To find a tenuous link between Joe Biden and his distant predecessor in the White House, the Republican Abraham Lincoln, we have to go back 160 years, when the 16th President of the United States pardoned a certain Moses Robinette, the great-great -grandfather of the current Democratic president.
Documents kept at the American National Archives trace the trial of his ancestor, convicted for fighting with an army employee during the Civil War, before being pardoned by Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), according to the Washington Post Monday.
On March 21, 1864, in a military camp bordering the waters of the Potomac, in the American state of Virginia on the edge of the federal capital Washington, John Alexander, an army employee, heard Moses Robinette talking about him at the cook .
Mr. Alexander then rushes into the room, curses fly, tempers flare and Robinette takes a penknife from his pocket.
The two men fight and Alexander is bleeding, slashed with knives.
Sentenced to two years of imprisonment
A month later, a military trial against Robinette began, accused among other things of
“attempted murder”
.
On the stand, witnesses described a man
“full of spirit, always lively and joking”
, and versions differ as to whether one of the two had drunk alcohol before the fight broke out.
During the trial, Robinette assured that he had
“no malicious intent towards Alexander, either before or after (the fight).
He grabbed me and could have seriously injured me if I had not resorted to the means I used.”
But the judges sentenced the president's great-great-grandfather to two years in prison.
He is then sent to the Dry Tortugas Islands, at the end of Florida, where he finds three army officers he knows well.
They then asked Lincoln to overturn his conviction, criticizing a sentence that was too harsh for
"having defended himself and having injured with a penknife a colleague who was greatly superior to him in strength and size, all under the impulse of the excitement of the moment
.
The request goes back to the president, who decides to pardon Joe Biden's ancestor.
Moses Robinette, released, returns home to Maryland and resumes his life as a farmer.
He was born in 1919 and died in 1903, his obituary describing him as an
"educated man of great elegance"
, 39 years before the current president was born.