When Does Lincoln Get Exonerated |verified| Info

Ellie was twenty-seven now, a graduate student in history at a small college that tolerated her obsession only because she kept her grades up. She had spent fifteen years gathering evidence: handwriting analyses that didn’t match, photographs with subtle differences in ear shape and mole placement, diary entries from soldiers and politicians who whispered that something was off about the president after 1861.

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 Marks had asked the question so many times that the words had worn smooth, like stones in a river. when does lincoln get exonerated

Stanton’s journal.

The Smithsonian denied the discrepancy for two years. But a whistleblower leaked the internal memo. Ellie was twenty-seven now, a graduate student in

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:

“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.” According to Silas, the man claiming to be

And on a cold November morning, President Maya Chen stood at a podium in Springfield, Illinois, and read a joint resolution of Congress.