Cumberland Landing, Va. Secret Service men at Foller’s House.
Seated behind the men at the table is the head of McClellan’s secret service of detectives and spies, “Major Allen,” smoking a pipe. Known as “E. J. Allen,” it is several years before his identity is revealed as Allen Pinkerton, a Scotchman who had emigrated to the United States about 20 years earlier and created a successful detective agency in Chicago. He had become the chief detective for McClellan when McClellan was in charge of the Department of the Ohio. Shortly after the first battle at Bull Run, Pinkerton brought his entire agency, men and women, into “information” work for the government. (info source: Signal Corps Association.)
Title is from “Civil War photographs, 1861-1865” compiled by Hirst D. Milhollen and Donald H. Mugridge, Washington, D.C. : Library of Congress, 1977
Photograph from the main eastern theater of war, the Peninsular Campaign
Photographed by James F. Gibson
Part of Civil War glass negative collection. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
Record pages for this image: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003000054/PP/
