A Treasury of Great American Scandals (34 page)

Despite having been one of the leading voices of both the American and French Revolutions, author of such works as
Common Sense
and
The Rights of Man,
Paine died reviled and nearly friendless. The radical views on religion he expressed later in his life certainly contributed to his unpopularity, and an attack on his former friend George Washington didn't exactly enhance his standing with the public either. Only six people came to his funeral.

One of Paine's harshest critics was the English pamphleteer William Cobbett, a staunch conservative who despised Paine's revolutionary ideas and repeatedly savaged him in print. Cobbett, alas, did not remain an enemy for long. Exposed to the ravages of the Industrial Revolution on Britain's rural poor, he was stunned by what he witnessed and as a result transformed himself into a radical reformer. Paine's worst critic was now his greatest disciple, preaching the new gospel against monied interests and monarchical privileges. Of course, this did not go over very well with Britain's ruling elite, and Cobbett, after serving two years in prison for sedition, was forced to flee to the United States in 1817. It was here that Paine's most loyal adherent started acting a little loony.

Cobbett was outraged at how poorly his hero's grave in New Rochelle, New York, was being maintained. “Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America,” he wrote. “There, however, he should not lie, unnoticed, much longer. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of England; and if no other people will show that they value that fame, the people of England will.” Cobbett could not have been more mistaken about his countrymen, as he would soon discover.

His plan to glorify Thomas Paine in perpetuity was twofold: He would remove his corpse from the ungrateful United States and take it to Britain, where he would build a magnificent monument for it, a rallying place for the poor and downtrodden. Obtaining the body was no problem. Cobbett simply stole Paine's remains under cover of night. “I have done myself the honor to disinter his bones,” he reported. “I have removed them from New Rochelle . . . they are now on their way to England. When I myself return, I shall cause them to speak to the common sense of the great man; I shall gather together the people of Liverpool and Manchester in one assembly with those of London, and those bones will effect the reformation of England in Church and State.”

Cobbett was bubbling with enthusiasm, but money was another matter. He didn't have any. This cast a bit of a pall on his plans to honor Paine with a lavish funeral featuring “twenty wagon loads of flowers . . . to strew before the hearse,” not to mention the monument he wanted to build. To raise funds, he decided to take his revered relic, Paine's body, on a tour of Britain. It was a flop. No one came to his “bone rallies”; instead, he was laughed at. Lord Byron even penned a mocking poem for the occasion:

Eventually Cobbett was reduced to selling locks of Paine's hair, but the demand was minimal. He was soon forced to realize that nobody cared, and he reluctantly shelved his plans. The bones he had removed from New Rochelle were shoved under his bed, where they stayed until his death in 1835. After that, Cobbett's son inherited them. But the younger Cobbett was arrested for debt and the remains were seized for auction, along with his other possessions. There was a reprieve, however, when a court ruled that Thomas Paine's skeleton was not a marketable asset, and it was returned to Cobbett's son. After that, the bone trail grows cold. And though history has rehabilitated Thomas Paine's reputation, his final resting place remains a mystery.

Abe Lincoln's Indecent Exposure

 

 

 

Most accounts of the life of Lincoln end with the solemn funeral procession that carried the martyred president by train from Washington back home to Springfield, Illinois. There is an epilogue, but it is not often included—perhaps because it is so unseemly. The Great Emancipator died in 1865, but he wasn't left alone until almost a half century later. In the intervening years, his corpse was subjected to a succession of abuses, including an abortive body-snatching scheme that came off more like a Keystone Kops caper.

Lincoln was laid to rest, the first time, in a temporary vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. And though his body would never leave the precincts of the graveyard, it would be disinterred no fewer than a dozen times. The first exhumation came just six months after Lincoln arrived at Oak Ridge, when his corpse was moved to another temporary vault pending completion of a permanent monument. His coffin was opened, ostensibly to identify the six-month-old corpse for the record. Then, in 1871, he was moved again—after being reidentified and reboxed in an iron coffin—to another temporary resting spot inside the partially completed monument. When a stone sarcophagus intended to be the president's permanent grave was completed three years later, officials were stunned to discover that Lincoln's iron coffin would not fit into it. They had to remove the body from the casket and place it in a smaller one made of wood. Of course, a formal identification of the remains was included in the process. Finally, on October 15, 1874, President Ulysses Grant dedicated the now completed National Lincoln Monument at Oak Ridge. Abraham Lincoln, safely ensconced in stone, was now at peace—or so it seemed.

A year after the monument's completion, Benjamin Boyd, a master engraver in the employ of counterfeiter “Big Jim” Kinelly, entered the state prison at Joliet, Illinois. This was a blow to Kinelly's criminal operations, depending as they did on Boyd's skill in making quality engravings of U.S. currency. Kinelly wanted his man back and settled upon a plan to make it happen. He would steal Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom in exchange for Boyd's release, plus $200,000 in cash. It seemed simple enough, but word of the plot leaked out to the U.S. Secret Service. Patrick Tyrell, the agent in charge of the service's Chicago branch, ordered one of his paid informers, a petty crook named Lewis Swegles, to infiltrate Kinelly's gang and find out how and when they planned to make their move against Lincoln's remains. Tyrell wanted to catch them in the act.

On the night of November 7, 1876, a group of Secret Service agents and detectives borrowed from Pinkerton's and other detective agencies waited in the darkness of the National Lincoln Monument for the invasion of the body snatchers. Swegles, who was accompanying the robbers, was supposed to give the waiting lawmen a signal as soon as the crypt was entered, but he couldn't slip away in time. It was only after the thieves had entered the tomb, pried open the sarcophagus, and began dragging away the coffin that Swegles was able to get outside, under the pretext of fetching the wagon, and give the signal that the crime was in progress. All at once, the agents charged the tomb, but to their dismay they found no thieves. Rushing back outside, they started shooting at each other in the darkness and confusion. Miraculously, no one was killed, but the grave robbers, who had decided to wait for Swegles and the wagon outside, escaped into the night when they heard the gunshots.

The would-be thieves were eventually captured and imprisoned, but there would be no happy endings for Lincoln. His coffin was removed from the crypt and hidden within the walls of the monument to discourage any further attempts to steal his body. For years, people paid their respects to an empty sarcophagus. By 1900, the Lincoln monument had become so dilapidated that it had to be almost entirely torn down and rebuilt. While this project was being completed, the late president and his family were buried in a temporary hole in the yard for about a year. Then, in 1901, the remains were returned to the reconstructed monument. Lincoln's son Robert, determined to foil any future robbery attempts, ordered that his father's body be buried deep inside the tomb and covered with twenty inches of concrete to seal it forever. He also ordered that the coffin not be opened again before reburial. But local officials ignored that command. They had to be sure the president was still there.

A pungent odor reportedly filled the room as workers pried off the coffin lid. The gathered moved in closer to see the great man who had been dead for almost forty years. His skin had turned black, and the chalk applied to his face by the undertaker made it appear a “grayish chestnut” color, according to one witness. His hair, beard, and the distinctive mole on his face were all well preserved, while the gloves he was wearing had rotted away. “Yes, his face was chalky white,” recalled Fleetwood Lindly, another witness. “His clothes [were] mildewed, and I was allowed to hold one of the leather straps as we lowered the casket for the concrete to be poured. I was not scared at the time, but I slept with Lincoln for the next six months.”

The “Resurrection” of John Scott Harrison

 

 

 

Despite all the disruptions to his perpetual rest, Abraham Lincoln was lucky that the thieves aiming to steal his body were thwarted in their ghoulish enterprise. John Scott Harrison was not so fortunate. This congressman from Ohio has the distinction of being the son of one U.S. president (William Henry Harrison), the father of another (Benjamin Harrison), and the victim of a horrible postmortem ordeal.

When John Scott Harrison died in 1878, body snatching was still a fairly common occurrence. There was money to be made selling corpses to medical schools, which used them to teach anatomy, and “resurrectionists,” as the thieves were called, did brisk business. During Harrison's funeral, it was noticed that the grave of a recently buried friend, William Devin, had been disturbed. Further investigation revealed that the body had been stolen. To avoid such a fate for their deceased dad, the Harrisons bricked up his grave, cemented it, and laid a ton of marble slabs upon it. They also hired two watchmen. The body of John Scott Harrison, they believed, was safe and sound.

After the burial, Harrison's son John Jr. and his nephew George Eaton went to Cincinnati to look for their friend William Devin's missing corpse. A search of the Ohio Medical College proved fruitless, until the two men were about to leave. One of them noticed a rope hanging in the chute through which cadavers were hoisted up to the school's dissecting room. The rope was taut, as though something heavy was hanging from it inside the chute. Pulling it up, they found a naked body with its head and shoulders covered by a cloth. When the cloth was removed, the men got quite a shock. “My God,” gasped John Jr. in horror, “that's my father!” Indeed, it was Harrison instead of Devin who had been buried at the disturbed grave the day before.

The gruesome discovery caused an immediate uproar, led by Benjamin Harrison, who arrived the following day. Although it was never discovered who took the corpse to the Ohio Medical College, the school was blasted in the press and subjected to an investigation. Dr. William Seely tried to defend the institution, saying that the entire affair “matters little, since it would all be the same on the day of resurrection.” This was not something the Harrisons wanted to hear, especially future president Benjamin, who never got over “the taste of hell which comes from the discovery of a father's body hanging by the neck, like that of a dog, in the pit of a medical college.”

John Paul Jones: Pickled in Paris

 

 

 

John Paul Jones commands a place of honor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he is buried in a magnificent sarcophagus at the center of a marble crypt beneath the academy's chapel. It is a fitting monument to the Revolutionary War hero and father of the U.S. Navy, who is famous for his wartime declaration, “I have not yet begun to fight.” But the dignity accorded him in this serene setting was about a century overdue. Before Jones was finally laid to rest at the academy in 1913, the hero and his remains were treated with appalling disregard by the nation he had served so well.

After his illustrious career during the American Revolution, and later in the service of Russia's Catherine the Great, Jones retired to Paris in 1790. He was hoping for a commission from the French government, but his glory days had passed and his health was failing. The great historian Thomas Carlyle described the deflated hero's final years: “In faded naval uniform, Paul Jones lingers visible here; like a wine-skin from which the wine is drawn. Like the ghost of himself !” Suffering from kidney disease and bronchial pneumonia, John Paul Jones died quietly and nearly alone on July 18, 1792.

Gouverneur Morris, the American minister to France, ordered the body to be buried privately and as cheaply as possible. With an additional touch of sensitivity, he had most of the dead man's uniforms, medals, and other personal treasures auctioned off to satisfy demands on Jones's estate. Morris later tried to explain his desire to dispose of the body with minimal cost or fanfare: “Some people here who like rare shows wished him to have a pompous funeral, and I was applied to on the subject; but . . . I had no right to spend on such follies either the money of his heirs or that of the United States.”

Morris's cold frugality was ultimately circumvented by the French, who apparently thought more of the great American than did the Americans. Pierre-François Simmoneau, a royal commissary of King Louis XVI, not only paid for a decent funeral, but had the corpse preserved in alcohol and placed in a lead coffin so that “in case the United States should claim his remains, they might be more easily removed.” A dignified funeral procession wound its way through the streets of Paris to the Protestant cemetery outside the city walls. There the gathered mourners, mostly French, were exhorted by the presiding minister to imitate this “illustrious foreigner” and his contempt for danger, his devotion to his country, and “his noble heroism, which after having astonished the present age, will continue to be the object of the veneration of future generations.” While the French paid their respects to “le célèbre capitaine Paul-Jones,” Gouverneur Morris didn't bother to attend the funeral. The American minister was too busy flitting around Paris on social calls.