The Secret Service was created on the day Lincoln was assassinated.

  • Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Credit: © duncan1890—DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
Author Bess Lovejoy

June 11, 2026

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On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation creating the U.S. Secret Service. That very evening, he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth. It seems like one of history’s strangest cases of ironic timing. But the story isn’t quite as uncanny as it sounds, because the Secret Service wasn’t created to protect the president. 

The agency’s original purpose was slightly less dramatic: fighting counterfeiters. In the mid-1800s, the American money system was chaotic; individual banks issued their own bills, and fake currency flooded the economy. By some estimates, as much as one-third of the nation’s money in circulation was counterfeit. The Civil War only made the problem worse, and U.S. Treasury officials pushed for a dedicated force to investigate financial fraud. That force was the Secret Service.

Meanwhile, Lincoln had remarkably little protection on that fateful night in 1865. Presidential security in the 19th century was casual by modern standards, and there was no permanent force assigned to guard the commander in chief. On the night of the assassination, a single Washington police officer, John Parker, had been assigned to accompany Lincoln to the theater. Historians still don’t know exactly where Parker was when Booth entered the presidential box.

It would take more than 30 years and two murders for the Secret Service to get the job it has today. Only in 1901, after the assassinations of Presidents James A. Garfield and William McKinley, did Congress permanently assign the Secret Service to presidential protection. (It still investigates counterfeiting, too.)

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln’s corpse.

In 1876, counterfeiters attempted to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln from his tomb in Springfield, Illinois — and the Secret Service helped stop them. The plot was cooked up by Chicago crime boss James “Big Jim” Kinealy after a master counterfeiter named Benjamin Boyd was sent to prison. Kinealy’s gang planned to steal Lincoln’s corpse, hide it in the Indiana dunes, and demand Boyd’s release plus $200,000 in ransom.

The Secret Service (originally created to fight counterfeiters, remember) learned of the scheme through an informant inside the gang. On Election Day in 1876, Secret Service agents and Pinkerton detectives hid inside Lincoln’s tomb waiting for the thieves to strike. The grave robbers managed to pry open Lincoln’s sarcophagus and partly pull out his coffin before the officers moved in. Amid the confusion, one detective accidentally fired his gun, and the startled thieves escaped into the night. They were captured days later in Chicago, back at the same pub where the informant had first heard them discussing the plot.

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