As president, Joe Biden has the supreme power to pardon criminals at will, and he has wielded that power for a large number of convicted Americans.
But it turns out that Biden has quite another connection to the presidential pardon, one dating back to the Civil War.
According to The Washington Post, this sordid bit of Biden family history lay hidden for 160 years among hundreds of court-martial cases in the National Archives until it was recently uncovered by researchers.
According to the researchers, Biden’s great-great-grandfather, Moses J. Robinette, was a civilian employee of the Union Army during the Civil War.
Government records show that Robinette was hired as a veterinary surgeon in 1862 or ’63. He was assigned to the Army of the Potomac’s reserve artillery and given the task of keeping its horses and mules in a state of readiness for war.
On March 21, 1864, Robinette got entangled in a fight with another civilian employee by the name of John J. Alexander.
It appears that Biden’s ancestor had been jawing about Alexander to a female cook and Alexander confronted Robinette about the gossip. The confrontation escalated into a physical altercation and an allegedly intoxicated Robinette pulled out a pocketknife.
The fight ended with Alexander bleeding from multiple cuts and Robinette under arrest. He was charged with inciting a “dangerous quarrel,” as well as assault with “attempt to kill” because he had used a weapon.
The president’s great-great-grandfather proclaimed at his trial that he only acted in self-defense.
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A transcript of the trial shows that he insisted “I had no malice towards Mr. Alexander before or since. He grabbed me and possibly might have injured me seriously had I not resorted to the means that I did.”
Regardless, Robinette was found guilty on all the counts but attempted murder and sentenced to two years of hard labor.
He then spent nearly three months in red-tape limbo. By July, as the Civil War raged on, he was sent to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas islands near Key West, Florida.
Once Robinette arrived at Fort Jefferson, three Army officers who knew him petitioned to have him pardoned, maintaining that his sentence was too harsh and that he had been “ardent, and Influential … in opposing Traitors and their schemes to destroy the Government.”
The officers’ letter first went to Sen. Waitman T. Willey from the new state of West Virginia. Willey endorsed the request and sent it along to the White House to the attention of President Abraham Lincoln.
After reviewing the records of the case, Lincoln decided in favor of Robinette, pardoning him on Sept. 1, 1864.
Once released, Robinette went home to Maryland and took up farming. He died at the age of 84 in 1903.
When Robinette’s obituary was published, it made no mention of his fracas with Mr. Alexander, his court-martial and conviction, nor his subsequent pardon by Honest Abe.
Perhaps he would be relieved to know that his name will go down in history for a much more auspicious reason thanks to his great-great-grandson and the country’s 46th president, Joseph Robinette Biden.
