The city was electric. Downtown Springfield was crammed on the night of the century’s closest presidential election.
Two miles to the north, in the crisp autumn silence of Nov. 7, 1876, an audacious, if preposterous, scheme was unfolding. Thugs had broken into Abraham Lincoln’s tomb to steal his body.
Counterfeiters crippled by the imprisonment of a master engraver had hatched the heist, convinced that the government would pardon their confederate and surrender cash to boot for the return of the 16th president’s remains.
It was the pluck and good luck of a stoic Irish immigrant, Patrick Tyrrell, an early hero of a nascent U.S. Secret Service, which foiled the criminal venture 150 years ago. But it followed a string of debacles that night, including the inability of the burglars to move the casket, an officer’s accidentally fired gun which allowed the criminals’ escape and, during the subsequent manhunt, the good guys unwittingly shooting at one another atop the tomb.
Its aftermath created sleepless nights for those responsible for safeguarding the tomb, prompting the eventual burial of the president’s remains deep in concrete.
While the enterprise was unorthodox, the villains chose a prime target. Just a decade earlier, Lincoln had ended the Civil War, preserved the Union, set in motion an end to slavery and had fallen to an assassin’s bullet for his efforts. Critical review of his tenure was still decades away, said Jacob Friefeld, director of the Center for Lincoln Studies at University of Illinois Springfield.
“If they wanted to get people’s attention, that was a good body to steal because Lincoln, at this point in 1876, is still an American saint,” Friefeld said. “He’s a hero.”
The story began a year earlier, when Tyrrell busted Benjamin Boyd’s counterfeiting operation in Fulton, 176 miles northwest of Springfield. Boyd was a notoriously skilled engraver whose plates produced impeccable reproductions of paper currency.
Counterfeiting was rampant in the 19th century. Before there was a national currency, nearly every bank issued its own paper banknotes, Secret Service archivist Michael Sampson said.
“People not familiar with all the different varieties that existed assumed that each was genuine,” Sampson said.
When the federal government issued the first centralized currency in the 1860s to finance the Civil War, counterfeiters delighted – unsuspecting recipients were prone to trust the government’s so-called greenbacks.
By the end of the war in 1865, one-third to one-half of all currency in circulation was counterfeit, Sampson said. The Secret Service debuted that year to stop the stream.
With Boyd locked up in the state penitentiary in Joliet for 10 years, the quality of the fake bills, known as “queer,” suffered. James “Big Jim” Kennally’s small-time, Chicago-based ring was in a bind.
R. Emmett Tyrrell, great-great-grandson of Patrick Tyrrell, sits beneath a lithograph of Lincoln that the late president’s son, Robert Lincoln, presented to Patrick Tyrrell for his work to foil the attempt to steal Lincoln’s body. Photo by Jeanne Hauch
In 1876, Kennally took a plan to two Chicago associates, Terence Mullen, bartender at a dive called The Hub about a mile west of the Loop which Kennally co-owned and Jack Hughes, one of Kennally’s “shovers,” who spent his days putting the queer into circulation.
They would haul Lincoln’s casket hundreds of miles from its Oak Ridge Cemetery monument to the Indiana sand dunes on Lake Michigan’s southern shore, where the shifting landscape would bury it until the Illinois governor issued a pardon for Boyd and turned over $200,000 – in today’s dollars, $6.3 million.
But first they had to get past Tyrrell, whose arrest of Boyd had earned him a promotion to chief of the Secret Service’s Chicago district. Tyrrell was a burly, square-jawed man, meticulous and incorruptible. According to his great-great-grandson, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the family is descended from Richard Tyrrell, a 16th century Irish warlord who commanded troops in rebellion against English rule.
Thus, Patrick Tyrrell “was a very tough man,” said Emmett Tyrrell, 82, founder and editor of The American Spectator magazine. “He was a fighter from Day One.”
He was also lucky. When an original gang member backed out, Mullen and Hughes sidled up to a horse thief named Lewis Swegles. Swegles agreed to join the plot – and because he was a $5-a-day Secret Service informant, tipped off Tyrrell.
The gang had chosen Nov. 7, Election Day, knowing that the city’s attention would be riveted by presidential returns. Democrat Samuel J. Tilden bested Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by 252,666 votes out of 8.3 million cast, but the contest ended with Hayes in the White House by one Electoral College tally.
Tyrrell, joined by Secret Service Chief Elmer Washburn and two agents borrowed from Allan Pinkerton’s detective agency, arrived at the cemetery and posted themselves in the vestibule inside the tomb’s main entrance. At the time, the sarcophagus was in a separate room with an entrance at the back of the tomb.
Later that night, the conspirators arrived. After struggling to saw through the padlock on the catacomb door, Hughes and Mullen entered and removed the lid of the sarcophagus. They couldn’t lift the casket, which weighed as much as 500 pounds. They removed the container’s end but were only able to slide the coffin out about 15 inches.
At this point, according to Tyrrell’s report, provided by the Secret Service, Swegles announced he would summon a fourth man whom Swegles had recruited to drive the wagon. Instead, he alerted Tyrrell, who led the rush to the catacomb in stocking feet – he had removed his boots to keep the sound of his footsteps from carrying. It was during the charge that a Pinkerton agent’s cocked pistol discharged, piercing the silence.
“It was an unfortunate circumstance,” Tyrrell wrote in his report. Reaching the catacomb, his call for surrender went unanswered.
“I struck a match and entered and to my surprise, no fiend was there – the marks of their devilish work plainly visible,” Tyrrell reported.
Mullen and Hughes had fled upon hearing the gunshot. Tyrrell ordered his men to search the area. He ascended to the tomb’s terrace where he saw a shadowy figure and fired several times, dodging returned volleys before realizing he was in a gunfight with a Pinkerton agent. “What a mistake!” Tyrrell wrote later.
If Tyrrell was concerned about the criminals’ escape, he didn’t have long to worry. Within days of the Springfield brouhaha, Mullen and Hughes returned to Chicago and the pair were simultaneously collared at The Hub.
In May 1877, a local jury found Mullen and Hughes guilty of conspiracy to steal Lincoln’s remains and attempted larceny for would-be theft of the casket. Each was sentenced to a year in prison – joining Boyd in Joliet. Remarkably, Kennally was never charged.
As for Lincoln’s remains, the tomb’s custodian, John Carroll Power, hid Lincoln’s body in the tomb’s basement, fearing another attempt to pilfer it. A 1901 tomb renovation concluded with the casket 10 feet in the ground, encased in concrete.
Despite the foibles along the way, the late president’s son, Robert Lincoln, was satisfied with the work of the Secret Service. Emmett Tyrrell maintains a large framed lithograph of the Great Emancipator which Robert Lincoln presented to Patrick Tyrrell with a plaque dated April 14, 1887, reading, “for loyalty and service to his father, Abraham Lincoln.”
“He got his man,” Emmett Tyrrell said.
John O’Connor is a retired Associated Press reporter. An Illinois native, he has lived in Springfield since 1994.
This article appears in November 5-11, 2026.
