Documents purportedly demonstrate that Abraham Lincoln pardoned Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather during a late-night Civil War altercation, connecting the two US presidents across time.
According to the Washington Post on Monday, Moses J. Robinette was put on trial on March 21, 1864, following a brawl with John J. Alexander, a civilian employee of the Union Army. The trial was documented in court martial papers held by the US National Archives.
Following the altercation in the Army of the Potomac’s winter camp in Virginia, Robinette was accused of attempting to kill Alexander when Alexander heard him discussing him with a cook and attacked him.
The two men scuffled, and Robinette drew his pocketknife, leaving Alexander with several cuts before others intervened, according to the documents.
The 42-year-old, who had been hired by the army as a veterinary surgeon, insisted that Alexander “possibly might have injured me seriously had I not resorted to the means I did.”
But military judges convicted him and sentenced him to two years’ hard labor.
Three army officers petitioned Lincoln to reverse his conviction, arguing that Robinette had been defending himself against someone “much his superior in strength and size” and that the sentence was excessively harsh.
On September 1st of that year, Lincoln signed the pardon once he had consented.
Historian David J. Gerleman of the Washington Post writes that the tale “has waited 160 years to be told.”
The “slender sheaf of 22 well-preserved pages of his trial transcript, unobtrusively squeezed among many hundreds of other routine court-martial cases in the National Archives, reveals the hidden link between the two men and between two presidents across the centuries,” Gerleman wrote.
“Those few pages not only fill in an unknown piece of Biden family history, but also serve as a reminder of just how many Civil War stories have yet to be told.”
