Civil War Union Espionage Agent. He will be remembered for his heroic acts as a detective for the Pinkerton's Detective Agency. By the time he was eight years old, Webster's parents with several of his eleven siblings immigrated from England to the United States and settled in Princeton, New Jersey. After being a New York City policeman, he joined in 1854 the newly-formed Allan Pinkerton's Detective Agency advancing quickly to being one of the best detectives in the agency. He was given credit for saving United States President Abraham Lincoln's life. He learned of a plot by a Southern secessionist group, the “Sons of Liberty”, to assassinate then President-elect Lincoln while changing trains in Baltimore, Maryland. He quickly alerted Pinkerton, who managed to sneak Lincoln through Baltimore on a different train, thus brought Lincoln safely to Washington, D.C. without incident. After the Civil War started in 1861, he was stationed in Richmond, Virginia, then given the task of spying on Confederate forces and reporting to Pinkerton. He traveled freely throughout the Confederate States gathering information for the Union Army. He became friends with Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, who recruited him to be a courier for the Confederate's " secret line" between Washington, Baltimore, and Richmond, hence he had duped the Confederacy hierarchy. Becoming a double agent, he alerted Pinkerton of every message carried for the confederacy. In February after sleeping on cold ground few nights, Webster fell ill with inflammatory rheumatism and was unable to continue his courier service. Concerned but using poor judgment, Pinkerton sent two other agents, John Scully and Pryce Lewis, to Richmond to see what had become of him. Both were recognized by locals as Pinkerton's Union spies, arrested and sentenced to death by hanging. During a confession to a Catholic priest, Scully somehow exposed Webster as a Union spy. After being arrested, a Confederate court-martial found Webster guilty of being a spy and was sentenced to death by hanging. Scully and Lewis made statements at Webster's Confederate court-martial; their statements were lost during the war; and they were released in a spy exchange nineteen months later. Timothy Webster would be the first person executed during the Civil War for acts of espionage. This was unusual as a spy exchange between Union and Confederate forces was usually arranged. President Lincoln and Allan Pinkerton did everything they could do but could not prevent Webster's execution as the Confederacy hierarchy wanted revenge. On April 28, 1862, as he saw his coffin waiting for his body, he was led to the gallows at Camp Lee in Richmond. Before his death, Webster asked the minister to read from the Bible one of David's Psalms that called upon God to destroy his enemies in the most horrible ways; the minister refused. The first attempt to hang him failed. When the trapdoor was released, there was a problem with the rope causing the knot to slip and Webster falling to the ground. Upon the second hanging attempt, Webster was reported to have said "I suffer a double death!" He was originally buried at Shockoe Hill Cemetery in Richmond. After the war in 1871, Webster's body was transported to his final resting place next to his son and father. Webster's only son, Timothy Jr., died after his leg was amputated in July 1864 in a Confederate Prisoner of War Camp at Mobile, Alabama. Allan Pinkerton would later say about Timothy Webster, "No braver nor truer man died during the War of the Rebellion than Timothy Webster." His marker states “I died for my country”.