When Kate Warne interviewed for a job at the Pinkerton Detective Agency, no one would have predicted that she would save the life of Abraham Lincoln.
When Warne arrived for her interview in 1856, it was assumed that she was there for a secretarial position. Instead, she charmed Allan Pinkerton into hiring her as the first female detective in the United States. She successfully argued that a woman would have access to places men weren’t welcome, such as befriending the wives and girlfriends of the men the company investigated.
Her first major case involved suspected embezzlement at the Adams Express Company. Warne befriended the wife of their chief suspect, who took her into her confidence. Armed with the information she learned from the wife, the suspect was arrested, tried and convicted and most of the embezzled money was returned to the company. As her reward Pinkerton named her chief of their newly formed Female Detective Bureau.
The Baltimore Plot, a Southern conspiracy to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861, became her most famous case. Warne infiltrated a group of secessionists suspected of plotting against Lincoln, posing as a rich Southern lady complete with a thick accent.
Flirting with the male members of the group, she uncovered the details of their plot. They planned to attack him as he changed trains in Baltimore on his way to his inauguration in Washington, DC. Warne travelled with Lincoln, disguising him as her ailing brother and providing him with a cane so he would stoop over to hide his height. Spending a sleepless night watching over him, she helped safely smuggle the future president into Washington DC in time for his inauguration. It was her alertness throughout the trip that is believed to have led Allen Pinkerton use the slogan “we never sleep” for the agency.
During the Civil War, Warne’s work in the Pinkerton Agency’s military intelligence services had her adopting dozens of aliases to gather information for the Union. Employing her successful Southern lady persona, she was able to collect information that proved helpful to the US Government and its war efforts. Often traveling with Allan Pinkerton and posing as his wife, it is suggested that the two were involved in a personal relationship.
After the war Warne expanded her disguise repertoire to include that of a fortune teller. The agency rented a storefront where she predicted the futures of several criminals by gathering the information needed to convict them. She became one of the most successful Pinkerton agents at the agency.
Her own life, however, remained a mystery. Little is known of her time before she joined Pinkerton, save for a few basic details: she was born in New York in 1933 and was widowed at age 23, shortly before she joined the agency.
When Warne died of pneumonia in 1868 at the age of 35, Allan Pinkerton insisted that she be buried adjacent to the Pinkerton family burial site in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery. She was laid to rest under a headstone that misspells her name, the reasons why an eternal mystery.
Warne was first profiled in mutterhood magazine’s SECRET issue.