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.”
4
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.”
5
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.
A little more than three weeks after John Paul Jones was buried, a Paris mob stormed the royal palace of the Tuileries, and the bodies of the Swiss Guards killed while trying to protect the king and queen were tossed into a common grave adjoining that of Jones. With France in the midst of revolution and a crushing foreign war with Austria and Prussia, any hope of recovering Jones’s body and bringing it back home would have to be postponed indefinitely—not that there was any great clamor in the United States to do so. John Paul Jones was quietly fading into obscurity as the years passed, and, except for his heirs pestering Congress for his unpaid salary and other monies, no one gave the great man much thought. The cemetery where he was buried closed in 1804 and was soon covered over by the expanding city.
There were several attempts to find the burial site as the nineteenth century progressed, but all were futile. It seemed that Jones would be lost forever. But then, in 1899, General Horace Porter, the American ambassador to France, initiated his own search and eventually found the site of the old graveyard. As word of the discovery leaked out, though, the owners of the buildings on the site saw an opportunity for profit and demanded exorbitant sums for the right to excavate beneath their property. Ambassador Porter had no choice but to postpone his project until 1905, when the initial e
xcitement had died down and he was able to secure permission to dig on more favorable terms.
An army of workers immediately set about sinking shafts and digging tunnels. Around the clock they toiled, at one point encountering the badly deteriorated remains of those unfortunate Swiss Guards who had been, according to one report, “stacked like cord-wood” in their graves. Eventually, a series of lead coffins were found. One of them surely contained the remains of John Paul Jones. But which one? A group of anthropologists and pathologists were called in to help sort through the corpses. When the coffin thought to be Jones’s was opened, it proved to be a bonanza. “To our intense surprise,” wrote Ambassador Porter, “the body was marvelously preserved, all the flesh remaining intact, very slightly shrunken, and of grayish brown or tan color.” Simmoneau’s decision to cure the corpse in alcohol had paid off. The gathered experts were able to match the well-preserved face with a bust of Jones known to be an accurate likeness, and an autopsy confirmed the cause of death. The search for John Paul Jones was over. Now it was time to finally give him his propers.
President Theodore Roosevelt, sensing the propaganda value for the U.S. Navy, which he was looking to strengthen, sent a fleet of ships over to France to escort Jones back home. First, though, an elaborate service was held over the body, which now reposed in a sleek new mahogany coffin. This was followed by a big parade and a special trip to Cherbourg, where, after another ceremony, the casket was transferred to the U.S.S. Brooklyn for the trip back to the United States.
Still more obsequies awaited the arrival home, yet despite all the tributes and long-delayed expressions of gratitude, John Paul Jones was still getting dissed in some quarters. Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy, Jones’s final resting place, sang a parody of a popular song called “Everybody Works but Father”:
Everybody works but John Paul Jones!
He lies around all day,
Body pickled in alcohol
On a permanent jag they say.
Middies stand around him
Doing honor to his bones;
Everybody works in Crabtown [Annapolis]
But John Paul Jones.
And though Congress had settled on the academy over many other places vying for the remains, it was too cheap to fund a proper shrine. As a result, Jones’s body was stashed behind a set of stairs until Congress finally came through with the cash. That only took seven years.
Appendix I
Presidents of the United States
1) GEORGE WASHINGTON
Born: February 22, 1732, Westmoreland County, Virginia
Political Party: Federalist
State Represented: Virginia
Vice President: John Adams
First Lady: Martha Dandridge Custis Washington
Term of Office: 1789-1797 (two terms)
Died: December 14, 1799, aged 67, Mount Vernon, Virginia
Distinctions: Only president inaugurated in two cities (New York, 1789, and Philadelphia, 1793). Only president to not live in Washington, D.C. Only president unanimously elected, receiving 69 of the 69 electoral votes cast in 1788.
Pages: 4, 7-8, 37-39, 172-73
2) JOHN ADAMS
Born: October 30, 1735, Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts
Political Party: Federalist
State Represented: Massachusetts
Vice President: Thomas Jefferson
First Lady: Abigail Smith Adams
Term of Office: 1797-1801 (one term)
Died: July 4, 1826, aged 90, Quincy, Massachusetts
Distinctions: First president to live in the White House. First to have his son elected president.
Pages: 37-46, 155-57
3) THOMAS JEFFERSON
Born: April 13, 1743, Albermarle County, Virginia
Political Party: Democratic-Republican
State Represented: Virginia
Vice President: Aaron Burr (first term); George Clinton (second term)
First Lady: None (Jefferson was a widower.)
Term of Office: 1801-1809 (two terms)
Died: July 4, 1826, aged 83, Charlottesville, Virginia
Distinctions: First president inaugurated in Washington, D.C. First elected by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Pages: 32, 41-46, 155-58, 178, 180-83, 250-52
4) JAMES MADISON
Born: March 16, 1751, Port Conway, Virginia
Political Party: Democratic-Republican
State Represented: Virginia
Vice President: George Clinton (first term); Elbridge Gerry (second term)
First Lady: Dolley Dandridge Payne Todd Madison
Term of Office: 1809-1817 (two terms)
Died: June 28, 1836, aged 85, Montpelier, Virginia
Distinctions: Shortest president (5 feet 4 inches). First to have been a congressman. Last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Pages: 42, 157, 180, 252
5) JAMES MONROE
Born: April 29, 1758, Westmoreland County, Virginia
Political Party: Democratic-Republican
State Represented: Virginia
Vice President: Daniel D. Tompkins
First Lady: Elizabeth Kortright Monroe
Term of Office: 1817-1825 (two terms)
Died: July 4, 1831, aged 73, New York, New York
Distinctions: First president to have been a U.S. Senator. First to ride on a steamboat.
Page: 75
6) JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Born: July 11, 1767, Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts
Political Party: Democratic-Republican
State Represented: Massachusetts
Vice President: John C. Calhoun
First Lady: Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams
Term of Office: 1825-1829 (one term)
Died: February 23, 1848, aged 80, Washington, D.C.
Distinctions: Only ex-president to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Pages: 9-11, 159-61
7) ANDREW JACKSON
Born: March 15, 1767, Waxhaw, South Carolina
Political Party: Democratic
State Represented: Tennessee
Vice President: John C. Calhoun (first term); Martin Van Buren (second term)
First Lady: None (Jackson was a widower)
Term of Office: 1829-1837 (two terms)
Died: June 8, 1845, aged 78, Nashville, Tennessee
Distinctions: First president to be born in a log cabin. First target of
assassination attempt.
Pages: 12, 56, 58-63, 64-71, 136-37, 159-61
8) MARTIN VAN BUREN
Born: December 5, 1782, Kinderhook, New York
Political Party: Democratic
State Represented: New York
Vice President: Richard M. Johnson
First Lady: None (Van Buren was a widower.)
Term of Office: 1837-1841 (one term)
Died: July 24, 1862, aged 79, Kinderhook, New York
Distinctions: First president not born a British subject.
Pages: 64, 67, 69, 120
9) WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON
Born: February 9, 1773, Charles City County, Virginia
Political Party: Whig
State Represented: Ohio
Vice President: John Tyler
First Lady: Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison (never went to Washington)
Term of Office: 1841 (32 days)
Died: April 4, 1841, aged 68, Washington, D.C.
Distinctions: Shortest term in office.
Pages: 131, 281-82
10) JOHN TYLER
Born: March 29, 1790, Charles City County, Virginia
Political Party: Whig
State Represented: Virginia
Vice President: None
First Lady: (1) Letitia Christian Tyler, (2) Julia Gardiner Tyler
Term of Office: 1841-1845 (one partial term)
Died: January 18, 1862, aged 71, Richmond, Virginia
Distinctions: First acci
dental president. First to marry while in office.
Page: 131
11) JAMES K. POLK
Born: November 2, 1795, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina
Political Party: Democratic
State Represented: Tennessee
Vice President: George M. Dallas
First Lady: Sarah Childress Polk
Term of Office: 1845-1849 (one term)
Died: June 5, 1849, aged 53, Nashville, Tennessee
Distinctions: First presidential inauguration reported by telegraph.
12) ZACHARY TAYLOR
Born: November 24, 1784, Orange County, Virginia
Political Party: Whig
State Represented: Louisiana
Vice President: Millard Fillmore
First Lady: Margaret Smith Taylor
Term of Office: 1849-1850 (one partial term)
Died: July 9, 1850, aged 65, Washington, D.C.
Distinctions: First president to represent a state west of the Mississippi River.
A Treasury of Great American Scandals Page 26
