The records of the Adjutant-General’s Office furnish no evidence of wounds or injury at Fredericksburg.

The injury alleged at first as a consequence of loading commissary stores seems to have been abandoned by the claimant for the adoption of a wound at Fredericksburg, which in its turn seems to have been abandoned and a fall down a bank and trampling upon by troops substituted.

Whatever injuries he may have suffered during his first enlistment, and to whatever cause he chooses at last to attribute them, they did not prevent his reenlistment and passing the physical examination necessary before acceptance.

The surgeon of the Ninth New Hampshire Volunteers, in which he first enlisted, states that he remembers the claimant well; that he was mustered and accepted as a recruit in spite of his (the surgeon’s) protest; that he was physically unfit for duty; that he had the appearance of impaired health, and that his face and neck were marked by one or more deep scars, the result, as the claimant himself alleged, of scrofulous abscesses in early youth.  He expresses the opinion that he is attempting to palm off these old scars as evidence of wounds received, and that if he had been wounded as he claimed he (the surgeon) would have known it and remembered it.

It is true that whenever in this case a wound is described it is located in the jaw, while some of the medical testimony negatives the existence of any wound.

The contrariety of the claimant’s statements and the testimony and circumstances tend so strongly to impeach his claim that I do not think the decision of the Pension Bureau should be reversed and the claimant pensioned.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, August 4, 1886.

To the House of Representatives: 

I herewith return without my approval House bill No. 7234, entitled “An act granting a pension to Susan Hawes.”

The beneficiary named in this bill is the mother of Jeremiah Hawes, who enlisted in February, 1861, in the United States artillery, and was discharged in February, 1864.  He filed a claim for pension in 1881, alleging that in 1862, by the premature discharge of a cannon, he sustained paralysis of his right arm and side.  In 1883, while his claim was still pending, he died.

He does not appear to have made his home with his mother altogether, if at all.  For some years prior to his death and at the time of its occurrence he was an inmate, or had been an inmate, of a soldiers’ home in Ohio.

But whatever may be said of the character of any injuries he may have received in the service or of his relations to his mother, the cause of his death, it seems to me, can not possibly upon any reasonable theory be attributable to any incident of his military service.

It appears that in July, 1883, while the deceased was on his way from Buffalo, where he had been in a hospital, to the soldiers’ home in Ohio, he attempted to step on a slowly moving freight train, and making a misstep a wheel of the car passed over his foot, injuring it so badly that it was deemed necessary by two physicians who were called to amputate the foot.  An anaesthetic was administered preparatory to the operation, but before it was entered upon the injured man died, having survived the accident but two hours.