Editing Allan Pinkerton (section)

==Detective==
{{see also|Pinkerton (detective agency)}}

Pinkerton first became interested in criminal detective work while wandering through the wooded groves around Dundee, looking for trees to make  [[barrel|barrel staves]], when he came across a band of [[counterfeit money|counterfeiters]],<ref>Seiple (2015), pp. 16–17</ref> who may have been affiliated with the notorious [[Banditti of the Prairie]].  After observing their movements for some time he informed the local sheriff, who arrested them.  This later led to Pinkerton being appointed, in 1849, as the first police detective in [[Chicago]], [[Cook County, Illinois]].  In 1850, he partnered with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in forming the North-Western Police Agency, which later became Pinkerton & Co, and finally [[Pinkerton National Detective Agency]], still in existence today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, a subsidiary of [[Securitas AB]]. Pinkerton's business insignia was a wide open eye with the caption "We never sleep." As the US [[Territorial acquisitions of the United States|expanded in territory]], rail transport increased. Pinkerton's agency solved a series of [[train robbery|train robberies]] during the 1850s, first bringing Pinkerton into contact with [[George B. McClellan]], then Chief Engineer and Vice President of the  [[Illinois Central Railroad]], and [[Abraham Lincoln]], a lawyer who sometimes represented the company.
[[File:Allan Pinkerton on horseback, 1862.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.47|Pinkerton on horseback on the [[Battle of Antietam|Antietam Battlefield]] in 1862]]
In 1859, he attended the secret meetings held by [[John Brown (abolitionist)|John Brown]] and [[Frederick Douglass]] in Chicago along with abolitionists John Jones and [[Henry O. Wagoner]]. At those meetings, Jones, Wagoner, and Pinkerton helped purchase clothes and supplies for Brown. Jones' wife, Mary, guessed that the supplies included the suit Brown was hanged in after the failure of [[John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry]] in November 1859.<ref>Junger, Richard (2009) "Thinking Men and Women who Desire to Improve our Condition: Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846–1887" in Alexander, William H.; Newby-Alexander, Cassandra L.; and Ford, Charles H. eds ''Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy''. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, p. 154</ref>