He Served in Place of Abraham Lincoln

[Gene C]

Thank you Susan! How do you find these interesting old news articles? Is there a service you subscribe to? - never mind, I see it's newspapers.com


That was a good one Rogerm

[RJNorton]

Many thanks, Susan.

Am I reading that correctly --> Staples was given $800?

[Rob Wick]

Quote:(Unfortunately I have no idea how that box-dropping works.)

Eva,

If you click on the link I provided and then go toward the top of the page, you'll see (starting at the left) a box that says "Format" and next to that it says "PDF." Next to that is a button that says "Print PDF." Next to that are the words "Page No." Next to that is a box that says "n/a." Just click on the arrow in that box and you will see the number 191. Click on it and it will load the next ten pages of the PDF and you can either save it or print it. Do that again and click on the number 201. That will give you the last page in the article. If you can't get that to work, let me know and I'll send you the article.

Best
Rob

[Eva Elisabeth]

Susan, you are awesome. But this cannot be what/who maharba was talking about. I see no ridiculing and bad, ignorant treatment of Staples, instead Larner is quoted: " this fellow desired to represent the President", and "nothing was ever heard of the young man afterward...upon inquiring at the War Department I found the word 'deserted' behind his name".

BTW, is Noble a(n aristocratic or else) title, or is it a family or first name? Literally translates into this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edler

Rob, thanks much, but when I click on the 191, I get this screen and nothing else happens. (I am using my smartphone though, but usually all downloads work on it fine.It takes hours to get my computer online, and then hours to load a site, so I use my smartphone for all things internet and transfer from there to PC).
   

[Rob Wick]

Eva,

My guess is that the site is too large for your smartphone, although I'm no expert on technical things like that. If you want, I can send you the article. Just PM me your email address and I'll send it.

Best
Rob

[maharba]

Gene, I see that Rob Wick and Susan have posted links (I did not have, and cannot get to work for me). And Eva, you are right: if I had better links and such, I try and post them. Since some of us can't read the articles, what scraps of further information are found there? I'd like to think Summerfield got some pension for his unique service to his country. Contrast his pension (denied) with the fairly speedy
pension that Boston Corbett got approved.

I just wonder, from the initial skeptics to my post here and...various replies, I wonder: will Summerfield be the next 'Rutledge Extinction event'? External to this Symposium, perhaps published Lincoln scholars will take up the topic of Summerfield...but only to laborously deny virtually all aspects of the events? I'd like to see Gene or Roger submit a modern-day article on Summerfield to a pop magazine, maybe even as a 'curiosity item' in say Old Farmer's Almanac. Roger, you mentioned timing and dates a couple times: when was Noble officially a High Priest. I notice this oddity of dates, When he had that small newspaper interview, he suggested Summerfield died in the Wilderness campaign. But Summerfield was only recruited in October 1864 and the Wilderness was already over, 6 months BEFORE that.

[Gene C]

Thanks, but I don't right so good.
I admit I had my doubts about Summerfield, and with double checking and links provided by some knowledgeable folks here (Rob, Susan & Roger), I am no longer skeptical about his story. Sorry you can't get them to work for you.
The bad vibes you were sending about Larner still seem to me to be over stated.

[Eva Elisabeth]

(01-21-2016 03:52 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  Eva,

My guess is that the site is too large for your smartphone, although I'm no expert on technical things like that. If you want, I can send you the article. Just PM me your email address and I'll send it.

Best
Rob

Thank you so much, Rob! (Usually I can download entire books, but I am no expert either.)

---

Could desertion or a likewise remark in the files cause pension issues?

Also my question as for whether "Noble" was his family/first name or a title was a serious one, I'd really like to know! Thanks!

[RJNorton]

(01-21-2016 04:54 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Also my question as for whether "Noble" was his family/first name or a title was a serious one, I'd really like to know! Thanks!

Eva, it was his first name, not a title.

[Eva Elisabeth]

Thanks, Roger. Never heard.

[Susan Higginbotham]

Wasn't some sort of service-related disability required for a pension until 1890? That may have been one difficulty Staples had in getting approved for a pension.

[Eva Elisabeth]

Re.: "Gene, I see that Rob Wick and Susan have posted links (I did not have, and cannot get to work for me). And Eva, you are right: if I had better links and such, I try and post them."

It's no problem if you cannot to provide links - but, please, at least name the source/date when asked for so that others can look for it by theirselves. Thanks. And, as you see, others may be able to provide a link.

[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.

[Eva Elisabeth]

Great post, Laurie.

(01-19-2016 08:27 PM)maharba Wrote:  Perhaps you did not read this item or the links RJN posted. It was worse than even I detailed it. Poor Summerfield and family got to hear of the sneering comments directed against him by Lincoln's crony, and that "he was a ne'er' do well who probably died in the Wilderness'. I did not include that and several items in my initial narrative, and I assumed that Lincoln students here would read the other links that were posted. Do you not see the irony in both their treatment of Summerfield and that they refused him --the man who had stood in the place of Abraham Lincoln--
even a small pittance of a pension? If this article were published in a pop magazine such as The New Yorker or Readers Digest in the past, I believe many readers would have found it jarring on several levels --including that they had never heard of the man in all their high school and or graduate level college history courses.

Re: "Poor Summerfield and family got to hear of the sneering comments directed against him by Lincoln's crony, and that "he was a ne'er' do well who probably died in the Wilderness'."
I still don't know what were supposed to be the sneering comments - it seems to me, Larner just reported what he knew at the time the interview was held.

I also still don't know who the other of the both is supposed to be in "Do you not see the irony in both their treatment of Summerfield and that they refused him even a small pittance of a pension?" (Lincoln was long dead), and what influence Larner could have had at all on a pension had Larner known of the issue.

[maharba]

Interesting thoughts, LVerge. I'll cut to the chase though: in all American history there has only been one man who substituted for a president, John Summerfield. Larner wasn't stupid, he knew this was not just a matter of "running down another substitute for a another wealthy patron". When he made his scorning comments about Summerfield, he was not then distressed in war duties, the War had been over for 25 years. When he filed for a small pension, it is appalling that the cronies who had prospered so well under Lincoln and Grant merely lounged idly by. The War office shuffling papers and losing them, and no one at all there seeming to notice or hear Summerfield whose War service standing in the place of Abraham Lincoln, was unprecedented and totally unique. Could this whole disgraceful episode have been so embarrassing, that is a principal reason it is never included in histories?