The Cosgrove Report: Being the Private Inquiry of a Pinkerton Detective into the Death of President Lincoln

ISBN-13: 9780802144072

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic - Inc.

Publication Date: 02-03-2009

Pages: 424

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

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CHAPTER 1

A Mystery Is Exhumed

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I find myself in a strange world. The century in which I was pleased to reside for a matter of some sixty-five years is gone, like some mammoth steamship sunk to the bottom of the sea. The stately halls and ballrooms are hidden forever in the ocean depths, and live on only in the minds of survivors, such as myself. From time to time, books of memoirs appear, bits of flotsam broken free of the wreck that float to the surface. But soon even this decay will be complete, and the rusting hulk will have no more messages to send the world above. So, if ever I am to put in my own motto, I suppose the moment has arrived.

Unlike many of my fellow survivors, I write of events past not to celebrate my own importance as a witness to history. Rather, I write out of duty, and most reluctantly. I cannot take to my grave the Truth of which Chance and Fate have made me custodian. The late century was crowded with events that will bend the course of history for scores of generations to come, yet the true meaning of the most momentous act of those hundred years remains hidden. I seek only to lift the veil that enshrouds it. Thus, in adding to the growing burden of public reminiscences of the recently departed era, I have limited myself to an account of events that transpired during a period of only eighteen months, which began for me just outside New York Harbor on the bright, crisp morning of March 21, 1868.

I was aboard the City of New London, returning from a seven-month sojourn in England and the Continent. As the steamer waited a few miles south of Fire Island Light for the appearance of a New York Harbor pilot boat, I had a leisurely breakfast with my traveling companion, the cashier of a large New York bank. We shared this repast, not in the ship's dining room, as we had our other meals, but in the cargo hold. The man required some assistance with his knife and fork because, at my request, the master-at-arms had placed him in irons the previous night.

The banker had been the occasion for my European venture. He had absconded some eight months earlier with a large sum of his employer's cash. The bank retained Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, which it was then my honor to serve, and I was set onto the trail of the errant cashier. I tracked my quarry to Toronto and from there to Halifax, from whence he had boarded a steamer bound for Liverpool. The trail became warm when he bounded to Edinburgh, since an American is even less a Scot than he is an Englishman. When I flushed him from there to Paris, he was as good as caught, for he spoke not a word of French. Neither was he conversant with the celebrated wines of that country, and he failed to taste the few drops of chloroform that had been added to the glass of champagne served him by an avaricious lady in a Marseilles bordello. But when he awoke to the rhythmic pulsing of the New London's engines as they churned Mediterranean water some hours later, he found himself once more among his countrymen.

He was moderately philosophical about his fate, however, not the least reason for which was his excellent position to negotiate a degree of clemency from the authorities. The majority of his booty remained unspent in banks from Toronto to Paris, and his cooperation in the recovery of these sums would save his former employer some considerable inconvenience. In making my hurried special arrangements for passage with the captain of the New London, I stipulated that my prisoner could have the freedom of the ship when it was out of sight of land. Until we rounded South Shoal lightship, the banker had worn irons only once before, when we stopped at Liverpool and I went ashore to cable ahead to Pinkerton's in New York.

The esteemed George Bangs, head of Pinkerton's New York Office, was surely waiting at dockside with a brace of New York policemen to take charge of the prisoner. Bangs would be there in person in anticipation of meeting the mysterious Cosgrove; few in the detective agency other than Allan Pinkerton himself knew my face, a precaution I forced on Mr. Pinkerton as a condition of my employment after the death of Timothy Webster. Tim, with whom I served in the New York constabulary before we both joined Pinkerton's prior to the War, was betrayed to the Confederates by a cowardly fellow detective and hanged. Since then, I have refused to be photographed, mastered the art of disguise and insisted that no one but Mr. Pinkerton himself should know my countenance. George Bangs was to be no exception. I sent for a porter to take my luggage on deck as soon as the sails of the pilot boat were sighted through the morning mists.

The schooner James Funk luffed to under our quarter, and launched a small boat. Some minutes later a man in a black suit and top hat climbed on deck and was handed up a small valise and a sheaf of papers. As I prepared to take his place in the boat for the trip back to the schooner, he stopped me.

"Mr. Nichols?" he asked, using the pseudonym with which I sign my reports.

I nodded, and he handed me a telegram, then went on about his business. I climbed into the boat, and as the seamen cast off from the New London, I ran a thumbnail beneath the flap of the envelope. The message was terse and emphatic:

TO: C. N. Nichols, aboard the City of New London: Urgent you join me in court.

E. J. Allen

"E. J. Allen" was Mr. Pinkerton's favorite nom de guerre, which he had adopted while serving as General McClellan's Chief of Intelligence during the War. The "court" was a code word meaning Washington City. Since he hadn't specified otherwise, I knew that Mr. Pinkerton meant I should meet him at a certain house on K Street. The "urgent" was unnecessary; the pains that had been taken to deliver the message to me on the high seas was a most eloquent announcement that, whatever the reason for the summons, time was of the essence.

A brisk March wind filled the schooner's sails, and well before noon we had tied up amidst the forest of masts and smokestacks at the foot of Wall Street. A uniformed officer from the nearby Customs House inspected my luggage on the pier, and within twenty minutes I was walking through the crowded lobby of the Astor House, where I maintained a suite of rooms on a permanent basis. I stopped only long enough to pack a fresh valise and settle my accounts with the bewildered room clerk before hailing a cab to take me to the ferry landing at the foot of Cortlandt Street. I reached the railroad station in Jersey City with time enough to send a telegraph ahead to Mr. Pinkerton before boarding the noon train for Washington City.

The cars were somewhat crowded, which was as well, since the human heat greatly abetted the work of the cast-iron coal stoves in driving off a late winter chill that had descended over the Jersey marshlands. Toward the front of the car I had selected, I recognized a cardsharp and his shill busily engaged in a game of three-card monte, before a fascinated audience of prospective pigeons. Before the sharp could glance up, I moved back to the next car and took a seat beside a well-dressed but gaunt man who seemed absorbed in a late morning edition of the New York Sun. Whatever he was reading seemed to disagree with him, or he with it, for he soon began to recite a sotto voce litany of sighs, exclamations and mutterings. Finally he cast the newspaper down and exclaimed, "The cowardly scoundrel!"

It was not clear whether this remark was addressed to me or to himself. I turned to him, lifted an eyebrow, and begged his pardon. He struck the folded newspaper with the back of his hand as though it were a despised adversary.

"The Great Criminal, Andrew Johnson," he said. "By this account he means to cower in the White House on Monday, instead of facing the bar of justice like a man."

My face betrayed my puzzlement.

"Can it be you haven't heard that Judas Johnson is to be tried in the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors?" he asked.

The matter had received little notice in the European press, and the press had received scant attention from myself, busy as I was in pursuit of the errant banker. I knew almost nothing of the matter, beyond the meaning of the word "impeachment," which I looked up when I first heard it some months earlier.

"I believe I heard something of the sort, but I have only just returned from the Western Territories by sea. I haven't seen an eastern newspaper in weeks."

It transpired that my companion was in the employ of a newspaper, and one familiar to me, the Cincinnati Gazette. His name was Reed, and he was on his way to Washington to report on the Impeachment Trial, an assignment which he seemed to find eminently agreeable. It struck me that the coming hours of enforced confinement with this student of political science provided me a splendid opportunity to come up to date on events in Washington City, and perhaps lend me some clew to the reason for Mr. Pinkerton's summons.

I introduced myself to my companion as Charles Nichols, a traveling canvasser for Hostetter Stomachic Bitters, a popular nostrum of the time.

"A wineglass full of these bitters taken three times a day is a certain cure for dyspepsia," I recited as I took a bottle of the product from my valise, drew the cork and offered it to the journalist. "It improves the appetite, prevents fever and ague, and removes all flatulency."

"Would that it could remove that flatulent Tennessee tailor from the White House and so spare the country the task of trying him," said Reed, after taking a long pull from the vessel.

Whatever else Dr. Hostetter added to his bitters, one part in four was pure grain alcohol, a fact that I, along with thousands of my comrades, discovered during the War. I cannot say whether the potion truly aided digestion, but I had often observed its effectiveness in loosening the tongue. And my disguise as a purveyor of the bitters provided a natural occasion to administer it when the need for such loosening arose. But no hidden motive lay behind the hospitality I offered Mr. Reed, for it was clear even before the spirits reached his brain that he was making ready to deliver a disquisition on the high crimes and misdemeanors that had led to the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.

The specific offense that led to the Great Criminal's impeachment, my companion explained, was his attempt to remove the Secretary of War in defiance of the wishes of the Senate. This was a brazen violation of the Tenure of Office Act, which had been passed only a year earlier by Congress. The act decreed that public officials appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate could only be discharged in the same manner. After the Senate voted thirty-five to six against the dismissal of Secretary Edwin McMasters Stanton, Johnson abandoned the rule of law that governs civilized men and sent one of his lackeys to evict the Secretary from the War Department. But, while this was the final outrage, the journalist declaimed, it was by no means the only one, or even the worst.

I do not involve myself in politics, but even I was aware of the ill will between the President and Congress that had been festering for more than a year. Andy Johnson was a Southerner, but never a Rebel. A man of humble origins who had earned his bread with his hands, he hated and resented the aristocratic leaders of the Old South. When the War came, he was serving in Congress, the Senator from Tennessee, but he resigned his seat to accept a commission as Brigadier General and Military Governor of Tennessee. He yielded to no man in his hatred of the Confederacy, and when he was nominated as President Lincoln's running mate in June, 1864, Senator Sumner of Massachusetts wished the ticket could be stood upon its head, with Johnson in the prime place. Sumner was one of the Radical Republicans who demanded the South be shown no mercy. But, ironically, he was one of the leaders of the pack now calling for the President's scalp.

Indeed, the Radical Republicans' displeasure with Andy Johnson was only a sequel to the umbrage inspired in them by President Lincoln, who looked upon the defeated Secessionists as strayed sheep returned to the fold. When Johnson suddenly ascended to the presidency, Sumner and his fellows believed this Rebel-hater would help them realize their dreams of plunder and vengeance. But within two months those dreams were shattered, when President Johnson ordered complete amnesty and pardon to hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers, and stipulated surprisingly mild terms for the reconstruction of North Carolina.

It was the first shot in the war between Andy Johnson and the Radicals. During the next three years he would be accused of everything from entreating with the enemy while Military Governor of Tennessee to conspiring with Booth in the murder of President Lincoln. In the end it would come down to the question of the President's power to discharge Edwin McMasters Stanton, the only ally of the Radicals within Johnson's cabinet. The articles of impeachment had been voted in the House of Representatives, and the Senate trial was to commence on Monday. The Washington City toward which we sped through that waning March afternoon was a city divided; a full battalion of troops stood guard at the War Department, where Secretary Stanton was completing his thirtieth day of continuous occupancy. In the White House, the five lawyers who would defend the President in the Impeachment Trial conferred with their client. Throughout the city rumors spread of Rebel sympathizers placing explosives in public buildings. There was intrigue enough for an army of secret detectives to deal with.

By the time Mr. Reed had completed his account of these matters in far greater detail than I have repeated here, we had gone through the cities of Philadelphia and Wilmington, as well as three bottles of Hostetter's Bitters. My companion discovered the medicine to be a most agreeable tonic, and had consumed the larger portion. As we departed the depot in Baltimore on the last leg of our journey, he was snoring in close harmony with the whistle of the steam engine that drew us toward our troubled capital.

The countryside through which we passed was now in the grip of a winter storm, and a thick curtain of snow dimmed the lights of the occasional farmhouse standing off in the early evening darkness. It was past ten o'clock when I felt the train slow to a crawl as it passed the city limits of Washington. I took out my watch and set it back twelve minutes. Shortly I glimpsed the lights of the Capitol through the car window as we approached the old Baltimore and Ohio station at the foot of Capitol Hill. Leaving my traveling companion where he slumbered, I arose, picked up my valise and stepped out onto the rear balcony. It was a cloudy, moonless night and a few flakes of snow still fell, but the light coming from within the car illuminated the roadbed on either side of the train. We had slowed to the pace of a fast walk. I climbed down the steps and jumped to the ground, then made my way across the tracks to C Street. He who seeks to obscure his comings and goings is well advised to avoid railroad stations.

Some hundred yards from the station I found a young Negro lad dozing at the reins of a covered carriage parked just beyond the flickering aureole cast by a nearby street lamp. It was Patch, a footman in the K Street household of a close friend of Mr. Pinkerton. I wakened him and climbed into the vehicle.

Washington City had changed since the War. Gone were the throngs of soldiers, camp followers and peddlers who crowded the capital. It seemed that more of the streets had been lighted, but Pennsylvania Avenue, along which the carriage rattled, remained one of the few thoroughfares to have been paved. Just past the gas-lit facade of the White House, the War Department was bathed in torchlight. True to Mr. Reed's report, the building was ringed by armed sentries. We turned onto 17th Street, and the team slowed as the carriage wheels sank into the mud.

My journey ended in the doorway of a stately three-story mansion on K Street, where I was met by Mr. Pinkerton, himself. He solemnly shook my hand and ushered me into a sitting room at the front of the house. The drapes had been drawn across the windows, and Mr. Pinkerton quickly glanced about the empty vestibule before pulling shut the pair of doors separating it from our chamber. He strode across the room, seated himself and bid me do the same. When he spoke it was in hushed tones calculated to carry not even so far as the ornately papered walls.

"Thank you for your promptness, Nicholas. I feared ye would not arrive until the morrow."

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Excerpted from "The Cosgrove Report"
by .
Copyright © 1979 George O'Toole.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword,
PART ONE John Wilkes Booth, Dead or Alive,
1. A Mystery Is Exhumed,
2. A Five-Cent Clew,
3. The Custodian of Military Dispatches,
4. Dinner with the Devil,
5. The Restless Remains,
6. One of the Strangest Coincidences in History,
PART TWO Magic and Mystery,
7. An Inquiry into an Inquest,
8. "The Preceptor of All Great Magicians",
9. The Blind Photographer,
10. A Hand from the Dead,
PART THREE Riddles Within the Mystery,
11. The Shadows Gather,
12. In the Crypt,
13. A Charming Secret Detective,
14. Conjuring in the Countryside,
15. The "Glory-to-God" Man,
16. "Stand and Deliver!",
17. A Profitable Bargain,
PART FOUR Dr. Stewart's Secret,
18. A Theft Is Investigated,
19. An Honest Man,
20. Edwin Stanton's Secret,
21. A Mendicament for Mendacity,
PART FIVE The Twelfth Article of Impeachment: Assassination,
22. High Crimes, Misdemeanors and Murder,
23. The Gentleman from Kansas,
24. Cosgrove Confesses,
25. Saddles, Steamboats and Shank's Mare,
PART SIX Nicholas Cosgrove's Report,
26. Some Remarkable Disclosures,
27. Secretary Stanton in the Dock,
28. President Johnson Explains,
29. A Verdict of a Single Vote,
PART SEVEN The End of the Game,
30. A Major Disclosure,
31. The Letter of the Truth,
32. The Players Palace,
33. A Secret Place,
34. The Magic Box,
35. Pursuit Above the Clouds,
36. High Risk,
37. The Prisoner's Tale,
38. In Quest of Myself,
Afterword,
Appendix: Professor Haselmayer's Magic Tricks,
Bibliography,