PARDON SIGNED BY PRESIDENT LINCOLN ON APRIL 14, 1865
April 14, 1865 was a busy day for President Abraham Lincoln. It was the end of a historic week. Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia on the 9th-Palm Sunday-as Lincoln returned to Washington after a triumphant trip to conquered Richmond. The president greeted a stream of visitors and well-wishers in the morning, then presided over a Cabinet meeting that lasted more than two hours.
During the meeting, he revealed that he had again had a recurring dream. "I seemed to be in some indescribable vessel," he said, "and I was moving with great rapidity toward an indefinite shore." He said when he had experienced this dream in the past, momentous events had happened soon after. Lincoln told his Cabinet to expect great news very soon.
One of the pieces of routine business that crossed Lincoln’s desk concerned the matter of a pardon for a deserter, Pvt. Patrick Murphy. The California soldier had deserted back in 1862. He had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to be shot, but he was known not to be "perfectly sound," and the military court recommended that his sentence be commuted.
Lincoln, known for his compassion, agreed. Hours after signing this pardon (only first and last pages shown), he lay mortally wounded at Ford’s Theater with an assassin’s bullet in his brain. This document was hidden in the National Archives until 1997, when authors Thomas P. and Beverly Lowry uncovered it while reviewing 80,000 Civil War court martials of Union soldiers. They discovered more than 1,100 previously unknown documents signed by Lincoln.
AMNESTY OATH SIGNED BY ROBERT E. LEE
In June 1865, two months after his surrender at Appomattox, Robert E. Lee applied for a pardon, asking for full restoration of his citizenship. He sent it to Washington through Ulysses S. Grant, who recommended to President Andrew Johnson that it be approved.
But Johnson never acted on the application. Lee was left in limbo. He was also indicted by a federal court in Virginia for treason, but never prosecuted. In mid-September 1865, Lee left Richmond for Lexington, Virginia, to become president of Washington College.
On October 2, 1865, the same day he took his oath as president of Washington College, he signed an oath of allegiance to the United States.
The pre-printed oath included a promise to abide by the Emancipation Proclamation. As Lee signed with his distinctive "R E Lee" signature, the act was witnessed by Lexington attorney (and former Confederate) Charles A. Davidson. The oath was promptly forwarded to Washington. Lee was supposed to include a signed oath such as this with his application for a pardon, which he submitted months earlier, but was apparently unaware of this requirement when he submitted it.
When Lee’s oath landed on the desk of Secretary of State William Seward, he apparently did not realize Lee had previously applied for a pardon. Seward treated the document as a piece of finished business. He gave it as a keepsake to a friend in the State Department who stuck it in his desk and forgot about it. Lee’s request for a pardon went unanswered.
One hundred and five years later, in 1970, the Amnesty Oath of Robert E. Lee was rediscovered in a bundle of old State Department papers in the National Archives. The rediscovery prompted Virginia Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr. to introduce a resolution to restore Lee’s citizenship.
On August 5, 1975, President Gerald H. Ford signed the bill into law. After the war, Lee had encouraged his fellow Confederates to sign oaths of allegiance. But the fact that he himself had taken one was unknown until this document resurfaced more than 100 years later.
Please feel free to contact me at
the following address:
E-mail:w.tomtschik@worldnet.att.net
Accesses: 
|
Search my site:
