Allen Pinkerton not the fraud we think?

prroh

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Honored Fallen Comrade
Joined
Oct 1, 2009
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Maryland
I attended a lecture tonight where the lecturer a well know academic and civil war historian said that Allen Pinkerton has gotten a bad rap for almost 145 years but recent research that the hugely inflated estimates that McClellan threw around, using Pinkerton as a source did not come from Pinkerton.

The assertion was made that Pinkerton's main task to to figure Order of Battle estimates. The reports he gave to McClellan would list three estimates low, probable and high. The estimates were high but not unrealistically so. He was trying to please his boss, after all. The estimates that McClellan threw around greatly exceeded Pinkerton's reports. McClellan never shared the contents of Pinkerton's reports so everyone assumed he was quoting the detective with maybe a 25% markup.

Anybody know about the fairly recent access to Pinkerton's reports that would show that McClellan basically ignored Pinkerton and used him as cover for his off the wall OOB estimates which were sometimes off by 400%?

If true, this is further proof that McClellan was even weirder than is generally believed.
 
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