Abe Lincoln grave robber "not a Buckley highlight"

BUCKLEY – In addition to Buckley's famous residents, the village has a notorious one who landed in history books for trying to steal Abraham Lincoln's body.

John "Jack" Hughes grew up in rural Buckley and moved to Chicago in 1864. Hughes' tale is the subject of books "The Great Abraham Lincoln Hijack" by Bonnie Stahlman Speer and "An Attempt to Steal the Body of Abraham Lincoln" by John Carroll Power.

Hughes was a known counterfeiter and in the 1870s, he and three other men planned to steal Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom in exchange for a friend's release from prison and $200,000 in gold.

However, the plot had one snag: One member of the posse was a Secret Service informant. The men arrived at the tomb Nov. 7, 1876, as did detectives hired by the Secret Service to follow the men from Chicago. Hughes and a co-conspirator cut through the burial chamber's padlock and began to pull out Lincoln's casket.

When one of the detective's pistols accidently fired, Hughes ran away on foot, jumped a train to Ford County and stopped at local farmer Owen McMahan's home. Hughes was arrested when he returned to Chicago.

He was convicted of robbery and was sentenced to a year at the Joliet State Prison.

But despite the plot's grand scale, Ruth Jones, co-author of "Celebrating 150 Years: Buckley Illinois" said Hughes didn't make the cut into Buckley's history book.

"He was barely a blip on our radar," Jones said. "He's not considered a Buckley highlight."