He Served in Place of Abraham Lincoln

[L Verge]

(01-20-2016 10:01 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  In December of 1940, the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly published an article which it reprinted from the February 12, 1940 Easton Express newspaper from Pennsylvania. In this article is a pretty detailed explanation of Lincoln's motivation as well as how it came about that Staples's pension application was turned down.

The PDF function on the website only allows you to load ten pages at a time. To get the entire article, you will have to go to the page number drop box and load the next ten pages and then the next ten. There are about 12 pages to the article.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/alajournals/...f&size=100

Also, a man by the name of Bernard J. Cigrand, a dentist known as the father of Flag Day, wrote an article in 1911 which was published into 1912 in various papers around the country on the substitute story. Here is the article as it appeared in the Manchester (Iowa) Democrat on February 7, 1912. It appears that the author of the Easton article got some of the information from Cigrand's 1911-1912 article.

Best
Rob

Rob has provided a wonderful link to the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly above, Mr. or Ms. Maharba, so please read it. I also recommend http://linealarboretum.blogspot.com/2010...nding.html for getting started on who qualified for those Civil War pensions (as mentioned by Susan). And finally, the lengthy article from the ALPLM cited by Roger should be on your reading list -- all of these hand-delivered to you by members of this forum to add substantive arguments to your qualms about John Summerfield Staples.

After reading all three, it appears to me that your nemesis Noble Larner was not the man that Lincoln went directly to in order to find a representative for enlistment. These experts list Lincoln having the idea to find a representative, instructing John Hay and the Provost Marshall Fry to make it happen, and Hay then turning to Larner who was in charge of the Third Ward responsible for carrying out such tasks. Evidently Larner was just carrying out his duties - which were already weighing him down in the steady need for further warm bodies to send out onto battlefields.

If Larner did make a later, crude reference to Staples, perhaps it was because he knew very little to nothing about the boy's background and did not keep up with his service once enlisted on the President's behalf. It could have been a rather frustrated comment because of his war duties of assigning men to "meet the elephant."

As for the pension, Susan once again led us in the right direction. From what I read above, Staples finally decided to apply for a pension only after his health began to deteriorate in later life and as two wives had died and left him with two children to raise.

He filed for an invalid's pension and was turned down because no army records were found to verify his having contracted typhoid while first serving near the Dismal Swamp in North Carolina (they were later found and filed). Staples also did not have civilian records from doctors who treated him after the war because he waited too long -- the doctors were all deceased!

If you read the link about how to understand Civil War pension records, there is also a reference to ineligibility due to the type of regiment in which one served. Staples's original service was with the Pennsylvania Volunteers, and that's when he contracted typhoid. Would service in a Volunteer unit qualify one for a pension? I'll let you do the research from that point.