Pension to Schiedel, Stephen

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

EXECUTIVE MANSION, June 12, 1888.

To the Senate:

I return without approval Senate bill No. 1017, entitled "An act granting a pension to Stephen Schiedel."

The beneficiary named in this bill served in the First Regiment Missouri Light Artillery from October 24, 1861, to October, 1864. There is no record of any injury or disability while in the service.

In March, 1880, sixteen years after his discharge, he filed an application for a pension, alleging that about June, 1862, while carrying logs to aid in building quarters, a log slipped and fell upon a lever, which flew up and struck him, injuring his back and shoulder.

He furnished the testimony of two witnesses tending to support his statement of the manner in which he was injured, but upon investigation this evidence was found to be unreliable.

Medical examinations failed to disclose any disability from the cause alleged, but do tend to show that he was disabled since his discharge by an injury to his right hand and arm and some rheumatic trouble.

It is not claimed that he incurred any disability from rheumatism while in the Army. It appears distinctly that he was wounded in the right wrist and arm while firing a cannon at the village of Hamburg, Erie County, N.Y., on the 4th day of July, 1866. The doctor who testifies to this injury and who dressed the wound negatives any other illness before the accident.

Even if he has, since his discharge, suffered from rheumatism, he does not claim that this was incurred in the Army. He bases his right to a pension entirely upon an injury which he particularly describes, and which the medical examination does not sustain. It will be observed, too, that he continued his military service for two years and four months after the date of his alleged injury. It seems hardly possible that he could have done this if he had been injured in the manner he alleges.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

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

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