Pinkerton (detective agency)

Pinkerton is an American private investigation agency and security company established around 1850 in the United States by Scottish-born American cooper Allan Pinkerton and Chicago attorney Edward Rucker as the North-Western Police Agency, which later became Pinkerton & Co. and finally the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. At the height of its power from the 1870s to the 1890s, it was the largest private law enforcement organization in the world. It is currently a subsidiary of Swedish-based Securitas AB.

Pinkerton became famous when he claimed to have foiled the Baltimore Plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861. Lincoln later hired Pinkerton agents to conduct espionage against the Confederacy and act as Lincoln's personal security during the American Civil War. As such, Pinkerton and his agency are sometimes seen as the forerunners of the United States Secret Service.

Following the Civil War, the Pinkertons began conducting operations against organized labor. During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businesses hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruit goon squads to intimidate workers. During the Homestead Strike of 1892, Pinkerton agents were called in to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, who was acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, the head of Carnegie Steel. Tensions between the workers and strikebreakers erupted into violence, which led to the deaths of three Pinkerton agents and nine steelworkers. During the late nineteenth century, the Pinkertons were also hired as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia and were involved in other strikes such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

During the 20th century, Pinkerton rebranded itself as a personal security and risk management firm. The company has continued to exist in various forms to the present day and is now a division of the Swedish security company Securitas AB, operating as Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations, Inc., doing business as Pinkerton Corporate Risk Management. The former Pinkerton Government Services division, PGS, now operates as Securitas Critical Infrastructure Services, Inc.

In the 1850s, Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant, met Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in a local Masonic Hall. The two men formed the North-Western Police Agency, later known as the Pinkerton Agency. Pinkerton used his skills in espionage to attract clients and begin expanding the agency. Historian Frank Morn writes: "By the mid-1850s, a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago." The Pinkerton Agency began to hire women and minorities shortly after its founding because they were useful as spies, a practice uncommon at the time.

Among the business's early operations was to safely deliver the newly elected President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, from Springfield to Washington, D.C., in light of an assassination threat. Pinkerton detective Kate Warne was assigned and successfully delivered Lincoln to the U.S. capital city through a series of disguises and related tactics that required her to stay awake throughout the entire long journey. As a result of the public notoriety of this success, the business adopted an open eye as its logo and the slogan "We never sleep". Allan Pinkerton around this time also served in the "Secret Service" intelligence division of what was then known as the U.S. War Department.

These actions preceded and laid the groundwork for the establishment of the United States Secret Service, which is tasked with serving current and former U.S. Presidents' security to this day. The official Secret Service was founded on July 5, 1865, less than three months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

In 1871, Congress appropriated $50,000 (about equivalent to $1,312,000 in 2024) to the new Department of Justice to form a sub-organization devoted to "the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law." The amount was insufficient to form an internal investigating unit, so they contracted the services to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.