In a story that has waited 160 years to be told, a new report details a link between President Joe Biden and former President Abraham Lincoln. According to a Washington Post report, Lincoln pardoned a Union Army civilian employee by the name of Moses J. Robinette, President Biden’s great-great-grandfather. Monday’s, Feb. 19 Post report by historian David J. Gerleman cites the National Archives detailing a Mar. 21, 1864 fight between Robinette and another Union Army civilian employee.
Robinette, who was hired as a veterinary surgeon and assigned to the Potomac’s Reserve Artillery, was charged with attempted murder and court-martialed following the fight at the camp, according to the report. After being convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor, three army officers petitioned Lincoln to overturn Robinette’s conviction, saying that Robinette was acting in self-defense against a much superior and stronger adversary.
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 said in his Post article. “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.”
Lincoln pardoned Biden’s great-great-grandfather on Sept. 1, 1864. President Biden’s full name is Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., reportedly getting his middle name as a nod to his great-great-grandfather
