President Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather was released from a South Island prison during the Civil War after an intervention by a sympathetic senator and a presidential pardon from Abraham Lincoln, newly discovered records show.
Moses J. Robinette, Biden’s paternal relative, grew up in western Maryland and was hired by the Army as a veterinarian in 1862 or 1863 despite lacking specific training in the field, according to newly unearthed data from the National Archives: scholar David Gerleman wrote in the WashingtonPost.
His qualifications for the role were “not stated,” Gerleman wrote, but that was not an exception at a time when the U.S. didn’t have many veterinary schools.
The role would take Biden’s relative to an Army encampment in Virginia, where a fight with another civilian military employee would land him in jail after a military court marshal.
Robinette – whose last name is the president’s middle name – appears to have had a bad taste, and possibly a taste for alcohol (the president himself has expressed anger at special counsel targets for Donald Trump, and does not drink).
Excuse me: President Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather was pardoned after being convicted by a military court after drawing his pocket knife during a fight
Robinette was also a supporter of the Union, despite living and working in Maryland and Virginia, where loyalties were mixed leading up to the Civil War.
Documents that have survived to this day tell how he got into a scuffle after a brigade wagon commander named John J. Alexander “heard Robinette say something about him to the lady cook and rushed to the mess hall to demand an explanation,” according to the bill.
Tempers flared, expletives followed and Robinette pulled out his pocket knife. A brief scuffle left Alexander bleeding from several cuts before camp guards arrived to arrest Robinette,” Gerleman wrote.
The event prompted the distant relative’s incarceration of the future president in a military prison at Fort Jefferson, off the coast of modern-day Florida in the Dry Tortugas Islands.
The president’s ancestor was accused of inciting a “dangerous argument” after getting drunk and using the knife as a weapon in “attempted murder.”
He was able to refute that later charge during his military trial, but was convicted of the others.
Moses Robinette was sent to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas Islands off the coast of what is now Florida
Pardon power: ‘Pardon for the unexecuted portion of the sentence,’ President Abraham Lincoln wrote, wiping out the remaining sentence for Biden’s ancestor
Senator Waitman T. Willey, a former Whig who became one of West Virginia’s first senators after the state was admitted to the Union, approved the pardon after officers vouched for Robinette’s character
Tough Time: Robinette spent a few months in prison on the island before Lincoln’s pardon shortened his sentence
Although his temper may have flared during the argument, he was willing to let bygones be bygones, saying that “whatever I have done, I have done it in self-defense, so that I had no malice towards Mr. Alexander before or since. He grabbed me and could possibly have seriously injured me if I had not resorted to the means I did use.’
It’s all new information about a branch of a family tree that the president discusses less often than the Finnegans and other Irish ancestors.
In an episode that his ancestor Biden would recognize from his 36 years in the Senate and his tenure in the White House, Robinette’s conviction set off a lobbying campaign that ultimately freed him.
It started with a plea from army officers who assured him he was acting in self-defense, with a touch of old-fashioned Washington slant. The argument boiled down to a cut “with a pocket knife a teamster far greater than he in strength and size, all under the impulse of the excitement of the moment,” they wrote.
They were also political allies, noting that Robinette had been “fierce and influential…in opposing traitors and their plans to destroy the government.”
This received a favorable response from Waitman T. Willey, one of the first two senators of the new state of West Virginia after it split from Virginia and was brought into the Union in 1863.
That finally brought the matter to Lincoln, who issued a brief “Pardon for the Unexecuted Part of the Punishment,” signed “A. Lincoln’ on September 1, 1864. The War Department subsequently freed him.