Famous Scots
- Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884)
Pinkerton was born in Glasgow. His father was a police sergeant who was maimed in a riot in 1829. He trained as a cooper but became a member of the Chartist Movement which defended workers' rights and was involved in a strike by spinners in Glasgow. He then tried to help a leader of the movement to break out of prison in 1839 and had to leave Scotland to avoid being arrested in 1842. He sailed the day after getting married.Perhaps as a result of the police background of his father, he was appointed deputy-sheriff and then sheriff in Chicago. He started the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago in 1850. The company solved a number of train robberies and foiled an attempted assassination of President-elect Lincoln in 1861. Pinkerton led the Unionist Secret Service during the American Civil War but afterwards returned to his agency.
His next success was to break a working class movement, the Molly Maguires who had been operating in the coalfields of Pennsylvania for over twenty years. He also turned his hand to writing memoirs and popular semi-autobiographical case histories. His two sons continued the agency after his death in 1884.
Return to the Index of Famous Scots
Where else would you like to go in Scotland?
