Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [23]
Despite this detailed and accurate reporting—which he risked his life to deliver—many historians have highlighted Webster’s one great failure, which was also the signal failure of the Pinkerton agency during the war. Webster guessed in his reports that the Confederate troops near Richmond numbered 116,430. But it appears that his estimate was too high by far—there were actually 40,000 fewer troops in the area. That miscalculation may have contributed to General McClellan’s reluctance to attack the southern force. That in turn led to intense political antagonism between McClellan and Lincoln, who was pressing for an onslaught against the Confederate positions.
Webster’s bravery, though, is unquestionable. He continued to send back detailed reports until a slipup by a separate team of Union spies in the South revealed Webster’s identity as a Pinkerton. Webster was arrested, and on April 28, 1862, hanged for espionage in front of thousands of spectators on the Richmond fairground.
In his last message from his cell, Webster told a female Pinkerton agent who had come to visit him, “Tell the major I can meet death with a brave heart and a clear conscience.”*
WHEN THE WAR ended, the industrializing North once again offered opportunity for corporate espionage. The Pinkertons would again use undercover techniques in the late 1870s, under circumstances almost as dangerous as those faced by Timothy Webster.
The postwar era was a time of violent unrest in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, where child labor, unsafe working conditions, and an economic depression in the middle of the 1870s combined to provoke violent strikes by miners and brutal reprisals by management. Illiterate, poverty-stricken foreign immigrants vied with each other for work in the mines, and organized themselves into warring camps along ethnic lines.
Amid the chaos, some Irish-Catholic immigrants created a secret society they called the Molly Maguires. Historians aren’t quite sure where the name came from, although the organization seems to have had roots in secret societies in Ireland through which poor tenant farmers waged secret class wars against English landowners. There are those who believe that the Mollies never existed at all, and the society left almost no records for historians to examine. Legend holds that “Molly Maguire” herself was a poor widow whose cause was taken up by the local workingmen. Or she could have been a fiery Irish lass who led nighttime raids on wealthy landlords in Ireland. No one knows.
In coal country, the Mollies became a violent and vindictive gang motivated by both criminal agendas and the class war. In their lively account of the saga in their book The Pinkerton Story (1951), James Horan and Howard Swiggert wrote that the Mollies were believed to be responsible for numerous crimes in the area, including these over just a two-month period in 1870: ambushing a mining foreman, shooting a merchant, beating up a bridge watchman, beating a mine superintendent, and murdering a mine boss.
By 1873 Franklin Gowen, the president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, had had enough. He wrote to Allan Pinkerton and asked him to come to Pennsylvania. Gowen’s concern was not so much for the lives of the men on both sides of the fight as for the fate of a business venture. Gowen was diversifying out of the railroad business and into the coal business. The Reading railroad had purchased enormous tracts of land, and planned to transport