Did Abraham Lincoln create the Secret Service on the day he was shot?

History loves an awful coincidence, and this is one of the most uncomfortable. On the very day Abraham Lincoln was shot, he set in motion the agency that today is famous for one thing above all: protecting the President of the United States. You would think that would have helped him. It did not, and the reason is surprisingly simple.

The short answer

Yes. According to White House records, on 14 April 1865 Lincoln created the Secret Service to act on a commission’s recommendations. That night, at about 10:15 p.m., he was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, and he died the next morning. The agency was officially set up within the Treasury Department on 5 July 1865.

The real story

The twist is in the job description. The Secret Service was not created to guard anyone. It was created to catch counterfeiters. By the end of the Civil War, fake money was a serious problem damaging the country’s economy, and Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch had advised Lincoln to set up a commission to tackle it. The new agency was the result: a team of money detectives, not bodyguards.

So who was protecting Lincoln at the theatre? Not much of anyone. The National Park Service, which runs Ford’s Theatre today, notes that Lincoln did not seek personal protection. On the night of the shooting, a Washington police officer named John Parker was assigned to escort him to the theatre and back, but Lincoln usually did not have someone standing outside his box during plays. Where Parker was at the moment of the shooting is not known. Charges of neglect of duty were brought against him in May 1865 and dismissed a month later.

Others around Lincoln worried more than he did. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton often had soldiers escort the president’s carriage, and his friend Ward Hill Lamon acted as a self-appointed bodyguard. On that particular night, Lamon was away in Richmond.

It took the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 before the Secret Service was given its second mission of protecting the president. Since then, every president from Theodore Roosevelt onward has had Secret Service protection.

Why people get it wrong

Today the Secret Service is the dark-suited, earpiece-wearing image of presidential security, so it is natural to project that picture backwards. If the agency existed when Lincoln was shot, people assume it must have been on duty and somehow failed.

The truth is stranger. In 1865 there was simply no system for protecting the president. Presidents would grab whatever law officer happened to be nearby. The agency Lincoln created that day spent its first decades chasing forged banknotes, and the job it is famous for came almost forty years later.

“He signed up the money cops in the morning. Nobody signed up a bodyguard. That’s the bit that stings.”