With all the falderal over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, the other Presidential pardons are just as interesting.
George Washington issued the first presidential pardon. Many of those arrested after the Whiskey Rebellion were men who had served in the Continental Army and Washington wasn’t about to send them to prison because of a little tiff over a tax on booze.
And Joe Biden isn’t the only President to pardon a family member. Lyndon Johnson pardoned a family member, LBJ’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson who had been convicted of tax evasion. Other pardons are easily found. Andrew Johnson pardoned his brother, William Johnson, in 1865 for Confederate sympathies. Richard Nixon pardoned his brother, Donald Nixon, for fraud in the early 1970s. Bill Clinton in 2001 pardoned his half-brother, Roger Clinton, for a 1985 drug conviction. And Harry Truman pardoned his brother, Vivian Truman, for draft evasion in 1947.
The number of pardons at the end of a presidency were fairly low — n the few hundreds — until the Civil War. In 1863 Lincoln offered amnesty to confederate soldiers if they stopped fighting for the confederacy and took a new oath of allegiance to the Union. After the war itself, former Confederates swore a new oath, and about 6,000 signed up for the post-war federal frontier army, as “galvanized Yankees”.
After Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson continued the pardons to high-ranking Confederates. He granted 13,500 pardons from 1865 to 1869, mostly former confederate officers and businessmen. The pardoning process began a new industry in Washington: pardon lobbying.
This nitch lobbying continued through Johnson’s, Grant’s and Rutherford Hayes’ administrations. Kansas’ first chief justice, Thomas Ewing Jr., a Union General during the war, he helped famous Southern Generals get pardons. Ewing’s most famous lobbying client was General George Pickett, who led his division in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, the high water mark of the Southern Confederacy. In 1869, Ewing helped Pickett get a pardon from President Ulysses Grant.
The one Confederate that nobody pardoned was Captain Henry Wirtz, who commanded the notorious Andersonville POW camp in Georgia. Thirteen thousand of the 30,000 Union POWs there died of disease and malnutrition, all of it during the last year of the war. Wirtz was hanged in November 1865.
Beginning with Truman after WWII, a great many of the presidential pardons up to and including Lyndon Johnson were for draft evaders. Although evaders were charged with crimes, after the wars were finished, there were draft evasion pardons given by almost all the Presidents. Jimmy Carter pardoned the most, 209,000 evaders living in Canada so they could come back to America without stigmas. The vets of these wars who had gone into the services didn’t have such a soft spot for the evaders. And only about half of the 209,000 Carter pardons actually saw an evader return to this country. The others probably had started new lives in Canada and saw no need to return.
President Gerald Ford issued the Nixon pardon in 1974 that got Ford defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. But one other unusual Ford pardon was a posthumous one for Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia. After the Civil War, Lee had his civil rights stripped during Reconstruction. He couldn’t vote or hold office. President Andrew Johnson had issued a general amnesty to Lee, and Lee had applied for a pardon, but the pardon got lost in the federal War Department’s bureaucracy. It was left to Ford to formally pardon Lee.
Ron Smith – Special to The Informer
Dean Halliday Smith is a fifth generation Kansan, a retired attorney, a grandfather several times over, a Vietnam veteran, and a civil war historian. Territorial Kansas, the Civil War, and the post-Civil War west are his subjects of interest. Manhattan KS graduate, graduated Kansas Wesleyan in ’73. Worked on Governor John Carlin’s staff in 1980-81. Lobbied for the Kansas Bar Association for 14 years. His small farm is near where the historic Santa Fe Trail converged on the “Pawnee Fork” along the west route of the SFT.