Pension to Denny, Alfred

The following data is extracted from Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Grover Cleveland.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, June 22, 1886.

To the Senate:

I return herewith without approval Senate bill No. 1192, entitled "An act granting a pension to Alfred Denny."

It appears that the claimant entered the United States military service as captain and assistant quartermaster of volunteers on the 12th day of June, 1863. After remaining in such position for less than a year he resigned to accept a civil position.

The short record of his military service discloses no mention of any accident or disability. But twenty years after his resignation, and on the 12th day of March, 1884, he reappears as an applicant for a pension, and alleges in his declaration filed in the Pension Bureau that in August, 1863, while in the line of duty, he was, by a sudden movement of the horse he was riding, thrown forward upon the horn of his saddle and thereby received a rupture in his right side, which at some time and in a manner wholly unexplained subsequently caused a rupture in his left side also.

The number of instances in which those of our soldiers who rode horses during the war were injured by being thrown forward upon their saddles indicate that those saddles were very dangerous contrivances.

I am satisfied there is not a particle of merit in this claim, and no facts are presented to me which entitle it to charitable consideration.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

Source: Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Grover Cleveland

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