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stormy night”—his favorite was Eugene Aram, which drew on the career of a real-life murderer and his eventual capture. At the outset, Bulwer-Lytton declared his belief that the case was “perhaps the most remarkable in the register of English crime,” and he insisted that the reader must examine the “physical circumstances and condition of the criminal” in order to “comprehend fully the lessons which belong to so terrible a picture of frenzy and guilt.” These lessons were not lost on Pinkerton, who judged the novel to be the greatest ever written. As a Dundee friend later recalled, “He didn’t think much of you if you disagreed with him on that.”
    If Bulwer-Lytton fired his imagination, Frederick Douglass sparked Pinkerton’s conscience. The newspapers at that time were filled with stories about Douglass, the escaped slave whose 1845 memoir— Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave —was becoming a touchstone of the abolitionist movement. Pinkerton was deeply moved by Douglass’s struggle, as well as by his eloquence. Soon, the political ideals of Pinkerton’s Chartist days found a new channel. “This institution of human bondage always received my earnest opposition,” he later wrote. “Believing it to be a curse to the American nation, and an evidence of barbarism, no efforts of mine were ever spared in behalf of the slave.” The first of these efforts, it appears, was to offer his services to Charles V. Dyer, a leading force in the Chicago chapter of an organization called the American Anti-Slavery Society. Dyer soon found a way for the only and original cooper of Dundee to make himself useful.
    The Underground Railroad—a secret network of meeting points, back-channel routes, and safe houses used by abolitionists to ferry runaway slaves north to free states and Canada—had been up and running for many years by this time. Writing in 1860, one former slave claimed that the operation got its name from a disgruntled slaveholder who could not understand how his “escaped chattel” had disappeared so completely: “The damned abolitionists must have a railroad under the ground,” he complained. Pinkerton admired the cunning and subterfuge of the enterprise. The circuitous routes were changed frequently to throw marshals and bounty hunters off the track, and the organizers made use of coded railroad terminology to protect the individual components of the system from discovery. The planners of the escape routes were known as “presidents of the road,” the guides who escorted the fugitives from place to place were “conductors,” the hiding places and safe houses were “stations,” and the ever-changing routes were “lines.” The fugitives themselves were variously known as “passengers,” “cargo,” or “commissions.”
    Within months, Pinkerton’s log cabin on the Fox River would become an active station on the Underground Railroad, being a useful stopping point on the journey north to Wisconsin and Canada. Though some of the Illinois stationmasters would be prosecuted for harboring slaves, Pinkerton made little effort to conceal his activities. Some of his passengers stayed long enough to receive instruction in the basics of barrel making, in the hope that the skills might prove useful to them as free men. Years later, Pinkerton spoke feelingly of his efforts at this time, and of his growing awareness that the issue of slavery threatened to divide the nation. “Above all,” he said, “I had hoped for the oppressed and shackled race of the South that the downfall of slavery would be early accomplished, and their freedom permanently established. I had the anti-slavery cause very much at heart, and would never have been satisfied until that gigantic curse was effectually removed.”
    For the moment, at least, Pinkerton had more immediate concerns. Although he claimed to be content with his “quiet, but altogether happy mode of life” in Dundee, he often