The Plot to Steal the Body of Abraham Lincoln

Podcast Transcript

The 1876 plot to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln is one of the strangest and most audacious crimes in American history.

The scheme aimed to ransom the corpse of the assassinated president in exchange for the release of a jailed criminal and a huge sum of money.

Although the attempt ultimately failed, it triggered years of secrecy, multiple reburials of Lincoln’s remains, and the creation of a private guard to protect the tomb.

Learn more about the plot to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Before I get into the plot to steal the remains of President Lincoln, it is necessary to understand why this was such a big deal and why it was considered more scandalous than if someone had tried to do the same thing with the bodies of Zachery Taylor or William Henry Harrison.

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, it truly shocked the country. He had led the nation through its worst period in history, and just when the conflict was over, his life was taken in one last vindictive act.

After the assassinationon April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theatre, his body began one of the most elaborate funeral processes in American history. Lincoln died the following morning, April 15, in a boarding house across the street from the theater.

Within hours, preparations began for a national mourning ceremony that would allow citizens across the country to pay their respects.

Lincoln’s body was first placed in the East Room of the White House, where a private funeral service was held on April 19, 1865. The ceremony was attended by government officials, military officers, members of the cabinet, diplomats, and Lincoln’s family.

Outside the White House and throughout Washington, tens of thousands of people gathered in mourning. After the service, a solemn funeral procession escorted the coffin to the United States Capitol, where Lincoln lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. During the next day, an estimated 25,000 people filed past the coffin to view the fallen president.

Following the Washington ceremonies, Lincoln’s body began an extraordinary funeral journey by train. The funeral train retraced much of the route Lincoln had taken when traveling to Washington for his first inauguration in 1861.

The train carried both Lincoln’s coffin and that of his young son Willie, who had died in 1862 and whose remains were being returned to Illinois. The route stretched nearly 1,700 miles and lasted from April 21 to May 3, 1865, stopping in major cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago before finally reaching Springfield.

At each stop, Lincoln lay in state in prominent public buildings while massive crowds gathered to pay tribute. The scale of public mourning was unprecedented. In New York City alone, more than 150,000 people reportedly viewed the body, while the funeral procession through the city drew crowds estimated at over half a million spectators.

One interesting, fun fact about the funeral procession in New York City…

A photograph taken during the funeral procession on April 25, 1865, accidentally captured a future president: a young Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was only six years old at the time. He was watching the procession from the second-floor window of his family’s home on Union Square along with his brother.

Decades later, historians studying the photograph realized that two small boys leaning out the window matched the Roosevelt residence at the location and corresponded with Roosevelt family accounts of watching the funeral.

Across all the cities on the route, historians estimate that roughly 1 million people viewed Lincoln’s body directly as it lay in state, and perhaps 7 million Americans, about one-third of the U.S. population at the time, watched the funeral train pass or participated in memorial events along the route.

In terms of the total percentage of the American population, the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln might have been the most-attended event in American history.

So, the public, at least in the North, loved Lincoln, especially after he was assassinated, and soon after his death, he became legendary and a secular saint.

At the end of his journey, he was interred at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, his hometown. Construction of the grand Lincoln Tomb began in 1871 and was completed in 1874, at which point Lincoln’s coffin was placed inside a marble sarcophagus in a burial chamber behind a locked steel gate.

At this time, tomb security was minimal. Visitors were allowed to tour the monument, and the coffin was accessible within the structure.

The plot to steal Lincoln’s body originated not in politics but in the world of organized counterfeiting. In the 1870s, counterfeit currency was a major problem in the United States, which is why the United States Secret Service had originally been created.

A Chicago-based gang led by criminal James “Big Jim” Kinealy ran a large counterfeiting operation. Their most valuable member was master engraver Benjamin Boyd, who produced the plates used to print fake banknotes. When Boyd was arrested in 1875 and sentenced to ten years in prison at Joliet, the gang’s business collapsed.

Kinealy devised an extraordinary plan to free him. The gang would steal Lincoln’s corpse from his tomb and hide it in the sand dunes near Lake Michigan. They would then demand Boyd’s release and $200,000 in ransom, a huge sum equivalent to millions today.

To carry out the crime, Kinealy recruited several accomplices, including Terrence Mullen and Jack Hughes, and later enlisted a supposed professional body snatcher named Lewis Swegles.

The conspirators made a fatal mistake. Swegles was actually a government informant working with Patrick D. Tyrrell, head of the Secret Service office in Chicago. When Swegles reported the plan, Tyrrell alerted Washington and consulted with Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s only surviving son.

Robert Lincoln reluctantly agreed that authorities should allow the plot to proceed so the criminals could be caught in the act. Secret Service agents, local police, and detectives prepared an ambush at the tomb.

Just as an aside, Robert Todd Lincoln’s story is an interesting one. He had a connection with not one, not two, but three presidential assassinations.

First, his father was killed, and he was present when he died. Second, he was the Secretary of War and happened to be standing near James Garfield in 1881 when Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau. Third, while serving as U.S. minister to Italy, he traveled with William McKinley to the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, where McKinley was assassinated.

The conspirators chose the night of November 7, 1876, Election Night, as the moment to strike. The date was deliberately chosen: the entire country would be riveted to the unfolding results of the presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, one of the most contested elections in American history.

The city of Springfield would be distracted, the cemetery would be quiet, and any unusual activity might go unnoticed amid the general commotion.

The Lincoln Monument at Oak Ridge Cemetery housed the president’s remains in a marble sarcophagus located in a ground-level burial chamber. The plan called for Mullen and Hughes to break open the sarcophagus, stuff the coffin into a wagon, and drive north through the night toward the Indiana dunes, where Kinealy would be waiting.

Secret Service agents and a contingent of officers from the newly formed Chicago detectives unit converged on the cemetery that night and hid in the darkness of the monument itself, waiting.

Swegles accompanied Mullen and Hughes to the tomb. The two men managed to file through the padlock on the burial chamber door and had actually begun to drag Lincoln’s 500-pound lead-lined coffin toward the entrance when Swegles slipped away to signal the waiting agents.

What followed was a fumbling, almost farcical confrontation. When the agents rushed into the darkened monument, they collided with each other in the confusion. One agent accidentally discharged his firearm. In the chaos, Mullen and Hughes simply walked out of the cemetery and disappeared into the night.

Despite their initial escape, the conspirators were not free for long. Swegles continued working as an informant, helping agents track Mullen and Hughes back to Chicago. Within two weeks, both men were arrested at The Hub saloon. Kinealy, the mastermind, managed to evade capture for longer, but he too was eventually apprehended.

The legal proceedings that followed were underwhelming relative to the enormity of what had almost occurred. Illinois had no law specifically prohibiting the theft of a corpse.

Prosecutors were forced to charge the men with the relatively minor offense of conspiracy to commit an unlawful act and attempted larceny of the coffin itself, not the body.

Mullen and Hughes were convicted and sentenced to a mere one year each at the Joliet Penitentiary. Kinealy was never successfully prosecuted and largely faded from history.

The near-success of the plot terrified the custodians of Lincoln’s legacy. The Lincoln Monument Association, which oversaw the tomb, recognized with horror how vulnerable the president’s remains actually were.

For years afterward, Lincoln’s coffin was quietly moved around the interior of the monument, hidden in various locations to prevent another attempt.

On several occasions, the coffin was simply buried under rubble in the basement of the monument during renovation periods, with only a tiny circle of trusted individuals knowing its precise location.

Between 1876 and 1901, Lincoln’s body was moved at least seventeen times.

In 1901, during a major reconstruction of the monument, officials made the decision to permanently secure the coffin. It was placed in a steel cage and buried under ten feet of concrete in a chamber beneath the monument floor.

Before the final interment, a small group of witnesses, including Robert Todd Lincoln, insisted on opening the coffin one last time to confirm the body was indeed that of the president.

The witnesses, some of whom had known Lincoln personally, confirmed the identification. The lead-lined coffin was then welded shut and encased in its concrete vault, where it remains to this day.

People can still visit the Lincoln Tomb in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln, his wife Mary, and three of their sons are buried. The tomb is located in Oak Ridge Cemetery and is open to the public daily, generally from about 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with free admission.

Visitors can walk through the monument and see the burial chamber inside the granite structure.

Springfield also preserves several other major Lincoln sites. Visitors can tour the restored Lincoln Home National Historic Site, the only home Lincoln ever owned. It is operated by the National Park Service.

The ranger-led tours show how the Lincoln family lived before he became president. Tickets are free but must be picked up at the visitor center.

Nearby is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a large museum devoted to his life and legacy, generally open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily.

If you happen to be in Springfield, I highly recommend visiting Lincoln’s tomb and related sites.

The story was largely suppressed for decades, partly out of concern that publicity might inspire imitators. It was not widely known to the general public until the early twentieth century, when some of the participants and witnesses finally spoke openly about what had transpired in the Oak Ridge Cemetery.

Even then, it retained the quality of an improbable legend, the tale of a gang of second-rate counterfeiters who came startlingly close to ransoming the president known as the Great Emancipator.