A normal person stops having adventures when they die. And as if his entire life wasn’t evidence enough that he wasn’t “a normal person,” President Abraham Lincoln’s complete biography can’t end until 1901, 36 years after he was assassinated. Witness the absurd connection between money counterfeiters, grave robbers, moles, the other moles and the bizarre epilogue to America’s 16th President.
The first half of the 19th century is generally referred to as the Antebellum (Latin: “before” “war”) but the U.S. Treasury was in the midst of its own controversies. Simply, the banks were eventually united under an independent bank system but each bank, or system of banks, was responsible for printing its own money—money just being an arbitrary marker of gold, and gold being the one metal on Earth that people use for fuel, crafts and food. So there was no standard bills with Washington’s face and the like. Which actually makes sense because if they had Lincoln or Grant on the $5 and $50 bills, respectively, why would any opposing candidate bother running against those men?
So there were thousands of banks and thousands of different forms of currency which was all very confusing for people. Was the money from the Wells Fargo banks still good? If my bank goes under, does that mean my money is gone forever? Is the Fakey Bank a real bank? Money counterfeiting was as easy as writing a number on a piece of paper and the whole economy struggled and in fact underwent numerous “crises.” Counterfeiting aside, the legal tender from hundreds of banks was impossible to keep track of for anyone who ever traveled outside of their hometown, for instance, in the case of war.
Cue the Civil War. For or from slavery, those soldiers may have been fighting for freedom but they weren’t fighting for free. And munitions manufacturers don’t exactly hand out guns and ammo on the street corner (though the NRA might have people believe that’d make the country safer). Lincoln brings all the states under one currency and creates the U.S. Secret Service—in the few days between war’s end and his own assassination.
After the death of Lincoln, the U.S. Secret Service immediately got to work tracking and arresting money counterfeiters. One of the counterfeiters caught was Benjamin Boyd and in 1875, he was sentenced to ten years. Months later, in an Illinois bar, two of Boyd’s friends and cohorts lamented that they didn’t have the knowledge to properly counterfeit money like Boyd. These two men were Terrence Mullen and John Hughes—not to be confused with the other criminal credited with shaping your childhood. Mullen and Hughes remembered the spectacle eleven years earlier when Lincoln’s body was transported from D.C. to Illinois, with stops in 12 cities for opening viewing by the public, totaling more than 5 million people. Even when Lincoln’s body was back in Illinois, debates raged over who had the right to bury Lincoln anywhere.
It seemed as if Lincoln had been thrown into the highest levels of American mythology and his body alone had substantial value. Which was a ridiculously rare notion at the time, not that a body had value—but that one body was more valuable than any other body. And really, bodies did have some value, specifically to the emerging anatomical sciences. Unionization of the medical practice—that is, people had to be certified before performing surgery (ridiculous!)—had sparked the need for medical schools and, by extension, cadavers. For this reason, grave robbing was a crime as enforced as modern day pot possession (for Senators’ children, that is.) Medical schools and practitioners needed bodies but rarely had the money to buy them from families—which actually made grave robbing a viable, albeit illegal, enterprise that can "pick you up."
Also, has there been a Star Trek movie with zombies yet?
Again in a public bar, the would-be corpse thieves decided they could break into Lincoln’s unguarded tomb, steal his body and hold it for ransom. Their foremost demand would be an immediate release of their friend Boyd and pardon for all previous illegal acts for all three of them so they could continue about their counterfeiting schemes. Then Mullen and Hughes decided Lincoln’s body might be worth even more than that, so they planned to also demand $200,000—because, really, $250,000 would have just been ridiculous. Aside from figuring out how to spend the money, the pair’s next self-admitted problem was that they didn’t know HOW to steal a body. Did they need shovels? Horses? It’s all very confusing.
Never did it occur to them that the U.S. Secret Service (again, part of the Treasury Department) had pinned them as Boyd’s accomplices and was watching them this entire time. In fact, one of the undercover agents (Lewis G. Swegles) was actually drinking in the bar when Mullen and Hughes discovered neither of them knew how to steal a body. With more balls than a bowling alley, Swegles picked up his beer from the bar and approached the men, saying that he had overheard them talking about stealing President Lincoln’s body. As it turns out, said Swegles, I am a grave robber and would be delighted to help you guys out. What are the chances, laughed Hughes. What are the chances of that.
The men agreed to commit that body-lifting on November 7th, 1876—because that was the night of the presidential election and thus the cemetery would be unusually empty…or something like that. (This really isn’t a true story about logic.) To make their grave robbery even easier, Swegles (undercover agent) suggested the group also employ his “friend,” a fellow “grave robber.” At this point, Swegles had might as well have introduced the other undercover agent as “Uncle Sam” or “Fakey McFakerson.”
So on Election Night, the four grave robbers (two of them undercover agents) went to the cemetery, sawed the lock off Lincoln’s tomb, walked into the tomb, pushed the lid off Lincoln’s sarcophagus and attempted to lift the wooden coffin out. But the four of them could not lift it. Swegles said he’d go get the horses to help (what?) and ran outside. Breaking his word to the money counterfeiters, Swegles tried to find the USSS, detectives and city police that had surrounded the cemetery and tell them to arrest the criminal duo. Unfortunately, in the dead of the night, some cop saw Swegles running around in the cemetery and screamed out, “They’re running away!”
Shots were immediately fired and chaos ensued. Cops and officials from across the cemetery started shooting at each other and the actual criminals just ran away, baffled as to where it all went wrong.
A few days later, Mullen and Hughes were spotted in Chicago and arrested. Robert Lincoln, son of Abe, hired the best lawyers he could to make sure Mullen and Hughes would be locked away so long that they’d miss the first three Kansas Chief Superbowl victories. Unfortunately, the law was barely on Robert’s side as the maximum prison sentence for grave robbing in Illinois was one year. The duo got the maximum sentence but you can bet the President’s decomposing ass that the law was changed a week later.
As for Lincoln, his body was moved around a couple of times while a more secure resting place was constructed and completed in 1901, 36 years after his death. The place was sealed with cement, steal bars, locks and cement, again, to keep anybody from getting in. Or out.
And just to make sure that the oldest heist trick in the book--the old, “dumb criminals” act, coupled with a “switch-a-roo”--hadn’t been pulled on them, the men who moved Lincoln for the last time actually opened up the coffin. And saw the least likely thing any idiot would expect:
Lincoln’s corpse.
How ironic...
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