Notoriety by the stroke of a Pelikan pen

Comment: Interesting in many ways: fraud, Civil War, National Archives, etc.

Stroke of Pen Altered Date, and a Tale of Lincoln, Too

Excerpt:

Just hours before Abraham Lincoln “put on his hat and headed for Ford’s Theater,” on April 14, 1865, the president is said to have spared a mentally incompetent Army private the death penalty for desertion.

Comment: While Lincoln did pardon the Army private ... it was not on the day of his death. The record was altered to sell a book!

National Archives Discovers Date Change on Lincoln Record

Excerpt (click through the above link for photos!):

Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero announced today that Thomas Lowry, a long-time Lincoln researcher from Woodbridge, VA, confessed on January 12, 2011, to altering an Abraham Lincoln Presidential pardon that is part of the permanent records of the U.S. National Archives. The pardon was for Patrick Murphy, a Civil War soldier in the Union Army who was court-martialed for desertion.

Lowry admitted to changing the date of Murphy’s pardon, written in Lincoln’s hand, from April 14, 1864, to April 14, 1865, the day John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Having changed the year from 1864 to 1865, Lowry was then able to claim that this pardon was of significant historical relevance because it could be considered one of, if not the final official act by President Lincoln before his assassination.

Lowry's book: Don't Shoot That Boy! Abraham Lincoln and Military Justice

HT: Don Johnson: an unfortunate example of depravity

I wasn't sure what a Pelikan pen is. If interested click here.