On the evening of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln decided to attend a seven year old play his buddy had told him about, a little number about a hick American going to England to visit his aristocratic cousins. Not enjoying the play as much as his employer, Lincoln's bodyguard slipped out to a nearby saloon for a drink, giving famed actor John Wilkes Booth the perfect opportunity to shoot the president in the back of the head. Lincoln died nine hours later, marking the first assassination of a U.S. president and the start of one of the strangest series of events to ever befall a dead body.
Immediately after old Honest Abe's death, his wife Mary took to her bed for five weeks, barely even able to speak in her grief. The absence of Mary left no family member to plan a funeral, leaving the task to the members of Lincoln's cabinet. Being politicians, they of course decided to make the biggest spectacle out of it as possible. Lincoln had left orders for his body to buried in Springfield, Illinois, but rather than just take the body directly there, it was decided to send it on a 1,600 mile, two week, 40 stop, grieving tour across seven states. Upon hearing of the idea, Mary tried to stop them, but since plans had already been made, she was completely ignored. Nine days after his death, Lincoln's body left Washington D.C. aboard a funeral train, accompanied by the unearthed body of his eleven year old son who had died three years previously. However, after a week of being jostled around and left exposed for up to 23 hours at a time, the dead president's body began to show definitive signs of rot. Now one might think that a rotting body would hurry the whole tour thing along, but you would be wrong. The tour kept right on schedule, leaving Lincoln’s body a much less than appetizing sight by the time it was finally deposited into its waiting opulent tomb.
Only a few weeks after her husband's burial, the grieving Mary Lincoln was booted out of the White House to make room for President Johnson and his family. Not having much money, she lived in a rather poor state of affairs until 1870, when Congress finally got around to granting her a pension of what amounted to $58,000 a year in today’s money. Mary really never got over her husband's death, by which I mean she walked around in black all the time and met with every kook she could find that claimed they could talk to the dead. This behavior only intensified following the death of another one of her sons, which in turn led to some crazy ass levels of paranoia, including a belief that a wandering Jew was trying to poison her. Eventually her one surviving son, Robert, was forced to have her committed to an insane asylum in 1875. Mary responded to this turn of events by quite reasonably trying to commit suicide.
It was around this time that a group of counterfeiters came up with a rather audacious plan. Hoping to counterfeit up some sweet fake hundred dollar bills, the crooks ran into a bit of a jam when the most skilled member of their clique got himself thrown into prison for being a drunken idiot. Rather than just give up on a life of crime, the remaining members of the gang came up with a convoluted plan to kidnap Lincoln’s corpse in order to hold it for ransom until their imprisoned compatriot was freed and they were paid what amounted to $4.4 million in today’s money. Unfortunately for the would be conspirators, one of their number decided to spill the whole plot to a woman at a bar in an ill-conceived attempt to get laid. Rather than sleeping with him, the woman instead alerted the authorities, which resulted in the whole group getting arrested, but not until after they had managed to break into the dead president's tomb. Worried about future grave robbing attempts, the body was then secretly reburied in a shallow grave nearby. The arrest was carried out by the Secret Service, which at the time was in charge of hunting down counterfeiters. However, after managing to protect Lincoln’s dead body, somebody got the bright idea that they should totally protect living presidents as well. Thus was born the Secret Service as we know it today.
In the meantime, Mary Lincoln managed to get herself out of the insane asylum after proving that she was just quirky insane rather than dangerous to herself and others insane. For whatever reason, she never talked to her son again, preferring to spend her time touring Europe and demanding a larger pension from the government. Mary died in 1882 and was buried in the Lincoln tomb, in which again, her husband was no longer actually buried. As for Robert Lincoln, he apparently shared some of his mother’s paranoia, for in 1901 he decided it would probably be best to rebury his father's body in a steel cage encased in ten feet concrete, you know, because someone tried to steal it once 25 years ago. During this procedure, for god only knows what reason, someone got the bright idea of opening up the casket to get one last look at the long dead president. Unsurprisingly, old Honest Abe stank terribly, you know, like a dead body. With the crowd happy enough that it was indeed Abraham Lincoln, the body was buried again for the final time.
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