The Lincoln File
The tomb robbery, the suppressed photograph, the escape route, and the court that formed around a president’s name before and after his death.
- 1The Night Counterfeiters Tried to Steal Abraham Lincoln’s Body
Eleven years after John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, another group of criminals came for the president. This time Lincoln was already dead, buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, and surrounded by a monument…
- 2The Photograph Edwin Stanton Tried to Destroy: The Only Known Image of Abraham Lincoln in His Coffin
The photograph was not supposed to survive. On April 24, 1865, while Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed body lay in state inside New York City Hall, photographer Jeremiah Gurney Jr. was permitted to photograph the murdered president in…
- 3Before Booth: The Baltimore Plot That Put Lincoln on an Assassination Map in 1861
On the morning of February 23, 1861, people gathered in Baltimore expecting to see Abraham Lincoln pass through the city on his way to Washington. They were waiting for a president-elect whose movements had been advertised in…
- 4Inside Ford’s Theatre: How a Working Theater Became the Scene of a Presidential Assassination
Abraham Lincoln was not killed in an alley, on a battlefield, or while moving through an uncontrolled crowd. He was shot inside one of Washington’s best-known theaters, in a private box overlooking a stage, while roughly…
- 5Why Abraham Lincoln Was Finally Buried Beneath Steel and Concrete
Abraham Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, but the story of burying him did not truly end until September 26, 1901. During the thirty-six years between those dates, his coffin was moved repeatedly, his tomb was rebuilt…
- 6The Secret Service Wasn’t Created to Protect Lincoln
The modern image of the United States Secret Service is inseparable from presidential protection: dark suits, motorcades, advance teams, secure perimeters, and agents surrounding the president. That was not the agency Abraham…
- 7Lincoln, Egypt, and the Hidden American Succession
How Paschal Beverly Randolph, an unknown grandfather, Rosicrucian mythology, Moorish America, and a forgotten 1864 pamphlet created the strange historical soil from which the Ibrahim Kahlooni story could eventually grow.
- 8The Hughes Farm, Booth’s Escape Route, and the Mummy That Wouldn’t Die
The twelve days after Abraham Lincoln was shot are usually compressed into a simple chase story. John Wilkes Booth escapes Ford’s Theatre, receives treatment from Dr. Samuel Mudd, hides in the Maryland woods, crosses the Potomac…
- 9Lincoln’s Invisible Court
In March 1870, Lincoln’s former law partner William Herndon wrote to the biographer Ward Hill Lamon about a conversation with the dead president. In Herndon’s recollection, Lincoln began: “Billy, I’ll tell you something, but keep…
- 10Abraham Africanus and the New American Nobility
An election pamphlet gave Lincoln an earl for an ancestor. The same New York publishing circle imagined a nobility that could be made in the Treasury, one telegram ahead of the market.
- 11Lincoln and the Romanovs
John Todd Stuart bowed to Lincoln in the White House Blue Room on December 19, 1863. “How are you, Stuart?” Lincoln asked, holding out his hand. Stuart had been Lincoln’s first law partner and was Mary’s cousin. He now sat in…
- 12Lincoln in the Prophet’s Veil
The man in Adalbert Volck’s drawing holds a veil above his head. He wears a sash, loose trousers, and turned-up slippers, with a curved sword at his waist. Volck was a Baltimore dentist who drew for the Confederate cause under…
- 13Lincoln’s War and the Sultan’s Court
At five in the afternoon on May 13, 1865, Americans living in Ottoman Syria met at their consulate in Beirut to mourn Abraham Lincoln. Cornelius Van Dyck, who had helped bring the Arabic Bible to completion that spring, opened…
- 14Lincoln’s War and the China Trade
On Abraham Lincoln’s fifty-fourth birthday, February 12, 1863, Massachusetts governor John Andrew wrote to him about warships under construction in England. Andrew understood that Lincoln approved of trying to buy the ships…
- 15The Khallooni Mythos: Lincoln, Omar al-Mukhtar, the Druze, and the Kennedys
At Piqua, Ohio, people waiting up for Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train asked if Willie was aboard. He was. A correspondent for the Indianapolis Daily Journal who boarded at Richmond, Indiana, described the boy’s coffin at the…