Sold – Lincoln Shows His Sympathy for a Young, Imprisoned African-American by Pardoning Him, at a Time When the Fate of All African-Americans Was Still Much at Issue

During Lincoln’s presidency, under his clemency powers, he pardoned 324 persons for crimes for which they had been convicted by civil courts. The standards of kindness and mercy that he used were no different than those for convictions in military courts. Attorney General Edward Bates’ pardon clerk later wrote of Bates that he discovered “his most important duty was to keep all but the most deserving cases from coming before the kind Mr. Lincoln at all; since there was nothing harder for him to do than to put aside a prisoner’s application and he could not resist it when it was urged by a pleading wife and a weeping child.” Youth was often a consideration for the President.

Hamilton Anderson was convicted of larceny in New York and imprisoned. His case was placed before Lincoln by L.A. Whiteley, chief of the New York Herald's Washington office, who wrote requesting a pardon of “Hamilton Anderson, a young colored man…sentenced to hard labor for one year in the Albany Penitentiary.” The President wrote the Attorney General on October 31,  1863, saying that “Inclining to believe that this boy has been sufficiently punished in the four months imprisonment he has already endured, I have concluded to say ‘Let a pardon be made out in this case.’”

Document Signed, Washington, November 2, 1863, ordering implementation of Lincoln’s pardon of Anderson. “I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of State to affix the seal of the United States to a Warrant for the pardon of Hamilton Anderson…”  It speaks volumes about Lincoln and his sympathy for young African-Americans at a time when the fate of all African-Americans was at issue.

We have been able to find just two other pardons issued by Lincoln to an African-American, and those are in institutions.

On the very day this document was signed, Lincoln was invited to attend the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The chief orator was to be the eloquent Edward Everett of Massachusetts. The President would then add a few appropriate remarks in honor of the dead. Everett ended up speaking for about two hours; Lincoln spoke for less than three minutes, delivering the greatest speech ever made – the Gettysburg Address.