The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
fact about the engagement at Bull Run is that he did not, officially speaking, survive it.
Roemer was unemotional in recording the passing of young Worth: ‘During this battle, generally known as the Second Battle of Bull Run or Manassas, 29-30 August 1862, the casualties in Battery L were fourteen enlisted men wounded (including Sergeant Adam Wirth [sic], mortally wounded) besides myself, three horses killed and 21 wounded.’ According to his army records, Adam Worth died at the Seminary Hospital, Georgetown, on 25 September from wounds received at the battle three weeks earlier.
What really happened to Adam Worth at Bull Run must be a matter of speculation for, unlike Roemer and for obvious reasons, he did not write his war memoirs. Certainly he was wounded during the engagement. He later boasted of the fact, yet the injury does not appear to have been serious. At some point between 30 August, when he was carried from the battlefield, and 25 September, when he was officially listed as dead, Worth successfully made his escape. Perhaps he swapped his identification with another, mortally wounded soldier, or perhaps in the confused aftermath of battle when so many injured and dying were crammed into the nation’s capital, he merely ended up as a fortuitous clerical error, marked down on the wrong list. Either way, Worth emerged from the battlefields of Virginia with only a superficial wound and an entirely new identity. Adam Worth was now officially no more, and thus could move on without fear of pursuit. For the first time, but not the last, he reinvented himself and became a professional ‘bounty jumper’.
Over the coming months Worth established a system: he would enlist in one regiment under an assumed name, collect whatever bounty was being offered, and then promptly desert. Thus he drifted from one part of the sprawling army to another, changing his alias at every stop and developing a talent for masquerade that would later become a full-time profession. William Pinkerton, who was himself a young soldier in the Union Army at the time, reported that Worth, after his first desertion and re-enlistment, was ‘stationed for a time on Riker’s island, N.Y. [and] from there he was conveyed by steamship to the James River in Virginia, where he was assigned to one of the New York regiments in the Army of the Potomac.’ Although the war convinced Worth of the futility of violence, his desertions were prompted by avarice rather than cowardice, and he repeatedly found himself in the thick of battle including, according to Pinkerton, the famous Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, an engagement scarcely less ferocious than the Battle of Bull Run.
Desertion was a lucrative but highly risky business. ‘On his third enlistment,’ according to one of his criminal associates, ‘he was recognised as a bounty jumper, and was in consequence sent, in company with others of his class, chained together, to the front of the Army of the Potomac.’ Once more, Worth somehow emerged unscathed; he promptly deserted and re-enlisted again. There was clearly a limit to how long Worth could get away with changing regiments so, in a remarkable act of brass cheek, he now decided to change sides. As a contemporary wrote: ‘About this time General Lee of the Southern Army issued a proclamation to the effect that all Federal soldiers who would desert from the Federal armies to the Confederate lines, bringing their arms with them, would receive thirty dollars from the Confederate Government, and also receive a free pass to cross the frontier back into the United States by way of the adjoining States of West Virginia and Kentucky.’
The aspiring crook, untroubled by niceties such as loyalty to the Union cause, immediately ‘took advantage of these exceptionally liberal terms, and deserted one night in company with some others, while doing picket duty’. He did not linger in the South, and having collected his thirty dollars travelled back ‘through the Confederate States on foot, in order to gain the frontier of the Northern States’. He would doubtless have repeated the process several more times, but before he could do so the war came to an end, and so did the first phase of Worth’s criminal career.
Worth was just one of thousands of young soldiers to find themselves at loose ends with the declaration of peace. William Pinkerton, a man who came to play a defining role in Worth’s life and was to become his most reliable chronicler, was another. Before long the two men would become adversaries on either side of the law, then grudging mutual admirers, then co-conspirators and finally, most bizarrely, friends. Their paths did not cross until the war’s end, but already they were dark and light reflections of one another. Like the bright and tarnished pennies of Worth’s childhood, they were similar in value but utterly different in lustre.
The elder son of Allan Pinkerton, a Scotsman who had founded the great detective agency in Chicago in 1850, William Pinkerton was Worth’s exact contemporary and had enrolled in the Union Army at much the same time. Where Worth’s early life had been marked by material want and a complete absence of moral guidance, Pinkerton was brought up in well-to-do Chicago under a regime of the strictest ethical rules. Allan Pinkerton was a superb detective but a brutal father and a fantastic prig who hammered the virtues of honesty, integrity and raw courage into his children and employees with something close to fanaticism. William did his best to live up to these exacting standards, but could never be quite good enough. Working with his father, Abraham Lincoln’s official spymaster, William Pinkerton not only ran agents across the border into Confederate territory but was also present on the first flight of an observation hot-air balloon during the Civil War. Brave, bluff and energetic, Pinkerton was wounded in the knee by an exploding shell at the Battle of Antietam, having already ‘gained experience that was invaluable to him in the vocation which he was to follow’. He attended Notre Dame College in Indiana for a year and then joined his father’s fast-growing detective agency where he soon established a reputation as a tireless lawman, one of the first and perhaps the greatest of the American detective breed. The Pinkertons chose as their symbol an unblinking human eye and the motto ‘The Eye that Never Sleeps’, from which the modern term ‘private eye’ has evolved.
The lives and subsequent careers of Worth and Pinkerton starkly demonstrate the moral duality that so obsessed Victorians. They shadowed and echoed one another, the detective playing Holmes to Worth’s Moriarty, yet they were birds of a feather in their tastes, attitudes and opinions. Both, to a remarkable degree, represented typical American stories of self-created men from immigrant stock, rugged in their opportunism, sturdy in their beliefs, but at opposite poles of conventional morality. Worth would have made an outstanding detective; Pinkerton, a talented criminal. The American Civil War was a grimly levelling experience, but its end allowed the country to begin to rebuild and reinvent itself once more. The two men emerged from the battlefields determined, like thousands of others, to make their mark. They took diametrically opposed routes to that goal, but a lifetime later the bounty jumper and the war hero would end up, in a way neither could have predicted, on the same side.
Pinkerton’s had been a remarkable war, but then the official military record of Sergeant Adam Worth was also one of unblemished bravery and tragic heroism: a young and promising soldier mortally wounded while defending the Union on the battlefield at Bull Run. In truth, of course, he had spent the war dodging the authorities, swapping sides, abandoning the flags of two rival armies and collecting a tidy profit along the way.
AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, Worth drifted, like so many other veterans, to New York City which, by the mid-1860s, had already become one of the most concentratedly criminal places on earth. The politicians were up for sale, the magistrates and police were corrupt, the poor often had little choice but to steal while the rich sometimes had little inclination not to, since they tended to get away with it. Seldom has history conspired to assemble, on one small island, such a vivid