The Detective’s Assistant is a work of fiction, and Nell Warne exists only in the pages of this book. But Kate Warne was a very real person. She and the characters of Allan Pinkerton, Timothy Webster, Hattie Lawton, George H. Bangs, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln were living, breathing contributors to America’s history. Their lives and actions were the inspiration for this story.
The life of Kate Warne requires its own detective work to piece together. Her gravestone tells us she was born in Chemung County, New York. But little else can be found of her life before she entered Allan Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency office as a twenty-three-year-old widow. And while Pinkerton kept extensive files on his cases and his operatives, Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871 destroyed most of his records.
When Kate Warne became the first female detective in the United States on August 23, 1856, Pinkerton was doing something almost unheard of: hiring a woman to do what was then seen as a man’s job. Aside from mind-numbing factory work or running a boardinghouse, there were very few employment options for single or widowed women.
“I finally became convinced that it would be a good idea to employ her. True, it was the first experiment of the sort that had ever been tried; but we live in a progressive age, and in a progressive country. I therefore determined at least to try it, feeling that Mrs. Warne was a splendid subject with whom to begin,” Pinkerton recalled in his book The Expressman and the Detective in 1874. “She succeeded far beyond my utmost expectations.”
By one of the few accounts in her own words to survive, from Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln, we see that Kate Warne had a determined personality and was no pushover. In order to protect Lincoln on his train ride through deadly Baltimore, it was crucial that Kate arrange sleeping compartments together at the back of the train. But this was not an easy task: “Any person could take a Berth where they pleased. I gave the Conductor half a dollar to keep my berths, and by standing right by myself we manage[d] to keep them.”
The most we can learn about Kate Warne comes from Pinkerton’s accounts of the many exciting cases he and his detectives solved. While the cases presented in this novel are works of fiction, they are inspired by her real exploits, which can be found in Pinkerton’s books The Somnambulist and the Detective: The Murderer and the Fortune Teller (1875) and The Spy of the Rebellion (1883), along with The Expressman and the Detective.
“Kate Warne felt sure she was going to win,” Pinkerton wrote in The Expressman and the Detective as they closed in on Mr. Maroney’s stolen money. “She always felt so, and I never knew her to be beaten.”
But Pinkerton’s experiment with female detectives was relatively brief. And if a girl like Nell wanted to follow in Kate Warne’s footsteps, she would have found those doors quickly slammed shut. Pinkerton’s son Robert, who took over the business, disbanded the Female Detective Bureau in 1876, despite his father’s angry protests. Women would not be hired for police or detective work again until the next century.
Pinkerton doesn’t hold back praise for what he calls his two finest detectives, Kate Warne and Timothy Webster. “Mrs. Warne was the first lady whom I had ever employed,” he writes in The Somnambulist and the Detective. “As a detective, she had no superior, and she was a lady of such refinement, tact, and discretion, that I never hesitated to entrust to her some of my most difficult undertakings.”
Her undercover role as Mrs. Barley, in particular, was key to successfully thwarting the Baltimore Plot, which was the most important case of Pinkerton’s long career. The coded telegraph that appears in the book upon Lincoln’s safe arrival in Washington is an exact message that Pinkerton sent out heralding their triumph:
G. H. Bang’s
80. Washington Street.
Chicago.
Plums has Nuts—arri’d at Barley—all right.
Begun in 1850 in Chicago, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency quickly gained national prominence for catching train robbers and solving bank heists. The Pinkerton name came to mean “private eye” or private investigator, and the company’s logo of an unblinking eye above the phrase We never sleep was nationally recognized. Pinkerton has written that Kate Warne never slept a wink during the train ride delivering Lincoln through Baltimore, just as the logo promised. The hard work of Kate Warne and the other operatives in protecting Lincoln leading up to his March 4, 1861, inauguration eventually grew into what we know today as the Secret Service, which protects all US presidents.
Pinkerton served President Lincoln throughout most of the Civil War, both protecting him from personal harm as well as spying on the South. And his National Detective Agency went on to chase down outlaws over the ensuing decades, including Jesse James, the Reno Brothers, and Butch Cassidy. But Pinkerton, Kate Warne, and Timothy Webster were not serving President Lincoln in April 1865 when actor John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal shots in Lincoln’s assassination.
By that time, Timothy Webster had already died. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he’d gone undercover as a Confederate soldier of the South. With Hattie Lawton portraying his wife, the bold pair delivered valuable information to the Northern army. But he was eventually found out and hanged as a spy in April 1862. He was forty years old. Hattie Lawton stayed with him until the end, served time in a Confederate prison, then was never heard from again.
Kate Warne continued her detective work during the Civil War, working with Pinkerton and posing as a Southern belle. A master of disguises and false identities, Kate Warne went by many aliases, such as Kay Warne, Kay Waren, and Kitty Warren. She was known to close friends simply as Kitty.
Vibrant and full of life, Kate Warne died in 1868—felled not by a murderer or sworn enemy, but by pneumonia. She was just thirty-five. With no other family to her name, Allan Pinkerton was there by her side.
To this day, you can honor the memories of Kate Warne, Allan Pinkerton, Timothy Webster, and George H. Bangs at Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery. Their gravestones can be found—all together—in the Pinkerton family plot.