Bonnie Cash / Reuters
Moses Robinett, an ancestor of the President of the United States, was sentenced by a military tribunal in 1864 to two years in prison for “attempted murder.”
To find a tenuous link between Joe Biden in the White House and his distant predecessor, Republican Abraham Lincoln, we have to go back 160 years, when the 16th President of the United States pardoned a certain Moses Robinette, his great-grandfather. of the current Democratic president.
Documents housed in the American National Archives trace the trial of his ancestor, who was convicted of fighting with an army personnel during the Civil War before being pardoned by Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), according to the Washington Post on Monday.
On March 21, 1864, in a military camp bordering the waters of the Potomac in the U.S. state of Virginia, near the Confederate capital of Washington, John Alexander, an army officer, overheard Moses Robinette talking about him to the cook. Mr. Alexander then bursts into the room, cursing Fly, anger flaring, and Robinette taking a penknife from his pocket. The two men fight and Alexander is bleeding, cut with knives.
Imprisonment for two years
A month later, a military trial began against Robinette, accused of, among other things “attempted murder”. On the stand, witnesses describe a man “Full of spirit, always lively and joking”And versions differ as to whether either of them had been drinking before the fight began.
During the trial, Robinette testified that he had not “There was no malicious intent towards Alexander, either before (the fight) or after. He caught me and could have seriously wounded me if I had not resorted to the means I used.” But the judges sentenced the president’s great-grandfather to two years in prison. He is then sent to the Dry Tortugas Islands off Florida, where he meets three military officers he knows well. They then asked Lincoln to reverse his conviction, criticizing the sentence as too harsh. “Defending himself and injuring with a penknife a companion, far superior in strength and stature, all under the impulse of the excitement of the moment”.
The request goes back to the president, who decides to pardon Joe Biden’s predecessor. Moses Robinett, freed, returns to Maryland and resumes his life as a farmer. He was born in 1819 and died in 1903, in his obituary “an educated man of great elegance”39 years before the birth of the current president.
