On the night of November 7, 1876, two men stood inside a cold marble tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery, sawing through the corner of a heavy sarcophagus. Kerosene light flickered across the white stone as they strained to pull a lead-lined coffin from its resting place. They were not mourners. They were thieves, and the body they were trying to steal belonged to Abraham Lincoln.
Hidden less than a hundred yards away in the November darkness, agents of the United States Secret Service crouched behind tombstones, waiting for a signal. What began that night would set off a chain of secrecy, fear, and strange duty that lasted a quarter of a century. Lincoln’s body had never rested quietly. On the evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth pressed a small derringer against the back of the president’s head at Ford’s Theatre.
Lincoln never regained consciousness and died the next morning at 7:22. He was 56 years old. His body was embalmed, placed in a white metal casket trimmed with black broadcloth and fitted with a glass viewing panel, and loaded onto a funeral train that carried him 1,654 miles from Washington to Springfield, Illinois. The journey took 13 days.
In city after city, the coffin was opened and hundreds of thousands of Americans filed past. But the embalming could not hold forever. By the time the train reached Chicago, the face had darkened so noticeably that embalmers applied heavy cosmetics to keep him presentable. Mary Todd Lincoln, still shattered by the loss of her husband and three of her four sons, insisted on a quiet burial at Oak Ridge Cemetery, two miles north of Springfield, rather than the grand downtown tomb city leaders wanted.
She chose peace. That decision placed Lincoln’s remains in a rural, lightly guarded cemetery, and it was there, on May 4, 1865, that the coffin was placed in a temporary receiving vault. Within months it was opened twice more as officials rearranged the burial site. A 117-foot obelisk began rising over the grave.
It was supposed to be the end of the story. It was not. In Chicago, a counterfeiter named James “Big Jim” Kennally was watching his operation collapse. His finest engraver, Benjamin Boyd, had been arrested by the Secret Service, and without him the business was dying.
Kennally devised a plan so grotesque it still sounds like fiction. He would steal Abraham Lincoln’s body and hold it for ransom, demanding $200,000 in greenbacks and Boyd’s release from prison. At a time when a stolen cadaver sold to medical schools for $25, the sum was absurd, but that was precisely the point. Lincoln in death had become something more than a man.
He was a relic, a symbol so powerful that criminals believed the government would pay a king’s ransom to get the bones back. Kennally recruited saloon keeper Terence Mullen and small-time crook Jack Hughes, both desperate men with no experience in grave robbing. They planned to break into the tomb, drag the coffin out, and bury it in the Indiana sand dunes before making their demands. But there was a flaw in the plot they never suspected.
The man they trusted as their grave-robbing expert, Lewis C. Swegles, was a paid informant for the Secret Service. Every detail of the scheme was reported in advance. On election night, November 7, 1876, Mullen and Hughes walked through the fog toward the Lincoln Monument.
The polls in Springfield had closed. The streets were quiet. Inside the memorial hall, Lincoln’s coffin rested inside a white marble sarcophagus sealed with plaster and topped with a heavy stone lid. The men carried a hacksaw, crib jacks, and a lantern.
Swegles came with them, playing his part. When they reached the sarcophagus, Hughes began sawing into the marble. The work was slow. The sound echoed off the stone walls.
Mullen shifted nervously and looked toward the entrance. Swegles stood near the door, timing his exit. After more than an hour, they broke through enough of the sarcophagus to grip the coffin’s edge. It weighed between four and five hundred pounds, lined with lead.
They pulled and strained, moving it only a few inches. Swegles told Mullen he was going to check the wagon. Instead, he stepped outside and gave the signal to the waiting agents. What followed was almost farcical.
In the dark and fog, the agents rushed the tomb and could not see clearly. Two of them came face to face in the dim memorial hall, each mistaking the other for a thief. Shots rang out. Inside the burial chamber, Mullen and Hughes heard the gunfire and ran into the night, abandoning the coffin and their tools.
The next day, custodian John Carroll Power inspected the damage. The marble lid had been shifted. The plaster was shattered. Saw marks scarred the stone.
He later wrote that the coffin had been drawn to the opening and that the robbers had only to lift it out when they were interrupted. They had been minutes away from stealing the body of the president. Mullen and Hughes were arrested within days and convicted of conspiracy to steal the coffin itself. Illinois had no law against stealing a corpse, so the charge was a property crime.
They each received one year in the state penitentiary. But the real consequence was fear. The theft attempt proved the tomb was vulnerable, and anyone could try again. Power made a decision that no cemetery custodian had ever faced.
Instead of moving the body to a bank vault or an armed guard post, he chose secrecy. On a night shortly after the attempt, Power gathered about eight trusted men. They opened the sarcophagus, lifted the heavy lead-lined coffin, and carried it down into a passageway beneath the main floor. They placed boards on trestles, laid the coffin on them, and piled firewood over it until it was completely concealed.
For approximately two years, the 16th president of the United States lay under a pile of firewood inside his own monument while tourists walked overhead, laid flowers on the empty sarcophagus, prayed, and wept. No one knew. In 1880, Power and several prominent Springfield citizens formed a covert organization called the Lincoln Guard of Honor. Their mission was simple: protect the coffin and keep its location secret.
For more than twenty years, the body was moved repeatedly, always at night, always by lantern light, from the wood pile to sawhorses in a different corner, from one construction space to another. The guard inspected the coffin periodically and swore oaths of silence. The tomb was rebuilt in the 1890s as the masonry deteriorated, and the coffin was shifted again to a temporary underground vault. By the turn of the century, whispers had begun to circulate.
Had the body really been in the tomb all along? Was it switched? Was it stolen and covered up? The secrecy that had protected Lincoln’s remains now fed suspicion.
The man who understood this best was Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s only surviving son. He had been present at or near the aftermath of three presidential assassinations: his father’s in 1865, Garfield’s in 1881, and McKinley’s in 1901. He was a man of order and procedure, and he had spent his adult life surrounded by political violence and its aftermath. He wanted his father’s body placed beyond reach forever.
As the rebuilt tomb was completed with a deep concrete vault, Robert insisted on one final act. He wrote that he was desirous that the body be placed so it might never again be disturbed and that he wanted witnesses to confirm the remains were truly his father’s. On September 26, 1901, 23 men gathered in a dim underground chamber beneath the monument. They lifted the coffin from the temporary vault and set it on supports.
The screws were turned. A musty, sweetish odor rose from the sealed interior. When the lid was lifted, they looked down at a face that had been dead for 36 years. Abraham Lincoln was still recognizable.
His hair, beard, and the famous mole on his right cheek were plain to see. The skin was darkened and leathery, but the features were unmistakable. One witness said it looked as though Lincoln might open his mouth and speak. Several men turned pale.
The viewing lasted perhaps ten to fifteen minutes. Then the lid was replaced, the coffin lowered into a brick-lined pit ten feet deep, and workmen poured concrete over it, several tons of solid cement that would encase the coffin for eternity. The 1901 viewing killed the rumors. Twenty-three sworn witnesses had independently confirmed the body was Abraham Lincoln.
There had been no switch. The embalming chemicals applied in 1865 to preserve the body for a two-week funeral procession had preserved it for 36 years. The men who tried to steal Lincoln’s body vanished into obscurity. Kennally was caught on separate counterfeiting charges.
Swegles, the informant who saved the remains, disappeared from the historical record entirely. And the two convicted thieves served their single year and were forgotten. Today, visitors to the Lincoln Tomb touch the nose of a bronze bust for good luck and lay pennies at its base. Beneath their feet, ten feet down, sealed in that massive block of concrete, the coffin has not been disturbed since September 26, 1901.
After 17 moves and five openings, after a failed theft, a hiding place under firewood, and two decades of secrecy, the body of Abraham Lincoln finally rests where no one can ever reach it. This time, the peace is real.