“That Is Tim Webster”
IT WAS LATE AUGUST 1861, and Pryce Lewis and Sam Bridgeman were reunited, though this time there was no need for disguises. The pair were at Baltimore’s Miller’s Hotel, on the corner of German and Pacer streets, awaiting instructions from Allan Pinkerton. After the success of their mission to Charleston, the pair were Pinkerton’s new golden boys. Or, at least, Lewis was. When he’d returned to Cincinnati from his trip to General Cox’s camp, Lewis learned that Bridgeman was no longer an employee of the Pinkerton detective agency. He’d been “discharged for celebrating our safe return too hilariously.” Lewis went to see Pinkerton and told him that, yes, Sam liked a drink now and again, but he’d done a good job as his coachman and he deserved a second chance. Pinkerton acquiesced but emphasized Bridgeman was on his final warning.
Although Baltimore belonged to the Union in August 1861, it still seethed with discontent. The plot to assassinate President Lincoln might have been nothing more than a Pinkerton concoction, but what had happened on April 19 was anything but. On that day the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment had marched through the city, the first Northern troops to do so, and their presence wasn’t appreciated. A furious mob attacked the soldiers as they headed to the train station, and in the ensuing chaos four troops and twelve civilians were killed. The following month the situation remained tense, as the correspondent of the New York Herald discovered when he arrived at Baltimore’s Camden Station: “Half-drunken loafers swarmed therein,” he reported. “They carried costly daggers, revolvers of the latest fashion, and knives of glittering polish, while as they swaggered through the long passage, they d-d the Union, gave maudlin cheers for Maryland, and boasted of their future prowess … at every corner [of the city], in the middle of the streets, and around the hotel doorways, stood and shouted always the same brutal swarm. No life is safe there unless its possessor will say their says, no person is sacred there unless its possessor will say their says, no person is sacred there unless its spirit is against the Federal Union, and no property will long be inviolate whose holder does not loud and long proclaim his devotions to Southern interests and his seal for the Southern cause.”
Secessionists burned bridges and felled telegraph poles, while the city’s legislature censured the Federal government but quailed at open rebellion. Governor Thomas Hicks described Baltimore’s position as one of neutrality, so more Union troops came to the city to ensure it stayed that way. Nevertheless the secessionists continued to foment sedition, particularly after the victory at Bull Run, a triumph that emboldened the city’s Confederate-leaning politicians to the extent that they publicly condemned Lincoln as a tyrant.
Pinkerton was asked to find out what he could about the secessionists in Baltimore, so he sent Lewis and Bridgeman there. They had no precise objectives; they were to observe and report. Lewis’s favorite observation post was the veranda of Miller’s Hotel. There they ordered drinks from a bartender named John Earl, a known secessionist. Lewis was taking in the view from the veranda one afternoon when “Bridgeman directed my attention to a gentlemanly-looking, stalwart passer-by, who was accompanied by a lady.”
“That,” said Bridgeman, leaning across to whisper in Lewis’s ear, “is Tim Webster.”
Allan Pinkerton described Tim Webster in 1861 as “a tall, broad-shouldered, good-looking man of about forty years of age. In height he was about five feet ten inches; his brown hair, which was brushed carelessly back from a broad, high forehead, surmounted a face of a character to at once attract attention.”
There was a beard as well, precise and modest, a reflection of his personality. Nothing about Timothy Webster was ostentatious; after all, he was descended from that most stolid of stock, the English yeoman.
Timothy Webster Senior had been one of the Duke of Wellington’s men during the Napoleonic Wars of half a century earlier, and once France had been crushed he returned to being a tinsmith, the occupation of his father and the trade to which he himself had been apprenticed before he’d left to be a soldier. Then he married his childhood sweetheart, Frances, and they moved from Leicester, in central England, to the county of Sussex on the southern coast in order to find work.
Timothy and Frances settled in the village of Newhaven and started a family: two healthy daughters named Mary and Maria, and at the end of 1819 their first son, Samuel, was born. Three years later, on March 12, 1822, Frances Webster gave birth to another boy. This one they named after his father.
When Timothy was two, Reverend T. W. Horsfield visited Newhaven on a research trip for a book he was writing about the region. When the book was published the literate among Newhaven’s 929 inhabitants appreciated Horsfield’s description of their town: “The residents of Newhaven are chiefly engaged in maritime pursuits,” he explained. “There are, however, two extensive breweries and the place is noted for the excellence of its beer. There are four comfortable inns, and within the last twenty years the number of houses built is estimated at forty. The town is extremely neat and clean. Over the [river] Ouse is a handsome drawbridge, which was erected some years ago by an act of parliament in lieu of an ancient ferry.”
The reverend neglected to describe Newhaven’s centuries-old harbor (the reason why such a small town required a quartet of inns) from which a ferry sailed twice a week to France. Trading vessels also made frequent calls to Newhaven, and several ships a week arrived to transport boulders to the pottery districts of England. The boulders were collected from the Sussex countryside by the county’s poor and heaved down to the harbor. In 1823 the townsfolk of Newhaven amassed five and a half thousand tons of boulders.
For young boys too weak to help harvest boulders, Newhaven was a rural idyll in the 1820s. They might have scrambled up the hill behind the church of St. Michael (where Tim Webster had been baptized) to look out over the English Channel for the arrival of the ferry from France. And while they waited for the sails to appear, the young boys might have dug into the hillside searching for relics from the region’s previous inhabitants: a Stone Age flint, an Iron Age arrowhead or a Roman vase.
In the harbor they might have helped the fishermen unload the day’s catch: brill and sole and plaice. They might have pranced behind the hawkers who came to sell their wares, imitating their cries of “Taters O!” and “Damsons O!” and in the summer they might have dived from the wooden drawbridge into the river Ouse or swum in the cold waters of the Channel.
In 1827 Frances gave birth to her sixth child (a daughter, Esther, had been born in 1824), a boy who was christened Godfrey but lived just fifty-nine days. The following year Mrs. Webster produced twins, James and Jonathan, increasing her brood to seven.
Her husband probably made up his mind to emigrate at the start of 1830. Perhaps it was his New Year’s resolution. Struggling to support his large family, Webster would have suffered along with everyone else because of the poor harvest of 1829. It was the second consecutive bad harvest, and now “men were found dead behind hedges with nothing but sour sorrel in their famished bellies.”
He wasn’t alone in casting his eyes west toward America. Other men in Sussex, particularly those who worked the land, feared what the invention of the threshing machine meant for them. While some farmworkers resisted the Industrial Revolution, destroying threshing machines and torching the barns of farmers who owned the hated contraptions, others chose to escape the upheaval. In February 1830 Robert Peel, the home secretary, received a letter from an anxious Sussex magistrate complaining “about the number of Sussex laborers emigrating to America … leaving their families dependent on the parish.”
But Timothy Webster had no intention of abandoning his family. When he applied to the overseers of Newhaven Parish for assistance in emigrating, he explained that he wished to take with him his pregnant wife and their seven children: Mary, fifteen, Maria, thirteen, Samuel, ten, Tim, eight, Esther, six, and the two-year-old twins, Jonathan and James.
The committee of Newhaven Parish would have been willing to help Webster, as they were in assisting most paupers. For years they had been doling out money to the family, keeping them in food and clothes; now with one final sum they would be released from all further obligations. In 1830 it cost parishes such as Newhaven six pounds and five shillings (there were twenty shillings to the pound, and a shilling was subdivided into twelve pennies) to send one adult pauper to North America and three pounds and two shillings for each child under the age of fourteen. On arrival, the adults were given two pounds each and one additional pound for each of their children. With this pittance they entered their new world.
England had not been kind to Timothy Webster. If one was born into poverty, that was how one remained, no matter how hard one worked, or how valiantly one fought. When he and his family reached America in 1830, with eleven pounds between them, he looked to the future. From now on the Websters would consider themselves Americans.
The Tim Webster that Pryce Lewis watched stroll along a Baltimore sidewalk in August 1861 looked, and sounded, every bit the American. The man himself might have retained a vague memory of swimming in the river Ouse or playing in the streets of Newhaven, but Webster was now an American citizen, married to an American, with three American children. His accent was New Jersey—Princeton, to be precise—where his father had built the family home thirty-one years earlier. Though his mother, Frances, had been in the ground for years, worn out by all the children she had brought into the world, Timothy Webster Senior had died in 1860 at the age of sixty-nine.
After he married at nineteen and became a dad at twenty-one, Tim Webster’s life had appeared to be set for the same unremitting grind as his own father’s, the same constant struggle to put food on the family table. He’d been handed down the paternal profession, that of tinsmith, and in the early 1840s scraped a living in Princeton. But at some point in the latter half of the decade Webster took a different path.
When the Federal Census was compiled in 1850, Tim Webster and his wife, Charlotte, were living in New York City. It was a big household, with their four children, one of Tim’s brothers (and his wife) and one of his sisters. But Webster could afford it; he was a police officer earning far more than he had as a tinsmith.
By 1853 Webster was a sergeant, and that summer he was one of the officers responsible for policing the huge crowds that descended on the Crystal Palace exhibition in the city’s Reservoir Park. When Horace Greeley visited the palace in his capacity as editor of the New York Tribune he described how “the thickly-studded drinking shops were flaunting in their intemperate seductions, the various shows of monsters, mountebanks and animals, numerous as on the jubilee days of the Champs Elysees, opened wide their attractions to simple folk [and] little speculators in meats, fruits and drinks had their tables and stalls al fresco. A rush and a whirl of omnibuses, coaches and pedestrians encircled the palace, but amid all this were plainly discernible the excellent provisions of the police to maintain order. The entrances to the palace were kept clear and no disturbance manifested itself through the day.”
One of the visitors elbowing his way through the crowds at the Crystal Palace was Allan Pinkerton, there not so much to admire the exhibitions as to recruit detectives to his agency. He noted Webster’s calm but firm authority, and asked his friend James Leonard, a captain in the New York Police, for his name along with those of five other policemen whom he judged to be detective material. Most accepted Pinkerton’s offer but not Webster, who didn’t wish to uproot his family to Chicago. Three years later, however, Webster changed his mind and joined the Pinkerton agency. His family remained in New York until 1858, by which time he’d saved enough money to have a house built for them in Onarga, a community ninety-five miles south of Chicago.
By 1861 Webster was the undisputed star of the agency. When he wasn’t on duty, “he was of a quiet, reserved disposition, seldom speaking unless spoken to, and never betraying emotion or excitement under any pressure of circumstances.” Pinkerton, with his belief that a man’s face was the window to his soul, remarked that Webster “always wore that calm, imperturbable expression denoting a well-balanced mind and a thorough self-control, while the immobile countenance and close-set lips showed that he was naturally as inscrutable as the Sphinx.”
But Webster was transformed the moment he went undercover. He was no longer the silent, stoic son of the tinsmith turned soldier; instead he changed into what Pinkerton described as “a genial, jovial, convivial spirit, with an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes and amusing reminiscences, and a wonderful faculty for making everybody like him.” The Scot said Webster’s ability to play a part amounted “to positive genius, and it was this that forced me to admire the man as sincerely as I prized his services.”
Pinkerton believed that the secret to being an effective detective was the operative’s talent for acting, and Webster was a natural. Clearly he’d inherited some genes from his paternal grandfather, Samuel, a tinsmith by training but an actor by calling, who had appeared in numerous amateur stage productions throughout the county of Leicester.
Webster’s first wartime assignment had been to travel from Cincinnati to Memphis, acting the part of a wealthy Baltimorean, a hater of the Union and a loyal secessionist. In the latter half of May 1861 Webster booked into the Worsham House Hotel on the corner of Front and Jefferson streets, and wove himself into the city’s tapestry. Using his real name, he made a particular friend of an overbearing army doctor named Burton, all gold braid and no brain, who showed off his standing in the city by taking Webster on a tour of his camp.
Webster had returned to Cincinnati toward the end of June, around the time Pryce Lewis and Sam Bridgeman set out for Charleston, but on July 23 he departed once more for Tennessee. Riding the train to Memphis the following day, Webster “got in conversation with men from Louisville going to Camp Boone, Tenn., under Col. Tillman. Near the State line in Tennessee there is a camp of 200 men but few of them are armed. At Camp Boone near Clarksville under Col. Tillman there is 1800 men [sic], all Kentuckians not armed. At Clarksville an officer from Fort Dover near the Cumberland River near the Ohio said there was 500 men well armed and 4-32 pounders (iron) to guard the river.”
The next day Webster’s train was detained at Humboldt so he alighted and “drank and talked with officers from Union City. They said they had 6,000 men nearly all armed and 2-32 pounders (iron).”
In Memphis Webster looked up his old friends. They were delighted to see him. Join us for a night’s carousing, they proposed, so that evening Webster went from bar to bar with Colonel Robert Seeley and the military engineer “Bob” Rowley, and “the whole conversation was about how they, the Southern Army, had cleaned out the ‘Yankees’ at Bulls Run [sic].”
On July 29 Webster was still warming the bar stools of Memphis, along with the faithful Colonel Seeley. They hailed a Confederate captain, stood him a couple of whiskeys, and the officer whispered loudly to Webster “that there was 3,000 men at Randolph [Tennessee,] there was 1,000 men at Fort Clearborn and 35 heavy guns and … that the officers that were there were talking about the Manassas battle. They all wanted to rush to Washington and St. Louis.”
Webster left Memphis on July 31 with warm demands to hurry back, as well as a pocketful of introductions to trusted men in Richmond, Virginia, where Webster said he intended to stay during the winter; to Charles Stebbins, the proprietor of a china, glass and crockery store; to Colonel William Ritchie; to Colonel J. S. Calvert, state treasurer; and to George Bagby, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger and the associate editor of the Richmond Whig.
Webster had also on his person several other letters of a more sensitive nature, letters that were to be delivered to trusted secessionists in Baltimore and that were on no account to fall into Federal hands. The information concerned the Confederate effort, not just the overt activities in the Southern states, but also the covert work being carried out in Maryland.
Webster was now a double agent, embarking upon missions for two sides but betraying only the South. He returned north using the Confederate pass signed by Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, and delivered his hoard to Pinkerton’s headquarters in Cincinnati. The letters were painstakingly steamed open with every scrap of information noted, and then they were resealed with equal thoroughness. Webster tucked the letters into his satchel and continued east to Baltimore, where he handed them to their rebel recipients.
Webster was still in Baltimore when Lewis and Bridgeman arrived in early August. Webster was portraying himself as a wealthy gentleman of leisure and to that end Pinkerton had supplied him with the carriage used by Lewis. It had needed a spot of repair work after its flight through the mountains of Kentucky, and a new driver was recruited, but it complemented Webster’s role as an affluent Baltimorean. With him was Hattie Lawton, the young female detective who had worked with Webster during the febrile days of February.
She was his “wife,” the devoted Mrs. Webster, a woman of few words but great beauty. Webster’s rebel friends were impressed; a man with a wife so toothsome should be admired as well as envied.
Before Lewis had the opportunity to discreetly introduce himself to Webster, he and Bridgeman were summoned to Washington, where Pinkerton had recently relocated. As the pair took a train south, Webster remained in Baltimore fortifying the persona of a trusted confidant of the Confederate cause. By the end of August he’d been invited to join the Order of the Sons of Liberty, Baltimore’s branch of a secretive organization first founded by American patriots during the Revolutionary War, and whose enemy now was the North.
On August 23 he had a long discussion with a man named Merrill, a gun store owner and a rebel to the core. Webster told him he wanted to buy his stock of three hundred rifles. Not a problem, said Merrill, who added that he could also supply some Bowie knives. From the gun store Webster went to William Allen’s Eating Saloon, where Alexander Slayden told him “there was 5 to 6,000 stand of arms in Baltimore … and all of our boys had been getting muskets, rifles and pistols since wherever they could buy them.” Later Webster, Slayden and a thirty-year-old lumber merchant named Sam Sloan went to the Baltimore racetrack, where they met ten other rebels, and in between gambling and drinking, they discussed in low tones how to seize control. Who would lead an uprising now that George Kane, the chief of police, had been imprisoned for disloyalty to the Union? asked Webster. Slayden told him not to worry; “we have leaders enough. There is Colonel Street, just as good a man as we want and he is ready at any time.”
When Webster returned to his hotel he wrote a detailed report of everything he had learned. In the report was a name, that of Daniel Stiltz, a twenty-five-year-old photographic artist. Webster explained that Stiltz was a dedicated secessionist about to visit Federal camps in the Washington area “and take likenesses.” He’d even duped a prominent Unionist into writing him a letter of introduction. Webster asked Pinkerton to rush an operative to Baltimore so he could put him on the tail of Stiltz. Webster suggested sending John Scully, a young Irish detective whose energy compensated for his inexperience. The next morning, August 24, Hattie Lawton left Baltimore early to deliver the information to Pinkerton’s Washington headquarters. Webster spent the day moping about town, pining for his “wife” who’d been suddenly called away on a family matter.