Lincoln (29 page)

In the federal courts Lincoln handled almost every kind of proceeding, including, improbably enough, a case in admiralty, involving a salvage operation on a ferryboat in the Mississippi River. Much of his time was taken by suits for debt, brought against citizens of Illinois by plaintiffs residing in other states. In seventeen cases he represented Samuel C. Davis & Company, a wholesale firm in St. Louis, which sued to collect unpaid bills in Illinois. This was not work that Lincoln enjoyed, nor was it remunerative, because he had to hire a man to visit each of the localities where a debtor lived and appraise his property in order to determine whether a court decree could be executed. As other more interesting and rewarding cases came his way, he resolved to drop Davis & Company as a client, and he wrote the firm: “My mind is made up. I will have no more to do with this class of business. I can do business in Court, but I can not, and will not follow executions all over the world.”

Other litigation in the federal courts he continued to find fascinating, especially when it involved mechanical devices and patents. His very first case in the Chicago federal court (
Z. Parker
v.
Charles Hoyt)
had to do with Hoyt’s alleged infringement of Parker’s patent for a waterwheel. Along with
Grant Goodrich, Lincoln represented Hoyt. Defending their client with great energy, Lincoln explained to the jury in clear, simple language that Hoyt’s device was not a copy of Parker’s patented waterwheel but was simply an application of an age-old principle of waterpower. He reinforced his point by describing his early experience as an operator of Offutt’s sawmill at New Salem, which had been powered by the Sangamon River. When the jury came in with a verdict for the defendant, Lincoln said he “regarded this as one of the most gratifying triumphs of his professional life.”

The heart of Lincoln’s law practice continued to be in the circuit courts, and Lincoln & Herndon did its largest business in the Sangamon County Circuit Court. In August 1849, at the first session of that court held after Lincoln’s return from Congress, the firm had three cases on the opening day, seventeen cases on the second day, and eight on the third day. Once again Lincoln & Herndon was back in business. In 1850 the partners were involved in 18 percent of all the cases brought before the Sangamon County Circuit Court, and by 1853 they participated in about one-third of all cases.

As business increased, the small back room in the Tinsley Building, to which Herndon had moved during Lincoln’s absence, proved inadequate, and the partners rented a larger, second-floor office on the west side of the capitol square. It was a bare, unpretentious room, with two dirty windows looking out over sheds and an alley. There was no carpet. One long table occupied the center of the room, with a shorter one crossing it, to form a T, and both were covered with green baize. An old-fashioned secretary, with pigeonholes and a drawer to hold legal papers, a bookcase containing about two hundred law books, a couch, and some miscellaneous chairs completed the furnishings. The office was almost never cleaned.

In this office the partners worked until 1861. Unless they were on the circuit, both came in every morning, and they sat facing each other at opposite ends of the shorter table. From time to time, Lincoln would throw himself on the couch, resting his legs on two or three chairs or up against the wall, spilling himself out, as Herndon noted with irritable exaggeration, “easily over ¼ of the room.” Often, to his partner’s exasperation, Lincoln would read aloud from the daily newspapers or whatever book he was interested in. As he explained to Herndon: “When I read aloud my two senses catch the idea—1st I see what I am reading and 2dly I hear it read; and I can thus remember what I read the better.”

On many cases the partners worked together, with Herndon doing the research and the bookwork while Lincoln dealt with clients and the courts. But both Lincoln and Herndon handled many cases independently, or with other attorneys. In a rough division of labor, Herndon managed the office—insofar as any management was performed—and supervised the one or two students who were reading law with the firm, while Lincoln more
often appeared in court. Except when he handled cases in Menard County, Herndon usually stayed in Springfield, while Lincoln went out on the circuit.

Every spring, after the adjournment of the Sangamon County Circuit Court, Lincoln set out on the round of the other circuit courts in the Eighth Judicial District. He discovered that there had been some significant changes during his two-year absence. For one thing, Lincoln now found himself one of the senior lawyers traveling the circuit. Though he was only forty years old, he was more and more frequently called—though never to his face—“Old Abe,” both because of his weather-beaten appearance and because of his many years in public life and at the bar. Some of the younger, ambitious lawyers thought of him as one of the “fossils,” who wanted to keep down new talent, and Lincoln himself, while denying any desire to discriminate against younger attorneys, conceded, “I suppose I am now one of the old men.”

Another change resulted from the election in 1848 of David Davis as judge of the Eighth Judicial District, to succeed Samuel H. Treat, who had presided over so many of Lincoln’s earlier cases on the circuit. Davis, a native of Maryland educated at Kenyon College and the Yale Law School, had known Lincoln casually for a number of years, but the two men now became closely acquainted in traveling the interminable miles of the circuit and in sitting for endless hours in the county courts. In appearance they were a curiously mismatched pair. Davis, so portly that it was said he had to be surveyed for a pair of trousers, was a stickler for immaculate clothing and perfect grooming; Lincoln, thin to the point of emaciation, seemed always to be hastily dressed, usually in a bobtailed sack coat and jeans that did not come within inches of his feet. In the winter months he added to this ensemble a circular blue cape, or sometimes a gray shawl, which he wore over his shoulders, fastened with an immense safety pin; in the summer he traveled in a white linen duster, much stained and the worse for wear. But in many ways Lincoln and Davis were much alike. Both were devoted Whigs, dedicated to promoting the country’s economic growth and national spirit. Border-state men, they detested slavery but deplored abolitionist efforts to end it. In legal matters Davis, despite his formal training, was neither particularly acute nor learned, and like Lincoln he took a commonsensical approach to the law, allowing principles to guide his decisions more often than precedents.

Davis and Lincoln did not become intimate friends. “Lincoln never confided to me anything,” Davis remarked many years later, adding that “Mr. Lincoln was not a sociable man by any means” and that he had “no strong emotional feelings for any person—mankind or thing.” That sour judgment derived from the essentially professional nature of their relationship, which was based on respect rather than affection. Each man developed a high opinion of the other’s ability.

Davis, as he wrote to his wife, greatly admired “Mr. Lincoln’s exceeding
honesty and fairness.” So great was the judge’s confidence in Lincoln that on numerous occasions when called away from the bench by family illness or other emergencies he designated Lincoln to preside in his stead. The practice of asking a prominent attorney to substitute for the judge was a fairly common one on the frontier (until the Illinois Supreme Court put an end to it in 1877), but only when the substitute was an attorney like Lincoln, who had the respect of the other members of the bar, were his rulings accepted without protest. Most of the decisions that Lincoln made as judge were in routine or uncontested cases, but he also disposed of slander suits, divorces, and actions for debt.

For the next eleven years Davis and Lincoln, together with the other lawyers, traveled essentially the same circuit twice a year. In the spring, after concluding the session of the Sangamon County Circuit Court in Springfield, the judge and his entourage moved on to Tremont in Tazewell County; then to Metamora in Woodford County; thence south to Bloomington in McLean County, and to Mt. Pulaski in Logan County; next east to Clinton in DeWitt County, Monticello in Piatt County, Urbana in Champaign County, and Danville in Vermilion County; after that south to Paris in Edgar County; then, turning west, to Shelbyville in Shelby County, Sullivan in Moultrie County, Decatur in Macon County, and Taylorville in Christian County. After that the judge went back to his home in Bloomington and the lawyers dispersed. (The route varied slightly from year to year depending in part on the condition of the roads. Sometimes counties where there was little litigation could be skipped. From time to time, the legislature changed the boundaries of the Eighth Judicial District, adding or subtracting counties.) The area traveled, as Davis grumbled, was equal to the entire state of Connecticut.

Roads were slightly better than they had been in the earlier days. Lincoln never used the public stagecoaches that connected a few towns but traveled in his buggy, pulled by Old Buck, the successor to Old Tom. Accommodations remained miserable. Davis’s letters to his wife recited a litany of complaints: there was mud in the winter and dust in the summer; taverns were overrun with mosquitoes, fleas, and bedbugs; the dining rooms were dirty and typically the “table [was] greasy—table cloth greasy—floor greasy and every thing else ditto”; the waitress was so filthy that he guessed “the dirt must be half an inch thick all over her.” Worst of all was the food “hardly fit for the stomach of a horse.” Lincoln, as always indifferent to his surroundings and careless of comfort, registered no complaints. Once when he arrived at a hard-luck hotel and found the landlord had run out of meat and bread, he cheerfully announced: “Well in the absence of anything to eat I will jump into this Cabbage.”

Everywhere on the circuit Lincoln’s services were much in demand, mostly by younger attorneys who needed his assistance in drafting legal papers and in presenting their cases to the court. With some of them he worked so frequently that they came to think of themselves as his partners,
though they should more properly be termed his associates. With only one, Ward Hill Lamon, in Danville, was there anything like a formal arrangement; a local newspaper announced in 1852 the formation of the new firm of Lincoln & Lamon, Attorneys at Law. Possibly Lamon alone was responsible for inserting the advertisement, and perhaps Lincoln never knew of it. Anyway, he never rebuked Lamon because he was fond of this hard-drinking, two-fisted young giant with his endless repertory of off-color stories and Negro songs. The partnership, if it deserved that name, was limited to Vermilion County, where Lincoln and Lamon did frequently appear together, Lamon leaning heavily on the senior lawyer for guidance.

For the most part, Lincoln’s cases in the circuit courts continued to be of no great interest or consequence to anyone except the parties involved in the litigation. For instance, at the 1850 session of the Tazewell County Circuit Court, where he always had a large practice, he represented three defendants who were being sued by the village of Tremont for establishing an “unwholesome business,” a lard factory, that was polluting the neighborhood. Lincoln based his case on a highly technical point, involving a statute of limitations, and lost, and his clients were fined $10 each. The next year he and two local lawyers represented members of the Funk family, accused of cutting 1,200 trees on the property of John Shibley and hauling off the timber; he lost again, but the defeat was a technical one since the jury awarded the plaintiff only $104. In 1852 he defended Sheriff William Gaither and John Jones, accused of imprisoning and beating one Joseph F. Haines, on whom they were attempting to serve a writ. The jury acquitted Gaither but fined his assistant, Jones, $10; Lincoln could consider that half a victory. Later that same year he represented John P. Singleton, who was sued for nonpayment of a debt to Pearly Brown. In fact, Singleton had paid part of the debt and, at a time when cash was scarce in the West, had tried to pay the rest in corn, which Brown refused to accept. Lincoln negotiated a settlement. At the 1855 session he appeared for one Peter Duffy, accused of having repeatedly beaten, kicked, and thrown to the ground Benjamin Seaman, causing him to be “greatly hurt, bruised and wounded... sore, lame, and disordered.” The grand jury found for Seaman but, under Lincoln’s persuasion, reduced the damages awarded him from the $300 he claimed to only $3.

Lincoln’s income from his circuit court practice depended on the volume of the cases he handled. His fees were generally modest, as were those charged by most other attorneys on the circuit. For most cases he received $10.00 or $20.00. Collecting a debt of $600.00, he retained as his fee only $3.50. He felt strongly that clients should not be overcharged. In 1856 when a man in Quincy sent him a check for $25.00 for drawing up some legal papers, Lincoln wrote: “You must think I am a high-priced man. You are too liberal with your money. Fifteen dollars is enough for the job.” He returned the balance.

In handling hundreds of cases in the circuit courts, Lincoln firmly reestablished his reputation as a lawyer. It was a reputation that rested, first, on the universal belief in his absolute honesty. He became known as “Honest Abe”—or, often, “Honest Old Abe”—the lawyer who was never known to lie. He held himself to the highest standards of truthfulness. In notes for a lecture on the law, written about 1850, he referred to the “vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest” and warned: “Let no young man, choosing the law for a calling, for a moment yield to this popular belief. Resolve to be honest at all events; and if, in your own judgment, you can not be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation.”

Clients and other attorneys also respected Lincoln’s incredible capacity for hard work. Though most of the cases he argued on the circuit originated with local lawyers, he drafted nearly all the legal papers himself, from the purely formal praecipes to the most elaborate pleadings. Writing all these out in his own hand sometimes involved enormous labor. In the 1855 Macoupin County case of
Clark & Morrison
v.
Page & Bacon,
involving the claims of some St. Louis bankers and financiers, Lincoln for the defendants drafted a forty-three-page answer to the plaintiffs’ bill of complaints; this was a task that required immense concentration, and Lincoln’s handwriting suggested that he wrote the entire document at one sitting. Of course, few cases required so much labor, but Lincoln’s clients rarely lost a suit because of carelessness or inattention on the part of their attorney.