Strangest fact
Men who tried to steal Lincoln's body in 1876 were convicted of trying to steal a coffin worth 75 dollars, because Illinois had no law against stealing a body.
Why it is odd: A plot to ransom a president's corpse ended as a petty theft case, because the law had never imagined the crime.
Eleven years after his death, Abraham Lincoln lay in a marble sarcophagus, a stone coffin case, inside his tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. In 1876 a Chicago gang of counterfeiters, people who made fake money, had a problem: their best engraver, Benjamin Boyd, was in prison, and without him they could not make good printing plates. The gang's boss, James "Big Jim" Kinealy, came up with a plan to get him out.
According to the United States Secret Service, Kinealy persuaded two men, Jack Hughes and Terrence Mullen, to break into the tomb, take Lincoln's body and hide it. They would then demand Boyd's release from prison plus $200,000. They chose the night of the presidential election, November 7, 1876, when the town would be busy with the vote count. A man the gang recruited to help, Lewis Swegles, was secretly an informant for the Secret Service, which at that time chased counterfeiters and did not yet guard presidents.
The Secret Service told Lincoln's son Robert, brought in detectives from the Pinkerton agency and set a trap. Lawmen hid around the tomb in the dark. Working with crowbars, the thieves moved the heavy stone lid of the sarcophagus and began to lift the coffin out. Then a detective's pistol went off by accident. The other lawmen thought the robbers were shooting at them and fired back into the dark, and in the confusion the thieves got away. Hughes and Mullen were caught in Chicago about ten days later.
The case exposed a gap in the law. American Heritage magazine reports that Illinois had no law against grave robbing at the time, so the two men were tried for attempting to steal the coffin itself, which was valued at seventy-five dollars. Each was sentenced to one year in the state prison.
The people looking after the tomb were shaken. The tomb's custodian, John Carroll Power, and a few helpers secretly moved the coffin and buried it in a shallow, unmarked grave in the building's basement. A small group, later called the Lincoln Guard of Honor, watched over it from then on. When the tomb was rebuilt, Robert Lincoln asked for a final burial that no thief could reach. On September 26, 1901, the coffin was opened one last time so witnesses could confirm the body was Lincoln's, and then it was lowered into a steel cage about ten feet down and covered in concrete. A 14-year-old boy named Fleetwood Lindley, who was there that day, died in 1963 as the last living person known to have seen Lincoln's face.