href="#litres_trial_promo">‘entered school when six years of age, and was very soon after, as he himself stated, drawn into a trade with a boy larger than himself, who offered to give him a brand new penny for two old ones’. The child Worth, finding the newly minted coin a more attractive object than his two old ones, agreed to the swap and returned home to show his father, who ‘gave him a most unmerciful whipping’, thus ‘impressing on him the value of the new penny as against his two old ones’.
‘From that day until his death, no one, be he friend or foe, honest or dishonest, Negro or Indian, relative or stranger, ever got the better of Adam Worth in any business transactions, regular or irregular,’ Pinkerton concluded.
The young Worth grew up, or rather did not grow up, to be small in stature, measuring between five feet four and five feet five, according to police records. Contemporaries made much of his lack of height, and his criminal colleagues, who were nothing if not literal when it came to the allocation of sobriquets, called him ‘Little Adam’. In reality, for an age when human beings were appreciably smaller than they are now, he was not much below average height, but it suited the purposes of those who could not help admiring him to make our man out to be a midget, for thus his evil-doing was magnified and his ability to thwart authority appeared the more remarkable. When the Scotland Yard detective Robert Anderson called him ‘the Napoleon of the criminal world’, he was referring not only to the man’s nefarious accomplishments and criminal stature, but also to his contrasting lack of inches. The undersized Worth quickly developed an outsized Napoleonic complex.
Worth’s height was always the first physical feature noted by the various detectives, policemen, crooks and lovers who came into contact with him. The second was his eyes, which were dark, almost black, penetrating voids beneath shaggy eyebrows, suggestive of intelligence and determination. When he became enraged, which was seldom, they bulged unpleasantly. He had thick hair, which he wore short and combed to one side, a prominent curved nose and, in later life, a long moustache which curled across his cheeks to meet a pair of mighty side whiskers.
If Worth’s tough childhood left him with a cynical determination to outdo his peers by guile, it also seems to have imbued him with an intense romanticism. As his father scraped together a living to keep his brood alive in the malodorous hovel that was the Worth family home, his eldest son’s imagination released him to a world of grand dinners, fine apparel and civilized conversation.
In the Harvard students who paraded through Cambridge, the immigrant Jewish urchin had ample opportunity to observe the outward show of wealth and privilege. The brighter the penny, he saw, the easier the counterfeit. Ashamed of his lowly origins, frustrated by impecunity, the young Worth clearly felt himself to be the equal of the finest of the young gentlemen strutting Boston Common. Their wealth and sophistication provoked ambivalent feelings, of envy, resentment and anger, but also of admiration and desire. Worth resolved to ‘better’ himself.
America, then as now, promised all things to all men, even if it did not always deliver. It was a time when ‘ambition’, as Cardinal Newman wrote, ‘sets everyone on the lookout to succeed and to rise in life, to amass money, to gain power, to depress his rivals, to triumph over his hitherto superiors, to affect a consequence and a gentility which he had not before’. Worth shared those aspirations, and would eventually realize them. His methods alone would set him apart from other ‘self-made men’, for what others had earned, inherited or bought, he would simply steal, winning respectability by robbery, effrontery and fraud. Where his father had toiled to make clothes for the vanity of rich men, Worth would spin himself the dazzling outfit of a pretender, from pilfered cloth.
But it would be wrong to see the young Worth as merely a creature of immorality, a natural-born wrecker of the social fabric. From an early age he espoused many of the worthiest principles: loyalty to family and friends, the virtues of hard work, perseverance, generosity, charity and courage. As he entered his teens Little Adam was already evolving into a character of many and conflicting parts: selfish, greedy and generous to a fault, at once ruthless and romantic. He regarded his fellow men, and particularly his social superiors, with undiluted cynicism, yet he would never swindle a friend, rob a poor man or harm the harmless. He was acutely aware of the difference between right and wrong and evolved a code of behaviour that he held with the same resolute conviction as would any pillar of society, while he turned society’s codes upside down. Adam Worth had plenty of time for morals; it was laws he disdained. The hard, uncertain circumstances of Worth’s early life left him with the deeply held conviction that it was possible to be a ‘good’ man, at least in his own estimation, while pursuing a life of calculated deceit.
As he emerged from a deprived childhood into an adolescence that offered little better, Worth took the fateful decision to rid himself of his first, unglamorous life. At the age of fourteen, Worth ran away from home, leaving behind his humble parents and their status as social outcasts. The idea of a career in crime and imposture may not yet have formed in his young mind, but Worth already knew what he did not want. He never again set foot inside his childhood home, but a need for family love, and perhaps also for the strong father-figure that his own father never was, marked the rest of his restless existence.
After some months of leading ‘a vagabond life in the city of Boston’, he drifted to New York where he took, for the first and only time, an honest job as a clerk ‘in one of the leading stores in New York City’. Worth never offered any details of this brief flirtation with paid work, master criminals being notoriously touchy about that sort of thing, and the experiment was, anyway, cut short by the start of the American Civil War. At the age of seventeen, the store clerk from Massachusetts promptly abandoned the tedious job of filling in ledgers, and joined a New York regiment in the Union Army preparing to march south for battle.
Worth’s name first appears in the register of the 34th New York Light Artillery, better known as the Flushing or ‘L’ Battery, which assembled in Long Island. He was officially mustered into the regiment in New York City on 28 November 1861, and received a ‘bounty of $1,000’, according to Pinkerton. Many young recruits inflated their ages upon joining up, to appear more mature than they were and thus hasten possible promotion. The seventeen-year-old Worth gave his age as twenty, his first recorded lie.
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 associated with 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
