Kate Warne, America's First Female Private Detective

TTL News · January 24, 2021

What does Kate Warne, the first American private detective, have to do with the Twin Tiers and presidential history? Read on to find out!

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The young woman smiled as she met her brother at a train station in Philadelphia on the evening of February 22, 1861. Her sibling was tall but stooped over and covered in a shawl, rendering his facial features difficult for passerby to discern. To anyone who asked, she explained that her brother had taken ill and needed some breathing room.

On the sleeper car of the passenger train, the woman slipped cash to the conductor, urging him to avoid placing anyone else at the rear of the car. Accompanied by three other men in addition to her sibling, she settled in for a long night’s train ride.

It was no ordinary trip, however. The woman had lied when she said the man was her brother. In fact, he was president-elect Abraham Lincoln, traveling through a hotbed of secessionist activity on his way to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. Her name was Kate Warne—and she was the first female private detective in America.

Warne, in a photo dated 1866

Given her status as a pioneer in law enforcement, surprisingly little is known about Warne’s past. No verified photos of her are known to exist, and she left behind no comprehensive chronicle of her landmark work. Then again, adopting various guises in the pursuit of intelligence meant that obscuring her true history was often a matter of professional obligation.

Warne was born in Erin, New York, in 1830 or 1833. Coming from a family of modest means, she had only a limited education. She was interested in becoming an actress, but her family opposed the idea and she soon abandoned that ambition. While she later described herself as a widow, there are no details about her marriage or the fate of a husband, who reportedly died in an accident. Warne’s life seemed to begin in 1856, when the 23-year-old walked into the Pinkerton National Detective Agency offices in Chicago and declared that she would like to become a detective.

Pinkerton was named for and run by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant who worked as a deputy sheriff and for the Chicago police department. In the 1850s, he opened a private agency that soon had offices in several major cities. The Pinkerton name became renowned for its diligent approach to complicated matters that perplexed local law enforcement.

Pinkerton had high standards, but he was also prey to the gender biases of the era. Female police officers or detectives were virtually unheard of at the time, and Pinkerton assumed the young woman in front of him—whom he later described as “slender, graceful in her movements, and perfectly self-possessed in her manner” with “eyes filled with fire”—was looking for secretarial work.

Warne corrected him. She pointed out that he had placed an ad looking for new hires and that she had come to Pinkerton for the express purpose of becoming a private detective. She explained that his force lacked a key component when it came to gathering intelligence—being able to assume the role of a woman’s confidante. By ingratiating herself, she said, she would be likely to discover information about crimes plotted by husbands, who tended to make their wives privy to schemes that involved enriching the family’s coffers. And she would also be able to take advantage of the fact that men tended to brag when women were around.