Lincoln's Grave Robbers

“Ben was tempted by the idea of making money—literally making it. And he learned quickly from Kinsey. At the age of twenty, hunched over the desk in his room at his father’s house, he cut his first two counterfeit plates: the front and back of a $20 bill.”

Benjamin Boyd, the son of a master engraver and a talented engraver himself, quickly fell under the spell of Nat Kinsey, a renowned engraver of landscapes who was also secretly a counterfeiter. Boyd soon began crafting the best counterfeit plates in the business. His arrest in 1875 was such a blow to the coney network in the United States that drastic schemes were devised to free him—including the attempted theft of Abraham Lincoln’s body.

“By 1864 an astounding 50 percent of the paper money in circulation was fake.”

The US federal government only began mass-producing paper money in 1861, to help pay for the Civil War, and it was slow to mount an effective response to counterfeiting, which soon ran rampant. Within a few years, the situation had reached a crisis point: The fraudulence of much of the country’s currency threatened not only the war effort but the entire US economy.

“And it just so happened that Big Jim had a job for them. He wanted them to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln.”

In 1876, James “Big Jim” Kennally, determined to get Ben Boyd out of jail, makes an extraordinary proposal to the Logan County Gang, a counterfeiting ring located in Logan County, Illinois, near the site of the Lincoln Monument. His usual method of pressuring authorities by giving them bribes has failed, so Kennally has conceived a plan to hold the body of America’s most beloved president for ransom.

“Someone in the room asked if the undertaker should try and hide the bruising. ‘No,’ Stanton said. ‘This is part of the history of the event.’”

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who has just presided over one of the bloodiest conflicts of the century, chooses not to sanitize the brutal murder of the president by a Confederate sympathizer. Stanton insists that the bruises on Lincoln’s head be left fully visible to the thousands who will view his body lying in state. However, when Lincoln reaches his final destination (Springfield, Illinois, where he lived for over 20 years), the bruises have gotten so much worse that a local undertaker is finally summoned to apply a cosmetic so the sight will not horrify mourner.

“Meanwhile, in Springfield, a battle was brewing over the body. Mary Todd Lincoln insisted her husband be laid to rest in a quiet cemetery away from the center of town—it’s what he had told her he wanted. But Lincoln’s friends argued he should be buried right in the city, with a grand tomb and memorial for all to see.”

In 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s widow disappointed the president’s friends by having him buried in a modest grave in Oak Ridge Cemetery, well outside the city limits of Springfield, Illinois. However, years later, a sort of compromise was reached when Lincoln’s friends formed an organization called the Lincoln Monument Association to fund an elaborate monument at Oak Ridge, complete with a 117-foot obelisk, to hold Lincoln’s body. This massive tomb, which included a marble sarcophagus, made the bodysnatchers’ work considerably more difficult.

“‘Whisky alone is entitled to the credit of having thwarted this well-laid scheme to steal the remains of President Lincoln,’ recalled John Carroll Power.”

The Logan County Gang’s elaborate plans to rob Lincoln’s unguarded tomb went up in smoke when one of the gang members got drunk in a Springfield bar and boasted about the operation to a local woman. Soon, the news was all over town. Aside from drunkenness, a frequent liability to any secret plot is downtime. With three weeks to kill before the planned break-in, the nervous conspirators found it increasingly difficult to keep their audacious scheme to themselves.

“What made Brown perfect was his fluency in tough street language. ‘He can talk crooked,’ explained Swegles. ‘He had driven a hack and learned all the slang.’”

Billy Brown was, in reality, a law-abiding citizen named Bill Neely, but his fluency in criminal slang impressed the plotters, who agreed to take him on as a fourth man. He knew nothing about safecracking, but with Swegles’s help, he was able to bluff his way into the operation because of his fluency in the slang the criminals and counterfeiters used.

“When Big Jim Kennally approached government officials to negotiate for the return of Lincoln’s body, they’d demand evidence that Kennally really had the body. Kennally could produce the other half of the newspaper, the one hidden in the hub. Its ripped edges would fit perfectly together with the half left in Lincoln’s tomb.”

Kennally anticipates using a simple trick to convince the authorities that he has Lincoln’s body, since he cannot produce the stolen body until the ransom is paid. Interestingly, his newspaper gimmick resembles the “proof of life” still used by kidnappers of live people, whereby a photo of the victim holding up a recent newspaper is sent to the victim’s family as proof that their loved one is in their hands and was still alive on that date.

“‘You think, as I did, that there was no human being so foul as to conceive such a horrible and damnable an act,’ Tyrrell wrote to Chief Brooks. ‘But Sir, I am sorry to say that there is.’”

A major reason officials did not take warnings of the graverobbing plot more seriously is that few people, especially those in government, wanted to believe that Americans were capable of such a sacrilegious crime against one of their nation’s most beloved figures. This also explains why there was no hue and cry to track down the Logan County Gang and their honcho, James Kennally. The very depravity of the scheme aided the plotters and almost led to their success.

“A sort of labyrinth, Power explained—a series of thick walls holding up the massive obelisk above, with narrow, mazelike passages between the walls.”

The inner, “mazelike” structure of the Lincoln Monument resembles that of an ancient Egyptian tomb or pyramid, and these were designed to confound graverobbers and thieves. However, the Monument also features a guide—Power himself—who shows all visitors through the maze and answers their every question, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the labyrinthine design.

“Tyrrell later blamed George Hay’s accidental gunshot for alerting the body snatchers and allowing them to escape, but he was equally to blame.”

George Hay, one of Tyrrell’s armed agents, clumsily alerted the graverobbers by accidentally discharging his firearm while running to apprehend them. However, Tyrrell had already bungled the ambush by waiting too long to spring his trap. Also, his plan—to have all of his personnel hide in the mazelike tomb rather than station some outside—was misguided from the start.

“But their crook’s instincts told them not to stand around in this enclosed space—they’d be safer waiting outside, where they could spot anyone coming, and where escape routes existed.”

Once the graverobbers had pulled Lincoln’s coffin partly out of the sarcophagus and had gauged its weight, the hardest part was done; all that remained now was for them to wait for Billy Brown and his cart. Naturally, they decided to wait outside, where they could escape at a moment’s notice. Somehow, Tyrrell had not foreseen this possibility.

“The hungry strangers appeared to be on the run, they agreed, and were probably criminals of some kind.”

Jack Hughes and Terrence Mullen, fleeing the scene of their aborted crime without even a dime in their pockets, excite the suspicions of a group of farmers with their ragged, desperate appearance. Their cover story—that they are members of a posse looking for outlaws—only makes the farmers trust them less; after Hughes and Mullen’s capture, these farmers will remember them well because of their outrageous story, and one of the farmers will testify against them in court.

“But his long experience as a cop told him that crooks almost always drift back to their friends, their home base, the place they feel safe. It’s one of the main reasons criminals get caught.”

As Tyrrell knows, crooks on the run almost always look to their friends or family to help them; for this reason, police always shadow the contacts and haunts of a fugitive and wait for them to turn up. On November 11, less than four days after the botched graverobbing, Mullen returns to his job as bartender at the Hub. He doesn’t guess that Swegles has long since given his name to the authorities.

“He waited until both of the bartender’s hands were busy—one holding the mugs, the other pulling the tap handle. Then McGinn whipped out his pistol and stuck the barrel to Mullen’s temple.”

Mullen, who escaped into the woods at Oak Ridge Cemetery, finally has no avenue of escape when Tyrrell’s detectives corner him in Chicago. Unlike Tyrrell at the Lincoln Monument, McGinn has had the foresight to trap him behind the bar, when both of Mullen’s hands are occupied. Mullen is famous for having a short temper and owning a handgun, so McGinn is smart to take this precaution.

“The shoes placed Hughes in Springfield on the night of the crime. One of Tyrrell’s private eyes had seen Hughes going into a shoemaker’s shop, and the shoemaker could identify Hughes, as well as his own work on the man’s shoes.”

As the government builds its case against Hughes and Mullen, Tyrrell’s meticulous sting operation begins to pay dividends as the two men’s movements and purchases in Springfield on November 7th weave a tight net around them, obliterating their supposed alibi. Unfortunately for Hughes, cobblers of the time were distinctive craftsmen, and could easily recognize their own work.

“Tyrrell must have been at least slightly concerned by Hughes’s story. It was riddled with lies, but it sounded believable enough—it might even convince a jury.”

William O’Brien, the graverobbers’ flamboyant, publicity-seeking lawyer, resorts to an old standby: Accusing Tyrrell and his boss Elmer Washburn of railroading his clients to get publicity for themselves. Hughes plays along, shifting all blame to Tyrrell’s undercover agent, Swegles, and denying any part in the crime. An inherent weakness of sting operations is that they are, by design, dishonest, and so cast some suspicion on the officials and others who practice them.

“The whole case against the grave robbers rested on the testimony of Lewis Swegles, a known thief.”

Often the only way to plant a roper in a criminal organization is to recruit a known criminal who will be trusted by the crooks he will be spying on. However, such agents do not always make the best trial witnesses, as their testimony is intrinsically vulnerable to attack as unreliable and self-serving. Swegles could never have gotten into his position of trust with Hughes without his well-earned reputation as a horse thief. Unfortunately, since Tyrrell bungled the apprehension of the graverobbers, Swegles is the lone eyewitness of the defendants’ crime.

“Sharp got the letter, but he was sick of trouble with the law and decided not to deliver it to Curtis. Instead he brought it to the Springfield jail and handed it to a guard.”

Terrence Mullen, rather than trusting in his lawyer and the flimsiness of the government’s case, tries to solicit perjury from a friend, Nathan Curtis, to secure an alibi for himself. He puts it in writing and entrusts it to Thomas Sharp, whose drunken boasts ruined the first attempt to steal Lincoln’s body. Sharp proves again that he cannot keep a secret. This letter, and a second one Mullen wrote to another friend, offering him $35 to perjure himself, constituted the most devastating evidence against him and Hughes.

“Tyrrell reported to his boss, ‘This establishes the fact beyond a doubt that the counterfeiters were active for some way to liberate Ben Boyd, and Sir, the moving spirit was this same Jim Kennally, formerly of St. Louis.’”

Tyrrell has learned from a member of the Logan County Gang that they were behind the first attempt to snatch Lincoln’s body. More importantly, Tyrrell now has convincing proof that the counterfeiter “Big Jim” Kennally put them up to it as a way of freeing Ben Boyd, the master engraver. This crucial link establishes a compelling motive for the bizarre plot.

“Discussing the surprisingly light sentence, the Chicago Times expressed the same doubts as the jurors. ‘There is reason to believe that the actual extent of the plot is not yet exposed, and many think that Mullen and Hughes, though really guilty of complicity in the plot, did not contrive it, but are really the tools of smarter men.’”

Hughes and Mullen receive a light sentence of one year each for their unprecedented crime, reflecting concerns that they are small fry and that the plot’s true masterminds have evaded the law. Considering the defendants’ actions, particularly after their flight from Oak Ridge, the jurors questioned whether they had the necessary intelligence to plan such a complicated burglary.

“Together they agreed to form a secret organization with just one mission: protect Lincoln’s body. They called themselves the Lincoln Guard of Honor.”

After John Carroll Power receives an ominous postcard, the five men who helped him to bury Lincoln’s coffin in 1878 form a pact to prevent any further bodysnatching attempts. The postcard turns out to be a false alarm, but the Lincoln Guard of Honor remains vigilant. In 1901, they bury Lincoln’s body a final time in a steel cage encased in concrete in order to ensure its safety.

“‘I watched the shadow of the lid fall across Lincoln’s face,’ recalled Guard of Honor member B. H. Monroe. ‘The face disappeared from mortal view forever.’”

Before Lincoln’s fifth and final interment, members of the Lincoln Guard of Honor take a last look to ensure that the late president’s body is indeed still in his coffin. After a prolonged and eventful post-life, B.H. Monroe saw one of the most recognizable faces in American history for the last time.