Lincoln's Grave Robbers

Abraham Lincoln was the president of the United States from 1861 to 1865. He helmed the nation through the most devastating chapter of its history, the American Civil War, and he also held the Union together. Several American cities were afterward named for him. Today, he is considered to be the most beloved of American presidents.

Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. Nine years later, in 1874, Lincoln’s body was disinterred from its modest grave in Oak Ridge Cemetery and moved to the newly-built Lincoln Monument, a massive granite and marble edifice just outside Springfield, Illinois. As the 1876 Centennial Celebrations neared, the president’s hallowed remains figured heavily in the desperate schemes of counterfeiter James Kennally, who was determined to free Ben Boyd, his favorite engraver of “coney” plates, from prison. Kennally’s plan was to steal Lincoln’s body and hold it for ransom, for both a sum of money and Boyd’s release. The martyred president’s iconic significance to Americans, Kennally thought, would make his remains the ultimate bargaining chip; as it happened, Kennally attempted this theft twice, both times without success.

Nevertheless, Abraham Lincoln’s revered, almost mythic status worked to Kennally’s advantage: Though bodysnatching was still a common offense in the 19th century, most Americans had trouble believing that Lincoln’s body could be so disrespected, even by the worst criminals or fanatics. Ironically, the attempted desecration had nothing to do with the Civil War and its still-festering grievances, but was simply a coldblooded business decision. News reports of the first graverobbing plot were widely disbelieved; as John Carroll Power, the caretaker of the Lincoln Monument noted, “It seemed to them so incredible […] that no attention was given to it” (64). This gave Kennally the liberty to make his second failed attempt.

Clever, meticulous, and physically tough, Patrick Tyrrell is the central law enforcement officer in Lincoln’s Grave Robbers and the closest thing the book has to a hero. A seasoned Chicago detective, Tyrrell joined the United States Secret Service in 1874 at the age of 43, when his superior, Chicago Police Chief Elmer Washburn, became head of the Secret Service. An early triumph in Tyrrell’s career was his capture of Ben Boyd, a notorious engraver of counterfeit plates. Unlike some other officers and Secret Service agents, Tyrrell was incorruptible and refused bribes from Boyd to let him go. In 1876, a “roper” (undercover agent) hired by Tyrrell to infiltrate a Chicago counterfeiting ring told him about the gang’s plot to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body from his tomb in Springfield, Illinois, as a way of springing Ben Boyd from prison. This case, which led eventually to the arrests of gang members Jack Hughes and Terrence Mullen, marked the climax of Tyrrell’s career. His excessive caution initially let the two perpetrators slip away, but Tyrrell did not give up and brought them to justice. Tyrrell was widely celebrated for his detective work and courage, and in 1877, Lincoln’s son Robert gratefully presented him with a life-sized portrait of his father.

The criminal mastermind of Sheinkin’s story and one of the most notorious counterfeiters of mid-1800s America, “Big Jim” Kennally was a canny, ruthless racketeer who flooded the Chicago area with fake money throughout the 1870s. At the height of his power, Kennally produced “coney” of such seeming verity that even experts had trouble telling it from the real thing. He owed much of this success to his highly skilled engravers, so when the most talented of them—the brilliant Ben Boyd—went to prison for a long stretch, Kennally’s criminal empire stood on shaky ground. Unable to bribe government officials into releasing Boyd, Kennally soon resorted to much more desperate measures. He was organized and determined, and either of his two attempts to steal Abraham Lincoln’s remains might have succeeded, if not for bad luck: A drunken underling gave the plan away the first time, and a government informer foiled the attempt the second time. After the disastrous failure of the second attempt in 1876 and the arrest of his two accomplices, Hughes and Mullen, Kennally quietly sold the bar that had served as one of his bases of operations and slipped away with the money. In 1880, however, the accomplice who had owned the bar with him, Terrence Mullen, gave evidence against him, and “Big Jim” went to prison for two years on a counterfeiting charge.

A young “shover” who specialized in passing counterfeit bills for James Kennally’s gang in Chicago, the thickly bearded, cool-headed Jack Hughes was one of the two men tapped by Kennally to break into Lincoln’s tomb in November 1876. However, he also inadvertently alerted Secret Service agent Patrick Tyrrell to the bodysnatching plot: When a “boodle carrier” was arrested with Hughes’s counterfeit money in his pockets, the frightened teen quickly told authorities all about Hughes and his criminal hangout, a bar called the Hub. Soon after, Tyrrell sent a “roper” (an informal undercover agent) to the Hub to spy on the operation. For a seasoned grifter, Hughes turned out to be surprisingly naïve, continuing to trust Tyrrell’s roper even after his and Mullen’s near-arrest by a team of armed agents at Lincoln’s tomb.

In the aftermath of his catastrophic attempt at graverobbing, Hughes proved to be a resourceful liar, weaving a conspiratorial tale of police incompetence and corruption that might have fooled the jury, had his less cool-headed partner not written incriminating letters. In the end, Hughes served only a year in prison for the crime, owing to jurors’ belief that both he and Mullen were merely “the tools of smarter men” (180).

A colorful character who worked as a bartender at the Hub and kept a pet snake in a box on the bar, Terrence Mullen was a high-strung young man with bushy mustaches and alert eyes. Mullen saw himself as a man of action; as Patrick Tyrrell noted in a letter, Mullen was “elated” to be part of the graverobbing plot. As the Hub was merely a front for its co-owner James Kennally’s counterfeiting ring, Mullen, the bar’s other owner, made most of his profits as a distributer of fake bills, which he hired Jack Hughes to “shove” at local businesses.

After the arrest of Ben Boyd, Kennally recruited Mullen and Hughes for his bodysnatching venture; needing a third man, Mullen naively recruited Lewis Swegles, a police spy. Later, while awaiting trial with Hughes for conspiracy and attempted larceny, Mullen wrote letters to two cronies, begging them to provide him and Hughes with an alibi for the night of the crime. Both letters were immediately turned over to the police. If not for these attempts to secure a fake alibi, the two defendants might well have beaten the charges.

During the trial, which ended in a guilty verdict, Mullen appeared nervous and withdrawn. However, the jury was convinced that the two men lacked the necessary brains to orchestrate such a conspiracy and sentenced them to only one year in prison. Unfortunately for Mullen, upon his release, he discovered that his partner James Kennally had sold the Hub out from under him, disappearing with the money. A couple of years later, Mullen had his revenge when he became an agent of the police and was “elated” to help put Kennally behind bars for counterfeiting.