The 1876 Plot to Steal Lincoln's Body

President Lincoln's monument and tomb, Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, Illinois. Library of Congress

In the fall of 1876, eleven years after his assassination, a gang planned to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, and hold it for ransom in the Indiana Dunes.

The scheme

In October 1876, Benjamin Boyd, a skilled engraver for Chicago counterfeiters, was locked up in the nearby Joliet penitentiary. His boss, the Irish-American crime lord James "Big Jim" Kinealy, depended on Boyd and wanted him out. The plan:

1. Steal Lincoln's body from the tomb.
2. Carry it more than 200 miles to Indiana's sand-dune country and hide it there, where the shifting sand would cover the thieves' tracks.
3. Demand, in exchange, Boyd's release, a full pardon and $200,000 — over $5.5 million today, by the Park Service's reckoning.

Kinealy recruited two of his men, Terrence Mullen and Jack Hughes. A third, Lewis Swegles, joined them — but Swegles was an informant for the Secret Service, created just over ten years earlier to fight counterfeiting.

Jack Hughes (left) and Terrence Mullen (right). Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

The trap

Guarding a grave was not normal Secret Service work, so the service consulted Robert T. Lincoln, the president's only surviving son, and brought in Allan Pinkerton's detective agency, which sent two men. With local police, Secret Service operative Patrick D. Tyrrell planned to catch the gang in the act. On the evening of November 6, 1876, the lawmen boarded the same train to Springfield as the thieves and their informant. The tomb's first custodian, John Power, was warned and helped.

The thieves struck on November 7 — election day, which they reckoned would cover their crime. That night they broke into the tomb, opened the marble sarcophagus and pulled out Lincoln's cedar casket, with Swegles holding the lantern. Then they sent Swegles to fetch the getaway wagon he had pretended to arrange — and with him safely out, the agents and detectives rushed in.

The tomb was empty of thieves. Mullen and Hughes had gone to wait for the wagon by a tree down the hill, and when they saw the shadows of four or five men enter the monument, they knew the game was up.

"Interior of the Catacomb, as the Thieves Left It," from custodian John Carroll Power's 1890 book

The escape — and the arrest

Then one of Tyrrell's team fired a pistol by accident, and in the dark the Secret Service and Pinkerton men briefly shot at each other. In the confusion, Mullen and Hughes slipped away. Ten days later they were tracked down in Chicago and arrested at the Hub, a South Side saloon — the very place where the plot had first been revealed to Swegles.

Sources

Based on "A Plot to Steal the Remains of President Lincoln," Indiana Dunes National Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.