The Woman Who Helped Stop an Early Attempt on Abraham Lincoln's Life

This piece is part of an ongoing series on the unsung women of history. Read more here.
In 1856, an attractive young widow presented herself at the offices of Allan Pinkerton. At the time, he was well on his way to fame as the founder of America’s first detective agency. Little did he realize that his visitor wasn’t just another pretty face; she was Kate Warne and she was soon to become the world’s first woman P.I.
Though Pinkerton gushed about Warne’s good looks and graceful vivacity, what really impressed him was her sense of purpose. She was looking for a job, she told him, and he should hire her. “She could go and worm out secrets in many places which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access,” Pinkerton wrote years later. “She had evidently given the matter much study.” Pinkerton agreed, and a legend was born.
Little is known of Warne’s life before she became a private eye, only that she was about 23 when she came to Pinkerton’s office and that she had a knack for acting and undercover work. She soon proved her worth to Pinkerton, befriending the wife of a man who had stolen thousands of dollars from a railroad company and helping find the hidden cash. But her most famous case—helping evade an assassination conspiracy against Abraham Lincoln—was still ahead of her.
“She was a brilliant conversationalist when so disposed, and could be quite vivacious,” Pinkerton later wrote, adding with the era’s characteristic misogyny that “she also understood that rarer quality in womankind, the art of being silent.” Whether talkative or quiet, Warne’s tact and savvy served her well in 1861. That’s the year that Pinkerton discovered that President-elect Lincoln, who was on a whistle-stop tour from Springfield, Ill., to Washington, D.C. ahead of his inauguration, was the target of an assassination plot by a group of Southern conspirators who hated his abolitionism.

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