54 pages • 1 hour read
Steve SheinkinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
One summer night in 1864, a convict named Pete McCartney boldly leaps off a train that is en route to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, DC, and he escapes into the Pennsylvania woods. McCartney is a counterfeiter, and he manages to elude his pursuers, even though he is injured from the jump and his legs are shackled with heavy chains. He has a long history of escaping police custody and has been arrested many times for making and passing “coney” (counterfeit money). Typically, he has bribed his way out of jail, but some of his escapes have been quite ingenious—once, he fashioned a skeleton key out of scraps of foil from cigarette packages.
After his escape from the prison train, McCartney tries to go straight, even working briefly as a paid lecturer on how to detect counterfeit money. Eventually, though, he succumbs again to the huge profits of the coney racket. He is arrested again in Illinois and interrogated by Herman Whitley, the chief of the United States Secret Service, a new federal agency tasked with shutting down the endemic counterfeiting of the nation’s money. To Whitney’s disappointment, McCartney refuses to turn over his accomplices, agreeing only to surrender his cache of fake cash. At the end of their brief talk, McCartney vows to escape from jail that very night and visit Whitney in his hotel room; to Whitney’s surprise, McCartney manages to do this. Though the counterfeiter quickly surrenders and returns to jail, his gesture dramatizes the challenges facing the fledgling Secret Service in its uphill battle against endlessly resourceful and daring adversaries.
A decade later, in February 1875, a brand-new operative for the Secret Service named Patrick Tyrrell meets with the agency’s chief, Elmer Washburn, in a hotel in Chicago. Tyrrell, who is 44 years old, used to be a former Chicago detective; Washburn assigns him to the case of Benjamin Boyd, a highly skilled engraver of counterfeit money plates. Boyd was one of the nation’s most gifted engravers of illustrative plates and was seduced into the counterfeiting racket at the age of 20; soon, he was producing the best “coney” in the business. Typically, he would sell his counterfeit bills to “distributors” for at least 15% of their face value; the distributors then doubled the price to sell them to “shovers,” who passed the fake money at stores and other businesses. With just a single set of his handmade plates, Boyd could make a fortune in bogus currency; but it was a risky way of life, and in 1859, he went to jail for two years. After his release, Boyd married Allie Ackman, a young woman who, with her sister Martha, had been raised in the coney racket, helping their father crank out counterfeit money. Around the same time, the famous counterfeiter (and jailbreak artist) Pete McCartney became Boyd’s brother-in-law by marrying Martha. Together, they forged an extended crime family.
After a few more brushes with the law, Boyd went into hiding but continued to flood the country with his near-perfect counterfeit bills. Washburn tells Tyrrell that Boyd’s arrest will “snap the backbone” of counterfeiting in America (14). Tyrrell’s first step is to seek out Boyd’s mentor, Nat Kinsey, the man who first lured him into the trade. For a sum of money, Kinsey agrees to act as an informer, keeping tabs on Boyd’s movements. Eventually, Kinsey tells Tyrrell that Boyd has begun work on a new set of plates in a house in Fulton, Illinois. Determined to catch Boyd, Tyrrell arranges for Kinsey to flash him a signal from the counterfeiter’s window when Boyd is in the act of engraving the plates.
The next morning, Tyrrell and two other Secret Service agents approach Boyd’s house on foot. Spotting them from the window, Kinsey gives the agreed-upon signal. However, one of Boyd’s cronies shouts him a coded warning from the street. Wasting no time, Tyrrell charges into the house as his agents guard the exits. Overpowering Boyd’s wife, Allie, who tries to hold him back, Tyrrell races up the staircase, where he apprehends the startled Boyd. In the spare bedroom upstairs, which is Allie and Boyd’s workroom, the agents find a trove of damning evidence: engraving tools, a partially finished plate for a counterfeit $20 bill, and, hidden in the handle of a box, almost $8,000 in real currency. Both Allie and Boyd try to bribe the agents, but this time, they fail: The incorruptible Tyrrell even puts every penny of Boyd’s real currency in the bank for him, which astounds Boyd. Boyd tries to forge a key to his jail cell, just as McCartney once did, but a guard finds and confiscates it. For once, Boyd is unable to escape and faces years in prison.
Sheinkin provides a brief history of currency and counterfeiting in the American colonies and the new republic, starting with wampum (beads made from colored seashells), which were sometimes faked by charlatans, who dyed white beads purple to make them appear to be more valuable. When the colonies’ first mint in Massachusetts began mass-producing silver coins in 1652, counterfeiters were quick to fabricate pewter copies; and when paper money began to appear, it was ingeniously faked by lawbreakers like Mary Butterworth, a Massachusetts housewife who used a hot iron to transfer the banknotes’ designs to blank pieces of paper. Butterworth was never convicted since her method left no evidence behind.
After the American Revolution, the US government produced only coins and no paper money. This changed with the Civil War, when large amounts of lightweight currency were needed to pay troops and to buy supplies. As a result, counterfeiting became a major industry, as paper money could be faked more cheaply and on a far larger scale than coins. At that time, a paper-money counterfeiting operation required a vast network of distributors, shovers, and the all-important engraver, whose work had to be close to flawless. However, with such a huge profit margin, coney rings proliferated and soon raged out of control. By 1864, as much as 50% of America’s paper currency was bogus. In 1865, to save the US economy, the Treasury Department created a special police force—the Secret Service—to take out the counterfeiting gangs. At first, the Secret Service had no role in guarding US presidents; that would change in 1901, with the assassination of President McKinley.
In 1876, Ben Boyd was found guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. This was a significant triumph for the Secret Service and for Patrick Tyrrell, the agent who had investigated, tracked, and arrested Boyd. As a reward, Tyrrell was promoted to chief operative of the Chicago District of the Secret Service, making him responsible for three large states—Illinois, Missouri, and Wisconsin—an area the “size of a small country” (32).
The arrest and conviction of Boyd deals a devastating blow to the counterfeiting “empire” of James “Big Jim” Kennally, a St. Louis livery stable owner turned coney titan. Kennally is 37 years old in 1876 and is a cautious criminal who keeps as much distance as possible from the nitty-gritty of his trade, arranging counterfeiting jobs for distributors through his far-flung network of engravers and printers. Key to his success is the near perfection of his fake money, which he owed to the brilliance of his engraver, Ben Boyd. Now, with Boyd’s imprisonment, passable coney is in short supply; at the nation’s banks, fake bills have become so rare that tellers are falling out of practice at spotting them. Kennally tries to use other engravers, but the mediocre plates they produce have a short life expectancy: Once a fake bill is spotted by a teller, the bank sends out detailed descriptions, eventually making the entire batch worthless. Also, trying to pass inferior coney puts shovers and distributors at risk. Now, Kennally can no longer command top prices from his many clients. Since prison officials reject every bribe to let Boyd go, Kennally resorts to more desperate measures to save his criminal empire. Traveling to Lincoln, Illinois, he meets with members of the Logan County Gang, who are regular clients of his, to plot a more extreme form of pressure on the government. Kennally’s idea is to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln from its tomb in nearby Oak Ridge Cemetery and hold it for ransom for Boyd’s release.
The theft of an American president’s corpse has been attempted before. In 1830, a former gardener at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s family estate, broke into the late president’s burial vault to pillage his body. Apparently upset about his dismissal, the gardener made off with what he thought was Washington’s skull; after his capture, however, it was found to be the skull of one of Washington’s in-laws, who had been buried in the same vault. Years later, in 1867, a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, conceived a plan to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body and sell it to the highest bidder; however, he could not convince anyone else to join him in this venture, so he abandoned it. There was a thriving context for such crimes: Bodysnatching—the theft of corpses from graves or morgues to sell to the medical profession—was a major problem in the 19th century. However, to desecrate the body of a president was in a different league altogether.
Nevertheless, the Logan County Gang quickly agrees with Kennally’s plot. Thomas Sharp, the gang leader, selects four helpers, and the five of them travel together to Springfield and set themselves up in a saloon and dancehall, which is a front for their operations. They plan to snatch Lincoln’s body from his tomb, bury it in a ditch alongside a nearby river, and wait for a reward to be offered by the government. Then, James Kennally himself will “discover” the body, ostensibly while fishing. Having arranged an alibi for himself on the night of the heist, Kennally fully expects to evade arrest. His price for the return of the president’s body will be the release of Ben Boyd. Interestingly, Kennally sets the proposed date of the robbery as Independence Day, July 4, 1976, which is the nation’s centennial. The bustle and commotion of the festivities, Kennally thinks, will provide the perfect distraction for them to commit their crime and escape unnoticed.
Sheinkin relates how the federal government first began printing paper money in 1861 in order to fund the Civil War, only to trigger such an epidemic of money forging that by 1864, half of the nation’s currency was fake. Everywhere in the country, complex and sprawling “coney” networks spread their tentacles into the very heart of the nation’s commerce.
The widespread prevalence of counterfeiting and crime speaks to The Lure of Criminal Enterprises at that point in American history. The counterfeiters had embraced, in its starkest form, the American capitalist imperative to make money. The can-do pragmatism of the young nation can be seen, in a twisted fashion, in the homespun ingenuity of Mary Butterworth, who used common household items to print her fake bills. Some counterfeiting gangs were family affairs, notably that of the Ackman sisters, who learned about counterfeiting from their father and later married notorious counterfeiters to forge an extended crime family. Many counterfeiters were intelligent and talented, and they shone even at their other, honest jobs. The coney engravers Ben Boyd and Nat Kinsey, for instance, were talented painters who excelled at American scenes and landscapes. However, their art didn’t earn them as much as their lucrative career in counterfeiting.
For many in the coney trade, the thrill of lawbreaking itself was a powerful lure, and this dovetailed with a new spirit of rebelliousness in American life. Forged in the crucible of a revolution against the British, the United States had never quite lost its anti-authoritarian ethos; in the mid-19th century, this recalcitrance erupted into the cataclysmic Civil War, which allowed many to rationalize their anti-government profiteering. The nation’s moral gray areas were now a refuge for scoundrels of every stripe who learned quickly how to exploit the flaws in the system, such as the easily-forged paper currency that came with the war. Added to this, the country’s westward expansion, fueled by gold rushes and other exploits—usually in territories with burgeoning populations and little law enforcement—enthralled the east with tales of outlaw heroics, which were romanticized in the tabloids and pulps. As Sheinkin tells it, Pete McCartney saw himself as a swashbuckler as much as a coney artist, exulting in jailbreaks and other daring escapes.
With regard to their work, which was often challenging and dangerous, the counterfeiters showed great Dedication and Perseverance for a Cause. Like many traditional American success stories, most coney moguls rose from humble beginnings, prospering through a combination of grit, daring, and versatility. Lincoln’s Grave Robbers is, at heart, a history of the beginnings of the United States Secret Service, which was originally formed to fight rampant counterfeiting of the nation’s money. Secret Service agents, like Patrick Tyrrell, matched the counterfeiters’ determination and perseverance with their own. The entire business carried a sense of thrilling adventure, with the counterfeiters and the Secret Service agents playing a battle of wits, which is what Sheinkin focuses on in his retelling.
However, Sheinkin also highlights the harm the counterfeiters did to the nation’s finances and to its spirit. They did not care that their industrious money-spinning wreaked havoc on their young country’s economy. Further, “Big Jim” Kennally’s plot to steal Lincoln’s body would have dealt a harrowing blow to a nation just finding its feet, and a renewed moral identity, after a devastating war. He planned for the crime to occur on the centennial of the nation’s independence. This is a move that might have been practical for him—since it would have been a busy day of celebration—but it is symbolic of Kennally’s irreverence for the nation’s sacred symbols, including that of paper money, which is a symbol of the wealth and integrity of the United States government. Here, the Secret Service’s mission to protect Lincoln’s body foreshadowed its later role in safeguarding living presidents, thus continuing to shore up the US government as well as the economy.
By Steve Sheinkin