According to papers, Abraham Lincoln pardoned Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather during a late-night Civil War brawl, tying the two US presidents together across decades. The court martial papers in the US National Archives, as revealed by the Washington Post on Monday, detail Moses J Robinette’s trial following a dispute with fellow Union Army civilian employee John J. Alexander on March 21, 1864.
Robinette was charged with attempted murder during a scuffle in the Army of the Potomac’s winter camp in Virginia, where Alexander overheard him speaking about him to a cook and charged at him.
The two men fought, and Robinette produced his pocketknife, leaving Alexander with many cuts before others interfered, according to the records.
The 42-year-old was 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 tribunals convicted him and sentenced him to two years of hard labor.
Three army officers petitioned Abraham Lincoln to reverse Robinette’s conviction, stating that the sentence was excessive and that he was defending himself against someone “much his superior in strength and size.”
Abraham Lincoln consented and signed the pardon on September 1, the same year.
The narrative “has waited 160 years to be told,” according to historian David J. Gerleman’s Washington Post piece.
Furthermore, 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 in an email.
“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.”