The story "has waited 160 years to be told," according to the Washington Post article, written by historian David J. Gerleman.
Abraham Lincoln pardoned President Biden's great-great-grandfather after a late-night Civil War-era brawl, thereby somewhat remarkably linking the two presidents across the centuries.
The court-martial records in the U.S. National Archives, reported the Washington Post on Monday, detail the trial of Moses J. Robinette (Biden's relative) after a fight with fellow Union Army civilian employee John J. Alexander on 21 March 1864.
Robinette was charged with attempted murder, despite insisting that Alexander "possibly might have injured me seriously had I not resorted to the means I did." But military judges convicted him and sentenced him to two years' hard labor.
Three Army officers petitioned Lincoln to overturn his conviction, claiming the sentence was unduly harsh and that Robinette had been defending himself against someone "much his superior in strength and size." Lincoln agreed, and signed the pardon a few months later on 1 September.
The "slender sheaf of 22 well-preserved pages of his trial transcript, unobtrusively squeezed among many hundreds of other routine court-martial cases in the National Archives, reveals the hidden link between the two men - and between two presidents across the centuries," Gerleman wrote.