This review by John Corry appears in the April 2007
issue of The American Spectator. Click here to
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Stealing Lincoln’s Body
by Thomas J. Craughwell
(Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 234 pages,
$24.95)
ACTUALLY THE GRAVE ROBBERS were never up to the job, and their
caper was doomed from the start. Serious miscreants do not enlist
police informers to help them. But Stealing Lincoln’s Body
is as much about other things — the Secret Service,
counterfeiters, embalming practices, ethnic Chicago, even the
Pullman Strike of 1894 — as it is about bungling grave robbers and
where they went wrong. Thomas J. Craughwell has given us a richly
detailed, highly entertaining, and broad slice of our history.
Counterfeiting, it seems, is as American as mom’s apple pie.
When the English colonists in Rhode Island and the Dutch colonists
in New Amsterdam agreed to adopt Indian wampum as legal tender, the
Algonquins began passing off ersatz wampum to the colonists and
keeping the good stuff for themselves. And in no time at all, the
colonists began counterfeiting, too. In 1682, William Penn
complained that his “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania was failing;
half the coinage there was fake. Even so, courts tended to treat
counterfeiters leniently, although on occasion real annoyance set
in: In 1720, one counterfeiter was hanged in Philadelphia, and in
Newport, Rhode Island, another had his ears lopped off.
But counterfeiters adjusted and thrived, and on the eve of the
Civil War nearly 4,000 kinds of counterfeit bills — or queer or
coney — were in circulation. (Genuine bills were called rhino,
nails, putty, or spondulics.) By 1864, about half the bills in the
North were fake. Clearly something had to be done, and so Secretary
of the Treasury Salmon Chase authorized William Wood, a hero of the
Mexican-American War, to put counterfeiters out of business. The
dodgy Wood, who would become the first chief of the Secret Service,
then hired three assistants: a Chicago jailbird, a New Jersey
counterfeiter, and a suspected five-time murderer.
Unconventional certainly, but also effective: Within a year Wood
and his roughnecks had seized more than 200 counterfeiters and
confiscated an enormous amount of queer. In 1869, Wood was
succeeded as Secret Service chief by Hiram C. Whitely, and in 1874
honest Elmer Washburn, the former, and highly unpopular, police
chief in Chicago, succeeded Whitely. Washburn’s great inspiration
was to make the Secret Service truly secret; agents were told to
keep their names out of the papers and operate in the dark.
Washburn also wanted his agents to forgo the cowboy tactics that
Wood and, to a lesser extent, Whitely, had condoned. Washburn
insisted on professional standards, and as Craughwell writes,
Dublin-born Patrick D. Tyrrell, now a family man in Chicago, was
just the kind of agent he wanted: Tyrrell was “honest, respectable,
incorruptible,” and he kept written records.
(And yes, the editor in chief of the magazine you now hold in
your hands is also named Tyrrell. Patrick D. Tyrrell was his
great-great grandfather, and an old picture in Stealing
Lincoln’s Body suggests a strong family resemblance.)
Tyrrell and his colleagues seriously undermined Midwestern
counterfeiting when they broke up a big criminal ring in 1875; but
an unintended consequence of this was the grave-robbery plot.
Benjamin Boyd, one of the men they put in jail, was highly regarded
by other counterfeiters for the excellence of his engravings, and
his absence put a dent in their earnings. Consequently one Big Jim
Kennally devised an improbable plan. He would get underlings to
steal Lincoln’s body from its tomb in Springfield, Illinois, and
keep it in hiding until the governor of Illinois released Boyd from
jail. Then Boyd could get back to the lucrative business of
engraving.
WE ARE NOW AT THE PART of Stealing Lincoln’s Body where
susceptible readers may think they hear music: specifically, the
evocative tinkling ragtime of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” as
orchestrated for the Paul Newman-Robert Redford movie The
Sting. Author Craughwell gives us a collection of con men,
bunko artists and crooked pols, most of them Chicago Irish. For
example, “Red Jimmy” Fitzgerald swindled Charles Francis Adams, a
descendant of two U.S. presidents; “Hungry Joe” Lewis conned Oscar
Wilde. Aldermen “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin
threw parties to which the owners of brothels, saloons, and
gambling parlors had to buy blocks of tickets.
And so on; Big Jim Kennally and his crew, though, were never in
that league. They were not very good at strategic planning, either.
Big Jim, who stayed home on the night in question, entrusted the
actual operation to two pals, and they, in turn, enlisted not one,
but two, police informers as assistants. When they all showed up at
Lincoln’s tomb, Tyrrell and other detectives were waiting. When one
of the detectives accidentally discharged his revolver, however,
the two would-be grave robbers fled on foot. They limped back to
their old Chicago hangout and immediately were arrested.
But the aborted grave robbery had an aftermath. Some upstanding
citizens in Springfield, appalled by the notion that Abraham
Lincoln’s burial site might once again be desecrated, formed the
Lincoln Guard of Honor. It seemed to be no more than a symbolic,
patriotic-fraternal order but it undertook a serious task. Fearful
of another grave-robbery attempt, its members secretly reburied
Lincoln’s coffin in the basement of the tomb. Indeed, America’s
16th president did not find his final resting place until 1901,
when his coffin was enclosed in a steel cage, lowered into a vault,
and covered with cement.
