By 2029, the evidence was overwhelming. Congress held hearings. Stanton’s descendants testified. The actor John H. Little’s great-granddaughter wrote a memoir: My Grandfather, the Fake President.
She wanted to scream. The court of public opinion! The court of history! when does lincoln get exonerated
“They brought the prisoner in last night. A tall man, rough clothes, calling himself ‘A. Lincoln.’ The guards laughed, but the man had the same deep eyes as the president’s portraits. He keeps insisting he is the real one, that the man in the White House is a fraud. They say he’s mad. But I watched him split rails this morning—for the exercise, he said. And he did it better than any farmer I’ve ever seen.” By 2029, the evidence was overwhelming
And on a cold November morning, President Maya Chen stood at a podium in Springfield, Illinois, and read a joint resolution of Congress. The actor John H
But Ellie had found the letters. Hidden in a trunk in her great-grandmother’s attic, buried beneath lace doilies and yellowed photographs, was a correspondence between a Union soldier named Silas Webb and his wife. Silas had been a guard at the Old Capitol Prison in 1861. In one letter, dated November 12, he wrote:
The letters went on. According to Silas, the man claiming to be the real Lincoln was held for three months, then quietly moved to a military hospital in Maryland, where he died of “consumption” in the spring of 1862. His grave was unmarked.
Ellie shook her head. “No,” she said. “He was exonerated the day a twelve-year-old girl stood in the rain and refused to let the world forget his name.”