detectives, about a plot to assassinate him in Baltimore. Allan Pinkerton, however, had a plan to ensure his safety. The President-elect, guarded personally by Pinkerton, raced through Baltimore on an anonymous private train straight from Philadelphia to Washington at midnight. Pinkerton operatives grounded telegraph lines out of Philadelphia and were stationed along the train's route to ensure safe passage. Finally, the press traveling with Lincoln were held in Philadelphia at gunpoint by another Pinkerton operative, who briefed them on all these efforts, on background. 1 This story is significant for three reasons. First, before this Pinkerton was a private security contractor known to law enforcement and capitalists, but after this he became a household name. Second, foiling the plot required mastery of multiple networks. Pinkerton first learned of the plot because his Agency was working on security for the Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, as sabotage to the tracks was reportedly part of this plot. Pinkerton's own network of agents made easy work of infiltrating the Copperhead terrorist cell, since gaining the confidence of lower-level players led quickly to gaining the trust of leaders. Finally, he was also able to commandeer the railroads and telegraph lines to change the facts on the ground and outwit the terrorists. As Regina Schober has argued, the concept of network has been a crucial ideological formation, as a metaphor for the American state and for the expanding nation itself. 2 A source of Pinkerton's success was his understanding of networks, how they are built, and how they could be exploited. Bilansky 2 The third reason to start here is that Pinkerton would spend the rest of his life defending himself against claims the whole thing was a hoax. (Chicago mayor Wentworth wrote an editorial claiming exactly that, and the two men had a fist fight on a Chicago street over it.) 3 Moreover, this early controversy contributed to the launch of a literary career. 4 The first book Pinkerton published was a collection of testimonials about the Baltimore Plot, which was followed by eighteen novels and various shorter pieces between 1875 and 1884, covering exploits of his agency between 1851 and 1880. 5 The novels had titles like The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives, The Gypsies and the Detectives, The Professional Thieves and the Detectives, and Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives. To state the obvious, spies have always dealt in secrets, but Pinkerton was very public, spectacular even, about his spying. Espionage, as Timothy Melley shows in the Cold War era, is always a literary enterprise. 6 This paper draws on-and tells the story of-two families of documents, Pinkerton's public accounts of his Agency's work and the secret reports and other Agency papers. My focus here is on the principal nodes in Pinkerton's surveillance network, the operatives, and the central technology of the Agency, the report. Along the way, tensions emerge between the representations found in public and private documents.
