For years Big Jim's suave and mild-mannered "shovers," as they were called, had been sneaking out across the country and shoving bogus five-dollar bills across the counters of credulous merchants. The profits had been fantastic. But by the spring of 1876, a deadly paralysis was creeping over the gang, for their supply of counterfeit currency was almost exhausted, and Ben Boyd, the master engraver who made their bogus greenbacks, was in prison.
For months Big Jim sniffed vainly about St. Louis and Chicago, trying to get another engraver to make counterfeit bills. Finally he resolved that somehow the invaluable Ben Boyd must be set free.
Big Jim conceived the unholy idea of stealing the body of Abraham Lincoln, and hiding it away. Then, while the whole North was in an uproar, Big Jim would calmly drive a hard and fabulous bargain: he would agree to return the sacred corpse in exchange for Ben Boyd's pardon and a huge pile of gold.
249
Dangerous? Not at all. For Illinois had upon her statute-book no law against the purloining of bodies.
So in June, 1876, Big Jim set about clearing the decks for action. He despatched five of his conspirators to Springfield, where they opened a saloon and dance-hall, masquerading as bartenders while making their preparations.
Unfortunately for him, one of his "bartenders" drank too much whisky one Saturday night in June, drifted into a red-light house in Springfield, and talked too much. He boasted that he was soon going to have a barrelful of gold.
He whispered the details: on the eve of the next fourth of July, while Springfield was shooting off rockets, he would be out in the Oak Ridge Cemetery, "stealing old Lincoln's bones," as he put it; and late that night he would bury them in a sandbar under a bridge spanning the Sangamon.
An hour later the parlor-house madam was hurrying to the police, to tell her thrilling news. By morning she had blabbed it to a dozen other men. Soon the whole town had the story, and the masquerading bartenders dropped their towels and fled the city.
But Big Jim was not defeated. He was only delayed. He shifted his headquarters from Springfield to 294 West Madison Street, Chicago. He owned a saloon there. In the front room his man, Terrence Mullen, dispensed liquor to working-men; and in the back he had a sort of club-room, a secret rendezvous for counterfeiters. A bust of Abraham Lincoln stood over the bar.
For months a thief named Lewis G. Swegles had been patronizing this saloon and working himself into the good graces of Big Jim's gang. He admitted that he had served two terms in the penitentiary for stealing horses, and boasted that he was now "the boss body-snatcher of Chicago." He declared he supplied the medical schools of the town with most of their cadavers. That sounded plausible enough then, for grave-robbing was a national horror; medical colleges, in order to obtain bodies for dissection in their class rooms, were forced to buy them from ghouls who sneaked up to the rear door at two o'clock in the morning, with caps pulled low over their eyes and bulging sacks slung across their backs.
Swegles and Kinealy's gang perfected the details of their plan for rifling Lincoln's tomb. They would stuff the body into a long sack, pitch it into the bottom of a spring-wagon, and,
with relays of fresh horses, would drive with all possible speed to northern Indiana; and there with only the water-fowl to see them, they would hide the body among the lonely dunes, where the wind from over the lake would soon wipe out all telltale tracks in the shifting sands.
Before leaving Chicago, Swegles bought a London newspaper; and, tearing out a piece, he stuffed the rest inside the bust of Lincoln that stood over the bar at 294 West Madison Street. That night, November 6, he and two of Big Jim's gang climbed aboard a Chicago & Alton train headed for Springfield, taking with them the fragment of torn newspaper, which they proposed to leave beside the empty sarcophagus as they dashed off with the body. The detectives finding the paper would naturally keep it as a clue. Then while the nation was rocking with excitement, one of the gang would approach the governor of the State and offer to return Lincoln's body for two hundred thousand dollars in gold and the freedom of Ben Boyd.
And how would the governor know that the self-styled spokesman was not an impostor? The gangster would carry with him the London newspaper; the detectives, fitting their fragment into the torn page, would accept him as the bona-fide representative of the ghouls.
The gang arrived in Springfield, according to schedule. They had chosen what Swegles called "a damned elegant time" for their adventure. November 7 was election day; for months the Democrats had been denouncing the Republicans for the graft and corruption that had besmirched Grant's second administration, while the Republicans had waved the "bloody shirt" of the Civil War in the face of the Democrats. It was one of the most bitter elections in United States history. That night, while excited crowds were milling about the newspaper offices and jamming the saloons, Big Jim's men hurried out to Oak Ridge Cemetery—dark now, and deserted—sawed the padlock off the iron door of Lincoln's tomb, stepped inside, pried the marble lid off the sarcophagus, and lifted the wooden casket half out.
One of the gang ordered Swegles to bring up the horses and spring-wagon which he had been delegated to have ready and waiting in a ravine two hundred yards northeast of the monument. Swegles hurried down the steep bluff until he was lost in the darkness.
Swegles was not a grave-robber. He was a reformed criminal
now employed as a stool-pigeon by the Secret Service. He had no team and wagon waiting in the ravine; but he did have eight detectives waiting for him in the memorial room of the tomb. So he raced around there and gave them the signal they had all agreed upon: he struck a match, lighted a cigar, and whispered the password "Wash/'
The eight Secret Service men, in their stocking-feet, rushed out of their hiding-place, every man with a cocked revolver in each hand. They dashed around the monument with SwegJes, stepped into the dark tomb, and ordered the ghouls to surrender.
There was no answer. Tyrrell, the district chief of the Secret Service, lighted a match. There lay the coffin, half out of the sarcophagus. But where were the thieves? The detectives searched the cemetery in all directions. The moon was coming up over the tree-tops. As Tyrrell rushed up onto the terrace of the monument, he could make out the forms of two men, staring at him from behind a group of statuary. In the excitement and confusion, he began firing at them with both pistols, and in an instant they were firing back. But they weren't the thieves. He was shooting at his own men.
In the meantime, the thieves, who had been waiting a hundred feet away in the darkness, for Swegles to return with the horses, dashed off through the woods.
Ten days later they were caught in Chicago, brought to Springfield, thrown into a jail, and surrounded by heavy guards day and night. For a time there was intense public excitement and indignation. Lincoln's son Robert, who had married into the wealthy Pullman family, employed the best lawyers in Chicago to prosecute the gang. They did what they could, but they had a hard time. There was no law in Illinois, then, against stealing a body. If the thieves had actually stolen the coffin, they might have been prosecuted for that, but they hadn't stolen it; they had not taken it out of the tomb. So the best the high-priced attorneys from Chicago could do was to prosecute the ghouls for having conspired to steal a coffin worth seventy-five dollars, the maximum penalty for which offense was five years. But the case did not come to trial for eight months; public indignation had died down by that time, and politics were at work; and, on the first ballot, four jurors actually voted for acquittal. After a few more ballots the twelve men compromised and sent the ghouls to the Joliet prison fox one year.
Since Lincoln's friends were afraid that other thieves might steal the body, the Lincoln Monument Association hid it away for two years in an iron coffin under a heap of loose boards lying in a damp, dark passageway behind the catacombs—a sort of cellar. During that time thousands of pilgrims paid their respects to an empty sarcophagus.
For various reasons Lincoln's remains have been moved seventeen times. But the
y will be moved no more. The coffin is now imbedded in a great ball of steel and solid concrete, six feet beneath the floor of the tomb. It was placed there on September 26, 1901.
On that day the casket was opened, and human eyes gazed down for the last time upon his face. Those who saw him then remarked how natural he appeared. He had been dead thirty-six years; but the embalmers had done their work well, and he still looked very much as he had looked in life. His face was a trifle darker, and there was a touch of mold on one wing of his black tie.
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