Kate Warne: The First Female Detective Who Saved Abraham Lincoln

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In February 1861 a woman on a night train to Washington, D.C. fussed loudly over her sick brother, a tall man slumped under a shawl and a soft felt cap. The brother was president-elect Abraham Lincoln, and the woman was Kate Warne of the Pinkerton agency, moving him through Baltimore past a planned assassination. Five years earlier, in 1856, she had walked into Allan Pinkerton's Chicago office as a 23-year-old widow and asked for a detective's job. Told it was not the custom to employ female detectives, she argued that a woman could collect secrets in parlors and on train rides where a man would be suspected at once.

This episode pieces together what survives of her career. She cracked an 1858 embezzlement case by befriending the suspect's wife, ran Pinkerton's female detective bureau by 1860, and posed as a Southern lady at Baltimore's Barnum Hotel to learn how the plotters meant to strike during Lincoln's horse-drawn transfer between stations. She later spied for the Union and worked murder and poisoning cases under invented names. She died in January 1868 at about 35, and most records of her work burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

• In the Adams Express case, Warne's friendship with Mrs. Maroney helped convict her husband and recover nearly $40,000 of a stolen $50,000.
• The Baltimore plotters planned a staged street brawl at the Calvert Street Station to draw off police while Lincoln's car was pulled by horses toward Camden Street.
• Pinkerton had the telegraph lines cut on the night of February 22nd so no one in Harrisburg could warn Baltimore that Lincoln had left.
• Warne's sleepless watch until the 6 a.m. arrival in Washington reportedly inspired the Pinkerton slogan, We Never Sleep.
• After the war she posed as a fortune teller named Lucille to draw confessions in a suspected family poisoning.