Ben Macintyre - The Napoleon of Crime - The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty

The commander of the Flushing Battery was a German-born shoemaker named Jacob Roemer, who had emigrated to New York in 1839. Captain Roemer was a fussy, irascible man with a thrusting beard, crossed eyes and the bristling face of a natural martinet. Vain, blustering and courageous to the point of insanity, many years later Roemer wrote a massively self-inflating memoir, apparently designed to prove that the author himself was primarily responsible for winning the war. Young Worth, Roemer’s fellow countryman by birth, seems to have caught the eye of his commander, for he was soon promoted to corporal and then, on 30 June 1862, to the rank of sergeant in command of his own cannon and five men. Worth was well on his way to becoming a successful soldier, but he had by now fallen into bad, and thoroughly congenial, company. ‘He became associatedwith some wild companions, whom he had met at dances and frolics’ while in New York, Pinkerton later recorded.

The life of the Flushing Battery was anything but frolicsome. For several months, the soldiers drilled on Long Island, learning to wheel the field guns under the obsessively critical inspection of Captain Roemer. Then, in early summer, Captain Jacob Roemer, five commissioned officers, Sergeant Adam Worth, 150 men, no horses, 12 baggage mules and a laundry woman packed up and headed south to join the rest of the Union Army under the command of that dithering incompetent, General Pope, deservedly one of the least remembered generals of the entire Civil War. In Washington they drilled some more, around the unfinished Capitol building. Worth clearly hated every moment, and even Roemer admitted that Camp Barry was a ‘mud hole’.

‘All we wantedwas a chance to prove our devotion and our loyalty to our country,’ the prickly and patriotic Roemer wrote. Worth already had other ideas. Indeed, his first taste of army life compounded a blossoming disrespect for authority.

During the early part of August the Union Army and the Confederates, under the command of Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, warily circled each other in the fields and hills of Virginia. The Flushing Battery took part in several violent skirmishes, but it was not until late August that Roemer’s men tasted the full horror of battle when the two sides met head on, for the second time in the war, near the stream known as Bull Run.

On the evening of 28 August, thanks largely to Captain Roemer’s absurd determination to cover himself and his men in glory and blood, the Flushing Battery found itself engaged at close quarters with the enemy in the middle of Manassas valley. Roemer enjoyed every moment. ‘Shot and shell flewthick and fast,’ he recalled, as the gunners fired off 207 rounds and somehow beat the enemy back. ‘I was triumphant,’ wrote Roemer. One of his terrified lieutenants, however, was found hiding under a bush and had to be removed, gibbering, from the field. The battery commander was in his element, belting around the battlefield expecting, perhaps even hoping, to be shot by the enemy and leaving a trail of appropriately heroic last words as he went. On the 30th he gave a pep-talk to his troops. ‘Boys, it is no longerof any use to keep from you what may be in store for us,’ he announced gleefully. ‘Before the sun sets to-night, many of you may have given up your lives; perhaps I myself will have to, but all I have to say is – Die like men; do not run like cowards. Stick to your guns, and, with the help of God and our own exertions, we may get through. Forward march.’ What Worth made of Roemer’s epic oratory may be deduced from his subsequent actions.

A few hours later L Battery was caught up in the fiercest engagement so far. ‘Bullets, shot and shellfell like hail in a heavy storm … bullets were dropping all around and shells were ploughing up the ground. Men were tumbling, horses were falling and it certainly looked as though “de kingdom was a-comin”,’ recalled Roemer, who had his horse shot from under him and received, to his transparent delight, a flesh wound in the right thigh. Finally the enemy retreated. The Union Army was soundly defeated at Bull Run, but the unstable Captain Roemer regarded the battle as an immense personal victory.

From Adam Worth’s point of view, however, the most intriguing 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 timeon 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 timeGeneral 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.’