Secret Service

A unified economy was a goal that was dear to Abraham Lincoln. He believed everyone would benefit by a national currency, a bond that would transcend all conflicts and unhealthy competitions that existed in the nation at that time. (In addition to the corrosive divisions that precipitated the war between North and South, suspicion and ‘turf wars’ existed between cities and between states within all regions, between the heavily populated and industrial East coast and the sparsely populated and heavily agricultural West.) To counteract counterfeiting, Lincoln signed legislation, just hours before his death on April 14, 1865, permitting the creation of a special division of the Treasury called the Secret Service. This division was officially created on July 5, 1865. The Service’s initial and primary mission was to safeguard the nation’s new currency and thereby safeguard the nation’s integrity. Other duties included investigating crimes in customs houses, tax fraud and evasion, smuggling, and anything that threatened to cheat the U. S. government of its rightful income. In the 1870s, the Service was also asked to investigate actions of the KKK during Reconstruction in the South. The more familiar task of protecting the President and other notables came much later.

Funding for the Secret Service was at the pleasure of the Congress for nearly ninety years. Though Lincoln had signed legislation authorizing the formation of the Secret Service, no enabling act officially establishing such an agency was passed until 1951. Until that time, Congress decided year by year whether it would continue to fund the agency, and often did so with the greatest reservations. Meanwhile, the Service accepted more and more responsibility (e.g., in 1870, SS operatives also began working for the new Department of Justice in its campaign against the KKK), while often receiving proportionately less money to accomplish their goals. Less money meant fewer agents to cover the entire nation. In 1865, there were around twenty-five agents — or operatives, as they were originally called — some of them part-time. More than a few of these operatives were criminals themselves (it takes a criminal to catch a criminal), but by 1869, Congress had had enough of them. The second chief, Hiram C. Whitley, swept clean the force and started with new recruits. The force now numbered around twenty full-time operatives, supported by a large network of part-time employees (some of whom were counterfeiters themselves, striking bargains by working undercover for supervising agents). By 1874, scandal had rocked the division and the Service faced abolishment. In the end, all operatives were fired; only five were rehired, joined by five new recruits — ten men to cover the entire expanse of the United States.

The Secret Service was distrusted by the citizenry for reasons other than the unsavory character of its early operatives. The very idea of a ‘secret’ government entity sounded very un-republican to a people who prided themselves on self-rule and demanded transparency from their elected officials. The methods of the division were also objectionable — its operatives assumed disguises and engaged in the very activity they were paid to thwart. And the very word detective was anathema to Americans at the time; detectives were little better than spies, very much a hanging offense. Moreover, it seemed that these methods, objectionable in and of themselves, were used to entrap people into committing crimes. Thus, the Secret Service not only had to work hard at their day job, so to speak, but also at public relations, at convincing their constituency of their validity and integrity and the high priority of their work.

The Service was the first federal law enforcement force established since the U. S. Marshals whose duties were widespread and whose jurisdiction was the entire United States. Other law enforcement agencies that existed at the time were limited in their jurisdiction: the US Customs Service dealt with collecting tariffs and extending some security along borders; the US Park Police protected federal property in the District in Columbia; the Office of Instructions and Mail Depredations protected the mails. The US Marshals Service assisted federal district and circuit courts, including executing federal warrants. For this function, they were paid by the warrant. Because the Secret Service lacked the power of arrest, its operatives relied on US marshals to execute warrants for them. This was often an onerous process that relied on timing and cooperation, a process that was exceedingly frustrating for Service operatives. A certain devious creativity allowed the Service to circumvent the marshals, which denied the marshals their warrant fees, creating a somewhat adversarial working relationship between the two agencies.