one of his best agents was timothy webster, shown on the right. he also had two men operating under aliases, harry davies and charles williams, and two women, kate warren and hattie lawton. well, pinkerton and his agents immediately set up shop in baltimore and they started to ingratiate themselves as southerners with the various suspected secessionists in baltimore. lehman derided pinker ton's reports written on a daily basis as neither edifying or useful. they proved nothing but the baseness of the vocation which gave them their existence. in fact from a legal standpoint in my opinion the reports are quite probative. first they were written contemporaneously with the events being described. this is important when trying a legal case. you want to have the best evidence you can get. memories fade. people forget. they start to remember things the way they want them to be remembered. so the fact that these reports were written the same day the events occurred, or maybe a day later, gives them an added measure of credibility. certainly more credibili

one of the detectives, timothy webster, joined a pro-secessionist cavalry company. harry davies, another detective, moved into the barnum hotel which was sort of ground zero for pro-secessionist, anti-lincoln sentiment. and he very quickly ingratiated himself with the more radical element in baltimore. kate warny, america's first professional female detective, is also down there. she presents herself and a genteel lady from montgomery, alabama. and so she's welcomed into the circles of the conspirators' wives and sisters. and as for pinkerton, he presented an office and opened up what he said was a stock brokerage firm and let it be known that he had strong southern sympathies. and soon he's in the pro-secessionist circles, too. at one point he's introduced to a man named cipriano ferendini, an immigrant from corsica, who had a barbershop in the basement of the barnum hotel. in spite of that background, he was a fire-breathing secessionist who declared out loud and at just about every opportunity, it seems, that the only way for the south to be free was for abraham