"THE PERSONAL STORY OF ONE OF THE WAR'S TOP SECRET AGENTS": 1886 EDITION OF PINKERTON'S SPY OF THE REBELLION, IN ORIGINAL CLOTH

(CIVIL WAR) PINKERTON, Allan. The Spy of the Rebellion; Being a True History of the Spy System of the United States Army During the Late Rebellion… Compiled from Official Reports Prepared for President Lincoln, General McClellan and the Provost-Marshall-General. New York: G.W. Carleton, 1886. Thick octavo, original black- and gilt-stamped russet cloth.

1886 edition, posthumously issued, of the famed detective’s dramatic Civil War memoirs, recounting his thwarting of an assassination of Lincoln in 1861, his undercover role as a spy for the North, and much more, illustrated with frontispiece and 23 full-page engravings, in original cloth with Pinkerton's gilt-stamped legendary vignette and motto, "We Never Sleep."

The Spy of the Rebellion is "the personal story of one of the war's top secret agents" (Nevins II:82). In 1861, as the newly-elected President Lincoln was en route to Washington, he was accompanied by rumors of assassination. "Lincoln first received word of the plot through the detective Allan Pinkerton, responsible for guarding him on the trip," and Pinkerton also urged Mary, against her wishes, to travel separately through Baltimore as "Lincoln, wearing a felt hat in place of his familiar stovepipe, secretly boarded as special car" to the capital, accompanied by Pinkerton (Kearns Goodwin 310-11). On hearing of Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Pinkerton "experienced the loss of Lincoln as a sort of nightmarish inversion of the inaugural passage through Baltimore only four years earlier" (Bonansinga, Pinkerton's War, 239). During the war General McClellan, a friend of Pinkerton, asked him "to use his growing spy system to gather intelligence against the enemy. When McClellan was given command of the Army of the Potomac, Pinkerton, under the name Major E.J. Allen, headed an army spy system in Virginia, called the Secret Service… and after McClellan was dismissed in 1862, Pinkerton returned to his private detective business" (ANB). With frontispiece, lengthy appendix of infantry, cavalry, artillery, battery and miscellaneous regiments, and concluding chapter, "The Hardships and Privations of a Detective's Life," appearing after the appendix. First published in 1883. Issued by subscription: with New York title page imprint (this copy), and Chicago imprint, no priority determined. Broadfoot, 357. See Nevins I:13; II:82.

Interior with mere trace of scattered foxing, faint edge-wear, lightest soiling to bright original cloth. A handsome copy.