May 24, 1860, when Lincoln, then running for president, and Mary attended the dedication of Oak Ridge, a rural quiet cemetery, from the heart of Springfield). On April 28 Mary sent a message to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, in which she stated that her decision was final and that Lincoln's remains must be placed in the Oak Ridge Cemetery. On April 29 another message followed: "arrangements for using the Mather vault must be changed." And on May 1 the message was: "the remains of the president should be placed in the vault of Oak Ridge and nowhere else." The Oak Ridge vault was readied, but work on the Mather vault continued as a "contingency." Even after the burial, the debate was not over. The National Lincoln Monument Association began again to stoke the fires of creating the grand tomb for Lincoln at the Mather Block. Mary Lincoln threatened to have her husband's remains taken to Chicago or Washington for permanent burial. "My determination is unalterable," she wrote on June 10 and demanded a formal promise that "the immortal Savior and Martyr for Freedom" would be at Oak Ridge, and imposed a deadline of June 15 before she would make good on her threat. The association voted, on the evening before the deadline, by the narrowest of margins, 8–7, to accept her demands. Oak Ridge Cemetery became the site of the Lincoln Tomb. Attempted theft and movement of remains Attempted theft When the tomb was completed in 1874, Lincoln's coffin was placed in a white marble sarcophagus in a burial room behind a steel gate locked with a padlock. In November 1876, Chicago counterfeiter James "Big Jim" Kennally planned to steal Lincoln's body and hold it in exchange for a pardon for his engraver (who was serving a ten-year sentence at Illinois State Penitentiary) and $200,000 (approximately $ today). The plot failed when two men recruited to assist turned out to be paid government informants, and the men sent to get the body did not plan for how to remove the quarter-ton cedar-and-lead coffin from the grounds. On November 13, 1876, tomb custodian John Carroll Power and a group of trusted confidants moved the coffin from its room to a secret location in the basement of the tomb. Finding the ground waterlogged, they temporarily set the coffin on the ground and disguised it under a wood pile. Moving the