STEALING ABRAHAM LINCOLN

STEALING ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I would say, to use the criminal vernacular, that Big Jim Kinealy went 'Chinese angle' when the 'buttons' nipped his 'boodler'.

Benjamen F. Boyd was the Midwest’s foremost boodler, and maybe the finest engraver of counterfeit printing plates outside of the U.S. Treasury Department. Boyd’s queer fin was so good that by 1875 there were more than 300,000 examples floating about, maybe half of all five dollar notes in circulation. The treasury stopped issuing legitimate fins out of the Chicago branch entirely.

Then, in October, the Secret Service descended upon the little Mississippi river town of Fulton, Illinois and before Ben Boyd could slip across the railroad bridge to Iowa, slapped the bracelets on him right in front of his outraged wife. And that left Big Jim squarely behind the eight ball.

Big Jim owned a stable in St. Louis, but that was just his dodge. He was “a born crook” and the high pillow to hundreds of finders, passers, runners, smashers, bindle stiffs, butter and egg men and fake-a-loo artists, in short everyone and anyone who passed the queer soft on to unsuspecting marks. So with Ben doing a decade in the Joliet caboose (above) you would guess that Big Jim would to be looking for a new slant. Instead he came up with a plan that was a real bunny; he would steal the body of Abraham Lincoln, and exchange it for the live body Benjamnn Boyd - plus $200,000, just as an afterthought.

Late in January of 1876 Big Jim reached out to one of his Chicago passers, Ben Sheridan, who was looking for a vacation, after getting pinched and jumping bail.  Ben was a cool customer and played the Jasper in his fancy suit with a full beard. Big Jim figured him as the man who knew just how far he could push the bulge.

So he set Sheridan and his four man crew of goons up in a tavern in Springfield, Illinois (above), complete with a full liquor stock, and they spent a couple of months just taking the lay of the land. They played tourists at Lincoln’s tomb in the Oak Ridge Cemetery several times and it looked like an eggs-in-the-coffee job to them.

The rectangular granite monument sat atop the highest point in the cemetery. Two curving, confusing corridors met in the center of the marble monument at two rooms. In one room rested the body of Mary Todd Lincoln. In the other rested the President’s sarcophagus.

The monument itself was surrounded by tall oaks that would hide any nighttime visitors. The cemetery was two miles outside of town, the room containing the sarcophagus had but a single padlock on its gate, the groundskeeper lived elsewhere, there were no bulls on duty at night and questioning a custodian revealed that the casket itself had been sealed with simple plaster of Paris.

By the end of June things looked so Jake to Sheridan that he took a night off to relax. And that was when he stuck his foot in it. Drunk on corn in a local "can house" (above), Sheridan boasted to a chippy that on the night of July the third he was going “steal old Lincoln’s bones”. Well, the chippy called copper, which is to say she notified the local bulls, and in the morning the buttons paid a visit to Sheridan’s establishment just to let him know the caper was blown. Big Jim was not happy. He repossessed the liquor stock, locked the tavern tight and ordered the whole crew back to Chicago.

The truth was, Big Jim might have been lucky things went adrift at this point, because when John Carroll Power, the custodian, was interviewed later he described in detail the entire gang and offered the opinion that Sheridan was “of more intelligence “than all four goons “combined”, but “of exceedingly depraved morals”. Obviously Mr. Power was an observant judge of character and a powerful witness.

That fall, in the back room of The Hub, a saloon at 294 West Madison Street in Chicago, Big Jim met with his second choice of conspirators; Terrence Mullen (above), the bar owner, and a passer named Jack Hughes (below).

But Big Jim decided that this time they needed an actual resurrectionist, a man familiar with the problems of body snatching. And he was lucky enough that just such a man had recently started hanging out at The Hub, an ex-sailor and life long bundle stiff and body snatcher by the name of Louis C. Swegles. Swegles knew the right people and they seemed to know him, so Big Jim brought him into the plot, now laid on for election night, “a da-ned fine elegant time to do it”, as Jack Hughes said.

They caught the night train for Springfield and arrived at six on the morning of November seventh, and checked into the St. Charles Hotel. In their luggage they brought a can of blasting powder, a six foot fuse, a small file and a saw. They gang caught some sleep, leaving a call for 10:30 A.M. After breakfast Louis Swegles and Jack Hughs paid a visit to the monument. Hughes assured his fellows they wouldn’t need their tools to open the locked gate on the tomb. “I could fall against it and open it,” he boasted. Terry Mullen wanted to be certain, so that afternoon he stole an axe from a hardware store.

About nine o’clock that night they slipped into the looming silent monument. While Swegle held the lantern, Mullen began to saw through the padlock that Hughes had shown such disrespect for. And almost immediately the saw blade broke. Mullen was reduced to working the padlock with the file. It felt like it was going to take forever.

Finally the padlock fell apart and the three then prepared to attack the sarcophagus itself. Mullen wanted to use a sledge hammer but Swegles pointed to the copper dowels that were all that held the lid on. Having removed the lid (the open sarcophagus, above) they slid the President’s cedar covered lead coffin out. Swegles handed the lantern to Hughes and slipped back outside to bring the wagon up to the service door.

After waiting a few moments for Swegles to reappear, Hughes and Mullen decided it would be better if they waited outside. They were standing under an oak tree a hundred feet away from the service door when they heard the crack of a gunshot echoing from inside the monument. Being experienced thieves, they ran for it. Outside the cemetery walls they boarded the last streetcar for the night bound for downtown Springfield, and heard more shots and shouting behind them. Hughes and Mullen did not return to their hotel, but split up and made their separate ways out of Springfield on foot.

By November 9th Mullen was back in Chicago, tending bar at the Hub as if nothing had happened. Two days later Swegles reappeared with a harrowing tale of having escaped the bulls by the skin of his teeth. A week afterward Hughes showed as well. They were all thinking themselves very lucky to have escaped the Bulls.

But just as Mullen and Hughes started to ask themselves what had gone wrong, that was when the bulls swept them up. Both Hughes and Mullen were arrested and transported back to Springfield. Swegles was not arrested because he had been a stoolie for the Treasury bulls from the very beginning. From the second he had been asked to join the scheme, the bulls had been kept apace at every step of the way. Swegles had not gone for the wagon, he and alerted the bulls waiting in tomb to make the arrest. But instead they had ended up fighting a gun battle with each other in the dark. And Big Jim? Well, he never liked to be close to the actual crime, and immediately made himself scarce. The last he was heard of, Big Jim was heading for New Mexico territory.

Oddly enough there was no law in Illinois against grave robbing, so Hughes and Mullen were convicted only of the theft of Lincoln’s coffin, value set at $75.00. They were sentenced to one year each at hard labor and then disappeared from the pages of history. Big Jim would be convicted in 1880 of a land fraud in New Mexico Territory, and end up serving his time in the Joliet prison, the same institution once occupied by his onetime printer, Ben Boyd.

As for the corpse of President Abraham Lincoln, the unwilling player in this farce, Mr. Power had him secretly reburied in the basement of the tomb. And there he resided in obscurity in his own tomb until 1901 when Lincoln's son, Robert, had his father's coffin reburied. But this time it was placed inside a steel cage, lowered into a new 10 foot vault dug into the Illinois soil, into which was poured several tons of concrete and then the original stone sarcophagus was placed on top of it all, making it very unlikely anyone would ever try to steal Lincoln's corpse, ever again.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty - Five

The artillery crescendo gave the game away. As the hands on thousands of watches clicked over to 10:00 am on Thursday, 22 May, 1863 - another of those heavy humid Mississippi mornings – dozens of gunners along the 3 mile long battle line waited for that final tick to pull their lanyards one last time. It was natural, to want to deliver one last blow against the enemy before the defenseless infantry came came out into the open. But after hours of shot and shell, the hiccup in the rhythm of the bombardment, followed by the thunder of so many cannon in unison, betrayed the attacker's intent. Without bidding, the men of the 36^th Mississippi occupied the firing step of the redoubt and half cocked their muskets. Now it would be their courage and iron and powder against a forlorn hope.

Ulysses Grant (above)  had decided even before the second failure of 19 May that he would try again, but a harder blow this time. On Tuesday Grant had been able to bring 15,000 men against the rebel lines. Now he could use the combined strength of 40,000 men, and the entire artillery reserves of the Army of the Tennessee. With an hour long bombardment to prepare the way, Grant meant to capture Vicksburg on 21 May, before the rebels in his rear, under General Joe Johnston, had time to assemble a new army.

That plan changed after Grant was recognized by the reserves and wounded of Sherman's XV Corps. As he rode through their ranks after the failed assault the men chanted, “Hard tack, hard tack, hard tack, hard tack”. The veterans were not showing affection for the ubiquitous barely palatable biscuit, also known as “molar breakers” and “worm castles”. 

Instead, the chanting troops were advising their general that after two weeks of more marching and foraging than fighting, they were willing to storm this rebel city, but they would need full bellies and a full ration of ammunition. It was the genius of Grant that he heard his soldiers, took their advice, and delayed his second assault until 22 May.

The wagons which now trundled up the new road from the Johnson Plantation on Chickasaw Bayou, were loaded with food – for every soldier 20 ounces of pork or beef, 16 ounces of hard tack, and 1 ounce of desiccated mixed vegetables or potatoes. 

And for every 100 men, 8 quarts of beans or peas, 10 pounds of hominy, 8 pounds of roasted coffee beans, 10 lbs of sugar and 1 quart of vinegar. Not until every regiment had received three day's rations, was the emphases shifted back to ammunition.

Major General Sherman decided to use the extra day to prepare his corps for the renewed assault on the Stockade Redoubt (above).  It stood astride the Graveyard Road, the primary northern route into Vicksburg. Now the men knew what they faced – the 8 food deep and 8 feet wide ditch filled with abatis, and then the 17 foot slope before they could even come to gripes with the enemy. And being innovative men, they invented a way of avoiding the ditch.

That Wednesday morning, each of the 15 regiments in General Sherman's Corp was asked to provided 10 volunteers. The response spoke well for the spirit of the Army. Without knowing the risk they were being asked to take, double the number needed stepped forward. It allowed Sherman (above) to eliminate married men from the mission. But Sherman expressed his true feelings when he labeled the storming parties as “The Forlorn Hope”.

Preparations continued during the afternoon of 21 May, drilling nail holes and driving metal handles into the backs of 25 fresh cut 9 to 10 foot logs. After nightfall, the men dragged the logs out into the 500 yards of open ground in front of the rebel redoubt. After covering them with dirt and debris, they were left.

Come 10:00 a.m., 50 men with their rifles slung across their backs, would break out of cover and run like hell to the logs. Two men to each log, the volunteers would grab the handles and carry the burdens forward before throwing them across the trench. They would be followed by another 50 volunteers, who would be carrying boards pierced with nails. That afternoon it had been determined there only one ready source of planks, and that was the house in which General Grant was sleeping. So the general would drink his morning coffee on Thursday, 22 May while watching the house around him being dismantled.

The second wave of volunteers would run to the ditch, and jam the nails of the boards into the pre-drilled holes in the logs, thus forming foot bridges. The final 50 volunteers would be carrying scaling ladders. They would race across the bridges and lay the ladders against the redoubts' slope. The following assault troops would then cross the bridges, climb the ladders and capture the redoubt. Or so went the plan.

A mile to the south, 34 year old Major General James Birdseye McPherson's XVII Corp would be making a similar assault on the Great Redout. And about a mile further south of that the XIII Corps under 51 year old politician Major General John Alexander McClaerend would be attacking the Railroad Redoubt. It was hoped that if the rebel line was pressed in unison, it would break somewhere. Anywhere.

Wednesday evening, Grant informed Admiral Porter of the pending assault, and asked if the ironclads along the river could help by shelling the enemy water batteries from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. Porter assigned the ships Benton, Tuscumbria, Carondelet and Mound City to pound the river batteries.

Inside the Stockade Redout, the confident veterans of the 36^th Mississippi knew something was coming. But the only element of their defense which caused them worry was their commander, 30 year old Colonel William Wallace Witherspoon. There could be no doubt that he was a southern patriot. When the war broke out, William had just begun his career as a lawyer in the little town of Napoleon, where the Arkansas river joined the Mississippi. Still, he immediately enlisted in the 1^st Arkansas mounted infantry, as a private.

Less than a month after the battle of Bull Run, in August of 1861, a 12,000 man rebel army was camped along Wilson's Creek, preparing to fall on the 6,000 isolated Union troops in Springfield, Missouri. The Union commander, Brigadier General Nathanial Lyon, decided to strike first, and on 10 August, caught the rebels still in their tents. After a bloody morning, the Yankees were forced to retreat, but the attack, which cost Lyon his life (above), so damaged the rebels there were unable to follow up their victory, which saved Missouri for the Federal Union. One of the 1,300 rebel casualties was private William Witherspoon.

William (above)  was wounded so severely, he was discharged. But in March of 1862 he re-enlisted as a Lieutenant in the 36^th Mississippi Infantry. Over the next year he earned a reputation as so “harsh, overbearing and tyrannical” that his men stuck him with the vulgar sexual nickname “Pewter Spoon” Then at Iuka, Corinth and Chickasaw Bayou, he showed himself to also be a brave and “brilliant” combat commander. Whether he was drinking for self medication or addiction, did not matter much to his men, or his commanders, and he was twice charged with being drunk on duty.

That Thursday, promptly at 10:00 a.m., Colonel Witherspoon steadied his men as the last of the Yankee shells landed harmlessly on the face of the Redoubt. Then with a cheer, the forlorn hope appeared, running out from the shelter of the trees. 

The Mississippi boys did not wait for orders, but opened up at once. Sergeant George Powell Clarke, company “C” of the 36^th, said, “A withering fire of musketry, grape, canister and shells greeted them as they came in sight, and men fell like grass before the reaper…Here, now, the eye witness could have seen war in all its awful sublimity and grandeur.”

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FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT!

I can't help wondering why so many politicians keep calling for a new approach to politics  Aren't the same politics we've been using for the last 10,000 years good enough?  Maybe the real problem lies not with the lying, two faced, double dealing, back-stabbing, opportunistic, insincere politicians we have, but with the idiots who vote for them: i.e. us.  Check my math, please: politicians lie, politicians get elected. Could there be a connection?  Let me give you a little example from ancient history, so nobody feels insulted.

James K. Polk (above) was America's eleventh President, serving from 1845 to 1849. He was, until Richard Nixon, our most secretive President. He did not even tell his own cabinet members what he was thinking. He was a Jackson Democrat,  and no matter what your history books tell you he did not campaign on the phrase "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight" – that came up later. During his actual campaign for President, Polk was most famous for insisting he did not brand his slaves. And trust me, this smear was so good they still haven’t figured out who did it.

The story was first published in the 21August, 1844 edition of the Ithaca New York "Chronicle". It was a a Whig Party newspaper. And the story claimed to be a letter to the editor, quoting a three paragraph extract from an unpublished book, titled “Roorback’s Tour Through the Western and Southern States…” The extract claimed to detail Baron Von Roorback's conversations with a group of slave traders on the Duck River in Tennessee. “Forty of these unfortunate beings had been purchased, I was informed, by the Honorable J.K. Polk…; the mark of a branding iron, with the initials of his name on their shoulders, distinguishing them from the rest.”  Now, even in 1844 the idea of branding human beings, even those treated as slaves, was appalling to many people...even in places where the economy had been built on slavery.

Which was why the story was picked up by the "Albany Evening Journal", and other Whig newspapers, particularly in the 1844 “battleground states” of New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Many voters in those swing states were outraged that a man standing for President would do something so despicable as to brand human beings the same way you brand cattle. To Whig politicians the story from "Roorback’s Tour" was almost too good to be true.  And almost as quick as Republican bloggers caught Dan Rather, the Democratic press found out there was no such book and no such Baron. The details about Polk had been inserted into a real travel book, of a run in with some slave traders on Virginia’s New River. Polk’s farm was in Tennessee, so the inventor of the smear had shifted the scene to where it would do the most good. Besides, it was not common practice to brand slaves. Like whipping scars, branding tended to reduce their value as property,  since it indicated this slave had a tendency to escape. Slaves were certainly whipped and branded because in 1844, most Americans still believed black slaves were property and would have been equally offended if some government official tried to tell them how to treat their horses or how to slaughter their hogs.

Still, embarrassed at being caught repeating what was so obviously a fabrication, the Whigs pinned the whole thing on William Linn, a lawyer and a Democratic operative in Ithaca. But why would a Democrat smear his own candidate? Well, if I were a believer in conspiracy theories, I might say that this kind of allegation against Polk was actually a fairly safe charge to make. Polk did own slaves, but his Whig opponent in the election, Henry Clay, owned even more slaves than Polk did.  And it has been suggested by some historians that the “Roorback” story was a case of nineteenth century “wedge” politics. Abolitionism was still a minor issue in 1844, but abolitionists formed a solid voting block in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, those key battleground states. Convince enough abolitionists in those states that the Whigs were lying to them, and they just might choose the Democrat Polk over the Whig Clay as the lesser of two evils. And the letter to the Ithaca Chronicle had been signed, “An Abolitionist”, thus adding insult to the injury.

Well, maybe....And maybe that theory implies a level of sophisticated conspiracy that did not exist in the simpler culture and times of 1844 – and certainly would not have existed in Athens in 415 B.C., when Alcibiades was accused of vandalizing statues of the god Hermes.

You see Hermes was the mythical inventor of fire, and "...a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates....who protects and takes care of all travelers, miscreants, harlots, old cronies and thieves and injured athletes".  Each Greek home had an anatomically correct statue of Hermes standing on its front lawn, and it was common practice for visitors to pause at the stature and stroke his stone phallus for good luck before knocking on the front door. And when the owner left the house for the day or on  a business trip, they would also give the statue a tug for good luck.  And that was why it was so shocking that on the morning that Athens was launching a massive naval assault on Sicily, the city awoke to discover that every home statue of Hermes had its phallus knocked off during the night.  

It sounds to my modern ears as if the neighborhood kids had been drinking sour wine on the street corner and started smashing phalluses as a prank. But to the devout in Athens (and there were many who believed in the gods) it was also sacrilege. And rumors began almost immediately that the person responsible was the golden boy politician who was heading the expedition, and known for his past sacrilegious opinions, Alcibiades (above). Of course Alcibiades had his own theory. He thought it had been the work of his chief political opponent and co-commander of the Sicilian expedition, Nicias.  Two thousand five hundred years later, it is impossible to know who the phallus hackers really were and why they were whacking off in the dark.. But whether they planned it all or just took advantage of the situation, the one thing we know for certain is, that the people arguing both sides of the scandal were politicians.     

The point is, politicians have been gaming voters since voting was invented. And voters have been playing along, else the game would not have remained so popular for so long. And that is why when a politician tells me he is selling something new, especially when it is something I want to believe, my first reaction is,  “Pull the other one.,”  When the American political system works  (which it has not been doing recently)  it is been based upon pragmatism, as it was in the 1844 election.  Polk won 49.5% of the popular vote to Clay’s 48.1 %, and part of that razor thin margin was victories in New York and Pennsylvania - by less than 6,000 votes in both states.  Those two states gave Polk 62 Electoral Votes, out of his sixty-five vote margin of victory (170 to 105). It seems that if the Roorback story was a double blind trick, it worked.

Oh,... and remember the phrase “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”? That was not used in the 1844 election. Well, it was actually invented by Ohio Senator William “Earthquake” Allen, known for his thundering speeches, and he used it well after the election. The number was  the Southern border (54 degrees & 40 minutes of latitude) claimed by Russia when they owned Alaska. A simple glance at a modern map will confirm that the modern border between America and Canada,  agreed upon by President Polk, was (and is) the 49th parallel. So much for the “…Or fight!” part of the slogan. Have you noticed how often politicians don’t actually mean what they seem to say? You might say they make a career out of it. And always have. And we keep buying what they say. 

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