Lincoln, Abraham, as Sixteenth President

Autograph letter signed ("A. Lincoln"), 1 page (4 x 7 1/4 in.; 101 x 183 mm) on a half-sheet of blue-ruled Executive Mansion letterhead, Washington, 23 March 1864, to General George G. Meade. Matted, framed, and glazed with an engraved portrait of Lincoln.

The Collected Works of  Abraham Lincoln, ed. Basler, 7:261

Autograph letter signed ("A. Lincoln"), 1 page (4 x 7 1/4 in.; 101 x 183 mm) on a half-sheet of blue-ruled Executive Mansion letterhead, Washington, 23 March 1864, to General George G. Meade. Matted, framed, and glazed with an engraved portrait of Lincoln.
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An emblematic example of Lincoln's clemency policy: the suspension of the execution of Alanson Orton.

Lincoln's lenience towards military prisoners of both the Union and the Confederacy is well known. Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House of Representatives during Lincoln's tenure in the White House, was evidently the first to retail the oft-repeated anecdote about the President's rationale for dealing with cases of desertion. Lincoln apparently told Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt that he planned to file a complaint of desertion with his "leg cases," and when Holt asked what he meant by that term, Lincoln replied, "the cases that you call by that long title, 'cowardice in the face of the enemy,' but I call them, for short, my 'leg cases.' But I put it to you, and I leave it to you to decide for yourself: if Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs how can he help their running away with him" (A. T. Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, New York, 1886, p. 343).

Lincoln here directs the commander of the Army of the Potomac to "Please suspend execution of Alanson Orton, under sentence for desertion, until further order."

Two days later the President again wrote to General Meade to clarify his intentions regarding Orton: "Do not change your purpose to send Private Orton, of Twelfth U.S. Infantry, to the Dry Tortugas" (Basler 7:265). This clarification—demonstrating that Lincoln's was mercy was not without limit—was consistent with his General Orders of 26 February 1864, which directed "that the sentences of all deserters, who have been condemned by Court Martial to death ... be mitigated to imprisonment during the war" (Basler 7:208).

The Dry Tortugas are a series of seven small islands and coral reefs off Key West in the Straits of Florida. Fort Jefferson was erected on the Tortugas in the 1840s and 1850s, and during the Civil War it was used as a prison for deserters and other military criminals. (Dr. Samuel Mudd was incarcerated there when he was implicated in Lincoln's assassination.)