On this day in 1861

Born in Glasgow in 1819, Allan Pinkerton emigrated to the United States in 1842 and seven years later was appointed a police detective. In 1850, he founded the agency that would eventually become today’s Pinkerton National Detective Agency and, later that decade, was engaged to solve a series of train robberies. 

This helped him gain a thorough knowledge of the railways which would have been very useful when, in 1861, he was tasked with getting Abraham Lincoln safely to Washington DC for his inauguration.

Security for the President

Although the American Civil War was still some weeks away, trouble was already brewing, and Lincoln’s route would have taken him through confederate territory. Lincoln himself was on the side of the Union and he opposed slavery. This would have put him in grave danger as he journeyed through Maryland, which supported slavery, and the danger would have been heightened if he set foot in  Baltimore, where an apparent ‘Baltimore Plot’ had been formulated with a view to killing him in that city.

Lincoln’s schedule was well known, which Pinkerton saw as a problem. He advised the President Elect to skip his planned stop in Harrisburg so that his train could pass through Baltimore ahead of time, in the hope the assailants would miss him. Lincoln refused.

So, Pinkerton did the next best thing, and, on 22 February, he cut the telephone lines to Baltimore, and put Lincoln on a second train that arrived in Baltimore unannounced.

Lincoln delivered safely

Whether there actually was a plot to assassinate Lincoln as he passed through Baltimore remains a matter of debate, and the president received some criticism for not having met with the city’s residents on his way to Washington DC. However, history records that he made it safely to the capital the following day – 23 February – in time for his inauguration on 4 March.

Lincoln was assassinated on 15 April 1865, around five weeks into his second term of office, when shot in the back of the head by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser.

 

...and on this day in 1826

Banknotes aren’t real money, just promises to pay a debt owed. Previously, all banknotes were underpinned by an equivalent quantity of gold, which secured their value. However, when a bank had insufficient quantities of gold in its vaults it was technically unable to cash a note, which proved problematic in the aftermath of a crisis affecting English banks in the early 1800s.

British government thus ruled that no bank should produce a note worth less than £5, despite this posing particular problems for Scotland, where low value notes were the principal means of exchange, and whose banks had been largely unaffected by the crisis. Author Sir Walter Scott, who well understood the difficulties this could cause, took up his pen and wrote a series of three letters under the name Malachi Malagrowther, arguing against the ruling. He also noted that as it would be detrimental to Scotland in particular, it contravened clauses in the Acts of Union.

Clear and persuasive

Scott’s arguments were so clearly and cleverly constructed that they gained much public support and were debated in the House of Commons. As a result, Scotland was exempted from the bank on small value notes when it was implemented in England.

In an 1869 debate on currency in Ireland, MP Sir Frederick Heygate, recalled Malagrowther’s letters, telling the House, “In 1826 there was a great controversy in regard to an attack made by the Government on the £1 note currency of Scotland. Scotland was almost unanimously against such a change, and a famous series of letters then appeared on the subject in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal, under the signature of Malachi Malagrowther, and which were afterwards known to have been written by Sir Walter Scott. Malachi Malagrowther wrote thus — ‘Here stands Theory, a scroll in her hand full of deep and mysterious combinations of figures, the least failure in any one of which may alter the result entirely, and which you must take on trust, for who is capable to go through and check them? There lies before you a practical system, successful for upwards of a century. The one allures you with promises of untold gold, the other appeals to the miracles already wrought in your behalf. The one shows you provinces the wealth of which has been tripled under her management, the other a problem which has never been practically solved. Here you have a pamphlet there a fishing town; here the long-continued prosperity of a whole nation, and there the opinion of a professor of economics that in such circumstances she ought not, by true principles, to have prospered at all.’”

In other words, look at the evidence of our past successes, rather than unproven promises coming from the government. It was a simple and convincing argument, which won the day.