons, twelve-year-old William and ten-year-old Robert, and two younger daughters, Joan—born in 1855 and named after her recently deceased older sister—and the sickly Belle. Even so, Joan Pinkerton worked tirelessly to feed and clothe a steady stream of fugitives, who sometimes appeared in such great numbers that she was forced to find room in the cramped space beneath the floorboards and in the half attic below the roof. When the house overflowed, she enlisted friends and neighbors into the cause. Often, when her husband’s detective work took him away from home for long stretches of time, the duty of seeing the runaways safely on to their next destination fell to her. She would have been barely twenty-one years old when the family took up residence on Adams Street, but she threw herself into the struggle, according to one Chicago abolitionist, “as vigorously as did her husband.”
With John Brown’s latest unannounced arrival, the Pinkertons set to work once again. Joan gathered fresh clothing while her husband took the fugitives who would not fit under their roof and “got them under cover” with sympathetic friends. Brown himself was taken to the home of John Jones, a self-educated black man who was campaigning tirelessly against the state’s restrictive “Black Laws.” Jones listened along with Pinkerton as Brown informed them that he had arrived in
Now, warming his hands at Pinkerton’s fire, Brown appeared more than ever to be, as Frederick Douglass described him, a man whose “soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” For all his ferocious passion, he came to Pinkerton as a wanted outlaw. The governor of Kansas was reported to have offered a three-thousand-dollar reward for his capture. President Buchanan had ordered his arrest, and had added $250 to the bounty. As one newspaper declared, John Brown had become “the most notorious brigand our land has yet produced.”
Brown’s fugitive status did nothing to undercut the support offered him by Pinkerton, America’s top lawman. If anything, Pinkerton’s growing fame had added heat to his convictions. Even as he gained national renown as a tough and ruthlessly efficient lawman, Pinkerton continued to operate as an agent of the Underground Railroad. Having established himself as a detective, albeit a private one, Pinkerton found that his clandestine activities now carried a serious threat of legal consequences. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, intended to bolster earlier legislation that had fallen into disuse, sought to force federal marshals and other officers of the law in the free states to return runaway slaves to their masters. The new law overturned many of the “personal liberty laws” that had been passed in Northern states, and carried a one-thousand-dollar fine for any official who failed to enforce it. At the same time, any person charged with providing food or shelter to a fugitive would be subject to six months in prison and a one-thousand-dollar fine. As the stakes rose, Pinkerton found that he had become a lawbreaker with a badge—“half horse and half alligator,” in Edward Sanford’s phrase. The contradiction did not trouble him. “I have not a single regret for the course I then pursued,” he wrote in later years. To Pinkerton, John Brown was a hero to be emulated, a courageous figure “who almost single handed threw himself into a fight against the Nation.” So long as Brown was in Chicago, Pinkerton made sure he would not fight alone.
Pinkerton’s two-room clapboard house on Adams Street was now crowded with children, and not as well-suited to Underground Railroad traffic as the cooperage in Dundee had been. There were two sons, twelve-year-old William and ten-year-old Robert, and two younger daughters, Joan—born in 1855 and named after her recently deceased older sister—and the sickly Belle. Even so, Joan Pinkerton worked tirelessly to feed and clothe a steady stream of fugitives, who sometimes appeared in such great numbers that she was forced to find room in the cramped space beneath the floorboards and in the half attic below the roof. When the house overflowed, she enlisted friends and neighbors into the cause. Often, when her husband’s detective work took him away from home for long stretches of time, the duty of seeing the runaways safely on to their next destination fell to her. She would have been barely twenty-one years old when the family took up residence on Adams Street, but she threw herself into the struggle, according to one Chicago abolitionist, “as vigorously as did her husband.”
With John Brown’s latest unannounced arrival, the Pinkertons set to work once again. Joan gathered fresh clothing while her husband took the fugitives who would not fit under their roof and “got them under cover” with sympathetic friends. Brown himself was taken to the home of John Jones, a self-educated black man who was campaigning tirelessly against the state’s restrictive “Black Laws.” Jones listened along with Pinkerton as Brown informed them that he had arrived in
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