Tuesday, March 24, 1998

Rediscovering Lincoln

The National Archives, the great repository of American government records, is so vast the archivists themselves don't know what all they have. The archivists don't lose anything, they just don't know it's there.

Thus, a husband and wife team of amateur researchers turned up 570 documents bearing Abraham Lincoln's signature, an amazing find in a field that's been combed and recombed.

The documents are the findings of courts-martial in which some luckless soldier faced a harsh penalty, up to the gallows or the firing squad, for a military offense. Instead of signing off on the punishment, Lincoln would instead often scrawl a pardon at the bottom of the page, and, indeed, almost his last official act before departing for Ford's Theatre was to order the immediate discharge of a mentally retarded private found guilty of desertion.

Lincoln presided publicly with cold determination over America's bloodiest war, but these latest documents provide further proof that privately he was a compassionate, even soft-hearted president.