Lincoln's Grave Robbers

Lincoln’s Grave Robbers by Steve Sheinkin is a 2012 work of nonfiction. Sheinkin is an American author who began his career as a writer of textbooks and segued into producing nonfiction books for young audiences. He is recognized for the way his books make historical events and information accessible to his readers in exciting ways. Lincoln’s Grave Robbers tells of one of the lesser known incidents connected to the sixteenth president of The United States. It describes an attempt that was made to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln. Included in the book is a list of the characters, as there are many presented early on. There is also a glossary that defines phrases that the author uses in the book, phrases that help create a feel of the time and place of the action.

The story opens in October of 1875. Agents of the Secret Service conduct a raid in Fulton, Illinois. This takes place at the workshop of Ben Boyd, a notorious counterfeiter. Once Boyd is escorted to prison, other members of his illicit operation come together in the back of a bar in Chicago to discuss coming up with a plot to free Boyd. They devise a plan that begins with stealing the body of Abraham Lincoln from its grave in Springfield. Following that, they will hide it in the sand dunes in the vicinity of Lake Michigan. As ransom, they plan to demand that Boyd be released from prison and also that they be given two hundred thousand dollars in cash. The narrative alternately shows the actions of the band of criminals conspiring to enact their plan, the Secret Service agents as they pursue the conspirators, and an undercover agent who goes back and forth between the two groups. Historical data presented along the way includes the background of counterfeiting and grave robbing, the act of detection, and the workings of the Secret Service in its earliest times. Counterfeiting was a major and very profitable crime, and the Secret Service was initially established to deal with it.

Ben Boyd was a master engraver which made him a likely entrant into the related criminal field of counterfeiting. It was during the Civil War that the treasury of the United States began to print paper money in vast amounts. This paved the way for counterfeiting to become pervasive as paper money was relatively easy to copy and to print for the average person, not just something that the government had the skills to do. It is suggested that by the end of the Civil War, half of the paper money that was in circulation was not genuine. A great deal of that fake currency was produced at the hands of Ben Boyd. It was in response to this that the Secret Service was established as a division of the treasury. When Boyd was caught, it eliminated a large amount of the counterfeit money that was in circulation.



Boyd’s underlings do a good amount of research in planning their crime. They hire criminal specialists and body snatchers and are able to figure out every detail. Getting in the way of their well planned crime is a man named Patrick Tyrrell, who is the head of the Chicago based branch of the Secret Service. As Tyrrell learns of the conspirators’ plot, he contrives one of his own which draws in not only additional Secret Service agents, but private detectives, and a man named Lewis C. Swegles, who was a member of, and trusted by, Boyd’s people. Swegles becomes an informant for the Secret Service. The climax of the story comes at Lincoln’s tomb on the night of November 7, 1876, when the criminals and the authorities face off against one another.

Publishers Weekly said of the book, “This meticulous and tremendously suspenseful account of the attempted heist of Abraham Lincoln’s body in 1876 reads like a smartly cast fictional crime thriller, with a skillful buildup of tension and sharp character portrayals. Sheinkin lays the groundwork for the plot by delving into the history of counterfeiting, a booming business during and after the Civil War (‘By 1864, an astounding 50 percent of the paper money in circulation was fake’). James Kennally, leader of one of the largest counterfeiting rings in the Midwest, masterminded the plot to steal the late president’s body from the Lincoln Monument, outside Springfield, Ill. His intent was to ransom the purloined corpse, hitting up the government for a tidy sum of money and the freedom of his jailed, top-notch engraver. Perhaps the most dynamic player is Lewis Swegles, a shrewd career criminal who juggled double roles as Secret Service informer and alleged conspirator. Sheinkin’s study of Swegles’s thought process and machinations intensifies the drama of the final showdown between the would-be robbers and government officials. A sizzling tale of real-life historical intrigue.”