Counterfeiting, Undercover Agents & The Abduction of Abraham Lincoln

Dark Histories

Ben Cutmore

History

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2024

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The ingenuity of the criminal class has rarely been criticised for lacking in imagination. One of the finer examples of this concept was put on full display in America, on the eve of the presidential election in 1876, When a group of shady crooks, who took the American Dream of making money a little too literally, decided they needed to bust one of their own from prison. The affair that unfurled led to one of the strangest stories in criminal history, featuring a small bag of relatively useless tools, an undercover secret service informant and the remains of a dead president.SOURCES Stahlman Speer, Bonnie (1997) The Great Abraham Lincoln Hijack. Reliance Press, USA. Craughwell, Thomas J. (2009) Stealing Lincoln’s Body. Belknap Press, USA. Rhodes, Karl (2012) The Counterfeiting Weapon. Econ Focus, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, vol. 16(1Q), pages 34-37. Tarnoff, Ben (2011) Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters. Penguin Press, London, UK. Power, John Carroll (1875) Abraham Lincoln: His Life, Public Services, Death & Great Funeral Cortege… Edwin A. Wilson & Co. Springfield, USA. Glaser, Lynn (1960) Counterfeiting In America. Clarkson N. Potter, USA The Rock Island Argus (1875) The Counterfeit Plates Found. The Rock Island Argus, Wed 3 Nov 1875, p2. Illinois, USA. Chicago Tribune (1876) Horrible - Dastardly Attempt To Despoil The Lincoln Monument. Chicago Tribune, Wed 8 Nov 1876, p5. Chicago, USA. Chicago Tribune (1876) Lincoln - The Violators Of His Tomb Arrested In This City. Chicago Tribune, Sat 18 Nov 1876, p1. Chicago, USA. Chicago Tribune (1876) Lincoln’s Remains. Chicago Tribune, Sun 19 Nov 1876, p8. Chicago, USA. ------- For almost anything, head over to the podcasts hub at darkhistories.com Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories The Dark Histories books are available to buy here: http://author.to/darkhistories Dark Histories merch is available here: https://bit.ly/3GChjk9 Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories & Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/ Or you can contact us directly via email at [email protected] or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017 Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The ingenuity of the criminal class has rarely been criticized for lacking in imagination.
0:05.0	One of the finer examples of this concept was put on full display in America on the eve of the presidential election in 1876, when a group of shady crooks who took the American dream of making money, a little too literally, decided they needed to bust one of their own from prison.
0:22.0	The affair that unfolded led to one of their own from prison. The affair that
0:23.4	unfurled led to one of the strangest stories in criminal history, featuring a
0:27.8	small bag of relatively useless tools and undercover secret service
0:32.4	informant and the remains of a dead president.
0:36.7	This is Dark Histories where the facts are worse than fiction. Hello and welcome to Dark History's season 8 episode 7 I'm Ben your host.
0:48.0	Today it's Easter Sunday happy Easter everybody I hope you're enjoying the if you're in the, at least if you're in the
0:54.3	Southeast of England, probably roughly near me, I hope you enjoyed the sun today. It was a beautiful
1:00.3	spring day, beautiful Easter day really. So was great anyway enough about the
1:05.6	weather that's that's a little bit too British isn't it I thought this week we would do
1:09.4	something a little bit sort of quirkier go for one of those kind of sort of slightly humorous
1:15.2	quirky historical tales because you know it's spring and I felt
1:21.0	well we haven't really had too much of one of them this season and you know I just feel like they helped to counterbalance
1:27.2	Some of the sort of darker elements of the podcast. So yeah this week's episode. It's a sort of a heist I guess a strange
1:35.1	host but it's a heist which again we don't do too many of those on dark
1:38.0	history so I think it's something quite fun anyway let's get on with it this
1:41.9	week's episode is called Counterfeiting, undercover agents, and the abduction of Abraham Lincoln.
1:52.0	Prior to the Civil War in America, money, nowadays taken for granted as a universal unit
1:58.0	came in a variety of fairly chaotic forms.
2:01.0	Towards the end of the 18th century, the United States Mint had been manufacturing a fairly large quantity of gold and silver coins.
2:08.0	But outside of this, there had been little efforts to standardise currency across the country.
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