The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower Page A

religious man. In Glasgow, he recalled, his parents had been “obliged to take their children to church to be baptized, but otherwise they never went to church; they were what is called Atheists.” Pinkerton, too, had taken his firstborn son to be baptized at Wisner’s church in Dundee, but he saw himself in much the same light as his parents. Nevertheless, for the sake of fitting in as a member of the community, he dutifully hitched up a farm wagon each week and drove with Joan to Sunday services.
    Pastor Wisner’s sudden grievance against his parishioner appears to have had more to do with politics than with church doctrine. A few weeks earlier, Pinkerton had announced himself as a candidate for office in Kane County’s Abolitionist party, putting a public face on the clandestine activities he had long pursued with the Underground Railroad. There were many in Dundee who felt as Pinkerton did about slavery, but the young cooper’s open, unequivocal stance put him at odds with the village elders, reflecting a clash between factions of the church that would echo through the region.
    When Pinkerton’s friends rallied to his side, publishing a letter of “collective protest” in the next issue of the Citizen, Wisner stepped up his attack. He now insisted that Pinkerton was both using and selling “ardent spirits,” placing him at the wrong end of the “moral thermometer” established by the American temperance movement. Pinkerton, a teetotaler, raised an energetic defense, gathering testimonials to the effect that no liquor had ever passed his lips and that spirits were not tolerated in his home. Wisner was unmoved. The pastor demanded a series of open trials at the church, where Pinkerton’s moral failings could be paraded in front of the congregation. In one session, Pinkerton was rebuked for circulating blasphemous materials, a charge he strenuously denied.
    As the slander and finger-pointing escalated, Pinkerton withdrew from the congregation in disgust, along with a number of sympathetic friends. Pinkerton believed he had left with his honor intact, but the episode placed an uncomfortable strain on his daily life in the small community. Business at the cooperage tapered off, and neighbors looked away as he and Joan passed. Not surprisingly, he began to look for greener pastures.
    Soon, his reputation as a rising lawman brought an offer from William Church, the sheriff of neighboring Cook County, to serve as his deputy. Though it meant selling the cooperage, Pinkerton didn’t hesitate. He was more than ready to put Dundee behind him and turn his volatile energies to better things. All his life, Pinkerton had been spoiling for a fight; a small man with big fists, he was cunning enough to channel his innate aggression into lofty causes, whether it was the Chartist rebellion of his homeland or the abolitionist movement of his adopted country. He had learned many lessons from John Craig, the wily counterfeiter, and had caught sight of possibilities beyond the banks of the Fox River.
    The new position marked a considerable increase in status, as Cook County encompassed Chicago, and with it fully half the population of Illinois. Joan accepted the move stoically, though not without a note of regret. She would never again hear the fondly remembered “rat-tat-tat” of the cooper’s hammer as it kept time with her singing. “They were bonnie days,” she said of their time in Dundee, “but Allan was a restless one.”
    With his wife and one-year-old son at his side, Pinkerton and his horse-drawn wagon rolled into Chicago in the fall of 1847. The city was in the midst of a robust expansion—“growth is much too slow a word,” one visitor exclaimed—and the population had nearly tripled since Pinkerton’s days at the Lill & Diversey brewery. The family settled on Adams Street, between Fifth and Franklin, in one of the thriving neighborhood’s two-room “balloon” houses—so named for the speedy manner in