Lincoln Part 6

I

To Eastern observers, Springfield in the 1830s was a frontier town. Though there were a few brick edifices, many of the residences were still log houses. If the roads were wide, they were unpaved; in the winter wagons struggled through axle-deep mud, and in the summer the dust was suffocating. The town had no sidewalks, and at crossings pedestrians had to leap from one chunk of wood to another. Hogs freely roamed the streets, and there was a powerful stench from manure piled outside the stables. After visiting Springfield, William Cullen Bryant came away with an impression of "dirt and discomfort."

But this was the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated place Lincoln had ever lived. Though Springfield had been in existence only since 1821, it was now a thriving community with 1,500 residents. The Sangamon County Courthouse occupied the center of the town, which was laid out in a regular, rectangular grid. The north-south streets were numbered; those running east-west were named after American presidents. The courthouse-soon to be replaced by the new state capitol-was surrounded by nineteen dry goods stores, seven groceries, four drugstores, two clothing stores, and a bookstore. Four hotels cared for transients. In addition to schools and an "academy" (roughly equivalent to a high school), the town boasted six churches. The professions were represented by eighteen doctors and eleven lawyers. There was a Whig newspaper, the Sangamo Journal, edited by Simeon Francis, to whom Lincoln during the previous sessions of the legislature had frequently sent news from Vandalia; and it would shortly be joined by the Democratic organ, the Illinois Republican, later rechristened the Illinois State Register.

Lincoln had every intention of becoming a part of this bustling community, but, in addition to a lack of education and money, he had a handicap: he was in a sense engaged. After the death of Ann Rutledge, the older women of New Salem urged him to find a wife, as most of the other young men his age were doing. But there were not many eligible young women in the vicinity, and, anyway, he was always awkward in their presence. He had, however, taken a liking to a sister of Mrs. Bennett Abell who visited New Salem in 1833 or 1834. The daughter of a well-to-do Kentucky family, Mary Owens was a handsome young woman with black hair, dark eyes, fair skin, and magnificent white teeth. She impressed everyone with her gay and lively disposition, and the residents of the village considered her "a very intellectual woman-well educated." After she returned to Kentucky, Lincoln is said to have boasted to Mrs. Abell that "if ever that girl comes back to New Salem I am going to marry her."

On her second visit-about a year after the death of Ann Rutledge-Lincoln began courting Mary Owens, and at first she reciprocated his interest. Then both began to have second thoughts. Granting Lincoln's "goodness of heart," Mary felt that "his training had been different from mine; hence there was not that congeniality which would otherwise have existed." Small events pointed to future difficulties. When she and Lincoln went for a walk with Mrs. Bowling Green, who was struggling to carry a very fat baby, he made no attempt to help her. On another occasion, when several young people were riding horseback to the Greens', she observed that all the other young women were a.s.sisted by their escorts in crossing a deep stream, while Lincoln rode ahead, paying her no attention. When she mentioned the neglect to him, he replied oafishly that he reckoned she could take care of herself. Soon she concluded that "Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman's happiness."

Lincoln's doubts were even more severe. Maybe Mary had been a little too eager to return to New Salem. He feared "that her coming so readily showed that she was a trifle too willing." He began finding defects in her appearance. From her first visit he remembered that she was pleasingly stout-weighing between 150 and 180 pounds, according to contemporaries-but now she appeared "a fair match for Falstaff." In a burlesque account of the affair, written a few months later, he declared: "Now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting in to wrinkles, but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head, that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirtyfive or forty years." His reservations were rationalizations. Painfully aware of his humble origins, he was not sure he could make this well-bred young woman happy, and he was too poor to support a wife in comfort. On a deeper level, the problem was that his personality was as yet so incompletely formed that he had great difficulty in reaching out to achieve intimacy with anyone else.

When Lincoln went to Vandalia in December 1836, he and Mary had not reached "any positive understanding," but both felt their informal arrangement might lead to marriage. For the next six months he engaged in an undignified attempt to get out of the liaison without injuring the lady's feelings or violating his sense of honor. Betraying no pa.s.sion whatever and never mentioning the word "love," his letters to her were, as he admitted, "so dry and stupid" that he was reluctant to send them. His main purpose in writing was to get Mary to take the initiative in breaking off the courts.h.i.+p.

After he moved to Springfield, he grew more than ever convinced that she did not fit in. She would be unhappy, he warned. "There is a great deal of flouris.h.i.+ng about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without shareing in it," he cautioned. "You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty." "You have not been accustomed to hards.h.i.+p," he reminded her, "and it may be more severe than you now immagine."

Apparently neither Lincoln's letters nor the arguments he made when he revisited New Salem in the summer of 1837 convinced Mary that they were incompatible. He began to take a different tack, suggesting that it was for her emotional as well as her physical well-being that she should break off their relations.h.i.+p. "I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women," he told her, and he was convinced that it would be best for Mary if he left her alone. "For the purpose of making the matter as plain as possible," he wrote her, "I now say, that you can now drop the subject [of marriage], dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without calling forth one accusing murmer from me." Indeed, if so doing would add to her peace of mind, "it is my sincere wish that you should." Then, having done his best to persuade her to break their understanding, he manfully announced: "I am willing, and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will, in any considerable degree, add to your happiness."

If Mary wrote a reply to this left-handed proposal, it has not been preserved, but Lincoln recorded that she firmly and repeatedly refused his tepid offer of marriage. To his surprise, instead of being relieved, he felt "mortified almost beyond endurance." "My vanity was deeply wounded ... that she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness," he reported some months later. Once it was certain that Mary did not return his affections, he even began to suspect that he was "really a little in love with her." Immensely relieved that the whole affair was over, he wrote a farcical account of his failed courts.h.i.+p-carefully not mentioning Mary Owens by name-to amuse Mrs. O. H. Browning, which ended: "I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying; and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have me."

II

"This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all, at least it is so to me," Lincoln lamented to Mary Owens a month after he had moved from New Salem. "I am quite as lonesome here as [I] ever was anywhere in my life." No doubt he did feel isolated during his first few weeks in town, but he was probably exaggerating his feelings to discourage Mary from further thinking about marriage. Indeed, he was presently surrounded by friends and welcomed in Springfield society.

From the beginning Speed was his close companion, and he became perhaps the only intimate friend that Lincoln ever had. Four years younger than Lincoln, Speed was also a Kentuckian. Unlike Lincoln, though, Speed came from a prominent family that owned a prosperous plantation, called Farmington, near Louisville, tilled by seventy slaves. Speed had attended private schools in Kentucky and had studied for two years at St. Joseph's College, in Bardstown. Seeking to make his fortune, he came to Springfield and became a part proprietor of Ellis's store. With flas.h.i.+ng blue eyes and a mane of dark curly hair, he was a handsome young man, whose vaguely Byronic air of elegance made him especially attractive to Springfield ladies.

For nearly four years Lincoln and Speed shared a double bed, and their most private thoughts, in the room above Speed's store. No one thought that there was anything irregular or unusual about the arrangement. It was rare for a single man to have a private room, and it was customary for two or more to sleep in the same bed. Years later, when Lincoln was a well-known lawyer, he and the other attorneys traveling the judicial circuit regularly shared beds; only Judge David Davis was allowed to sleep alone, not because of his dignified position but because he weighed over three hundred pounds. Much of the time when Lincoln and Speed were sharing a bed, young William H. Herndon, who had recently been withdrawn from Illinois College in Jacksonville and was clerking in Speed's store, slept in the same room, as did Charles R. Hurst, a clerk in another dry-goods store.

Around Lincoln and Speed gathered other young unmarried men of Springfield, like James H. Matheny, who would become the best man at Lincoln's wedding; Milton Hay, then a law student and clerk in the Stuart & Lincoln office; and James C. Conkling, a Princeton graduate who began practicing law in Springfield in 1838. Before the great fireplace in the back room of Speed's store, they met night after night, to talk and swap stories, and Lincoln with his endless repertoire of anecdotes was always the center of the group. Acting as an informal literary and debating society, the young men read each other's poems and other writings, and, as Herndon recalled, they staged debates on politics, religion, and all other subjects.

Lincoln quickly made other friends in town. William Butler, clerk of the Sangamon County Court, greatly liked this unusual young man who had just moved in from the country and, knowing that he was hard up, generously gave him free board at his house. Simeon Francis welcomed Lincoln to Springfield and opened the columns of the Sangamo Journal for anything he might care to write. And John Todd Stuart introduced his new partner to the more exclusive social circles of Springfield.

III

Lincoln found easy acceptance in Springfield because he arrived not as an unknown but as the partner of Stuart, one of the most prominent and successful lawyers in town. Unlike most beginning lawyers, who had to hunt around for business or accept cases that no one else would take, Lincoln began with a very full practice, for Stuart was concentrating on winning a seat in the United States House of Representatives and turned over most of the business of the firm to his junior partner.

Their office was a single room on the second floor in a group of brick buildings on Fifth Street known as Hoffman's Row, just a block north of the courthouse square. As Herndon remembered, it was furnished only with "a small lounge or bed, a chair containing a buffalo robe, in which the junior member was wont to sit and study, a hard wooden bench, a feeble attempt at a book-case, and a table which answered for a desk." Here Lincoln and Stuart received clients, heard their complaints, and advised what, if any, action was appropriate. If there was a question of legal precedents, the partners could consult their library, which consisted of a couple of volumes of Illinois Reports and some miscellaneous congressional doc.u.ments, legislative proceedings, and law books; it was a meager resource, but at this time probably no law library in Springfield contained as many as one hundred books.

Lincoln had no difficulty in performing the routine work of the office, like drafting wills or writing deeds; he had done a certain amount of this for his neighbors in New Salem even before he was admitted to the bar. Many of the Stuart & Lincoln cases involved only an appearance before a justice of the peace, few of whom were lawyers. Thus when Joel Johnson accused John Grey of forcible detainer, Stuart & Lincoln represented him at Justice Clemment's hearing. Lincoln was thoroughly acquainted with these procedures, since he had regularly attended Bowling Green's court in New Salem.

More complex cases went to trial before the circuit court, where, again, Lincoln had some experience as an observer and as a witness. Indeed, his familiarity with the process, as well as his expertise as a surveyor, had caused the circuit court in Morgan County (Jacksonville) to use him, even before he was admitted to the bar, as what might be called a paralegal in a disputed case over land and timber.

But now, as a licensed attorney, usually operating without his partner or other a.s.sociates, he had a much greater responsibility fully to master the forms and procedures of litigation, for even a minor, technical error could cause his client to lose his case. In bringing a case before the circuit court, a lawyer had first to decide whether to plead it "in law" or "in chancery"; the first referred to a highly formal set of proceedings and precedents derived from the British common law, while the second, sometimes called "equity" proceedings, followed somewhat more flexible and discretionary rules. In either case the attorney (and for clarity it will be a.s.sumed that he was representing the plaintiff) must first draft a praecipe, a brief request to the clerk of the court to issue a summons to the defendant; the praecipe included a brief statement of the nature of the controversy and the amount of the damages alleged. The plaintiff's lawyer then drafted what was called a declaration, indicating the form of action under which the suit was brought and setting forth the facts of the case.

In common law there were eleven major forms of action-trespa.s.s, trespa.s.s on the case, replevin, a.s.sumpsit, ejectment, etc.-each of which applied to different kinds of suits. An action for trespa.s.s, for example, rose when a plaintiff alleged that his person had been interfered with by a.s.sault or battery or that his land or property had been damaged; but an action for trespa.s.s on the case involved indirect or accidental damage or damage to intangible property. Thus a man who claimed a neighbor had stolen his cow would bring an action for trespa.s.s, while one who a.s.serted that he had been slandered by his neighbor would bring one for trespa.s.s on the case. The lawyer who incorrectly identified the action he was bringing might have his case thrown out of court.

The declaration also included a full account of the plaintiffs version of the facts in the case. This had to be prepared with the utmost care. If it alleged facts that could not be proved in a trial, the plaintiff could lose, even if those facts were not necessary to sustain his case. If it alleged facts that differed from those presented at a trial, his case could be thrown out. In one 1859 decision a case was dismissed because the amount of a promissory note stated in the declaration differed by half a cent from the amount of the note as proved in the trial.

In his early cases Lincoln paid close attention to one of the form books that suggested the proper language for declarations, and in his desire to avoid all technical errors his doc.u.ments often grew excessively legalistic and wordy. For instance in a May 1838 case in Fulton County for the collection of an unpaid note, his declaration alleged: "For that whereas the said defendants by, and under the name, style, and firm of 'John W. s.h.i.+nn & Co' heretofore, towit, on the twentythird day of March in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirtysix at Philadelphia, towit, at the county and state aforesaid made their certain promissory note in writing bearing date the date and year aforesaid and thereby then and there promised to pay Twelve months after the date thereof the said plaintiffs in their partners.h.i.+p name of 'Atwood & Co' the sum of Seven hundred and sixtytwo dollars and thirtysix hundredths of a dollar, for value received, and there and then delivered the said promissory note to the said plaintiffs...." As he became more experienced, he pared the legalisms and redundancies, and his declarations became models of simplicity and clarity.

After Lincoln filed his declaration with the clerk of the Sangamon County Circuit Court, the lawyer for the defendant would come back with a demurrer, alleging that the plaintiff's allegations were defective as a matter of law, or a traverse, stating his client's version of the disputed facts or events. Lincoln, for the plaintiff, might respond with a replication, taking exception to that counterstatement, and the opposing attorney could submit a rejoinder. All these papers, which might run to many pages, had to be written out in longhand; there were no secretaries and no copying machines.

Fortunately most of the early cases in which Lincoln was engaged required more common sense than mastery of precedents. They concerned such matters as a suit by Speed, on behalf of A. Y. Ellis & Company, for payment of a debt to the store by one Thomas P. Smith. In a slightly more complicated case Lincoln represented Elijah Houghton, who had been swapping some of his land with David Hart for twelve acres or so along Rock Creek, near New Salem-land that Lincoln himself had surveyed. The death of Hart put their handshake deal into question, and Houghton now asked the court to require Hart's three children and heirs to live up to the terms of the agreement.

From the beginning Stuart & Lincoln carried a heavy load of such cases. As early as the July 1837 term of the Sangamon County Circuit Court, the partners had nineteen common-law cases and seven chancery cases on the docket-more than twice as many as their closest rivals, Logan & Baker, and far more than any other attorneys. In the following terms Logan & Baker once exceeded the case load of Stuart & Lincoln, and from time to time, especially as Stuart prepared to take his seat in Congress, Samuel H. Treat also surpa.s.sed them. But always Lincoln had as much business as he could handle.

Lincoln's legal practice was not confined to Sangamon County. No lawyer could make his living from the two two-week terms that the circuit court met in Springfield each year, and Lincoln, like most of the other attorneys, traveled on the huge circuit that the judges were obliged to make, going from one county seat to another and holding sessions that lasted from two days to a week. Lincoln appeared at Bloomington, in McLean County, as early as 1837, and the following year he began regularly to attend the courts of Tazewell, Macon, Morgan, and other central Illinois counties.

A full schedule did not mean full pockets. Springfield was a town full of lawyers, and all were obliged to charge modest fees. For most of the cases Stuart & Lincoln handled, the fee was $5.00, and the ordinary range was from $2.50 to $10.00. In one case the partners charged $50.00, a fee so high that the client apparently asked to pay some of it by making a coat for Stuart, worth $15.00. In another, where the partners represented a Springfield hotelkeeper, the client paid their fee by giving Lincoln board for $6.00. It was Lincoln's job, as junior partner, to record these fees, which he and Stuart split equally.

He was also supposed to keep a record of the firm's income in a fee book, where he listed cases, the disposition, and the fees charged. Here, too, he entered expenses, such as for several loads of wood, which he apparently cut up with the $2.25 "wood-saw" he purchased, and for an $8.50 stovepipe. For a time he was conscientious in keeping records, but presently the task became onerous and long gaps began to appear. Neither Stuart nor Lincoln was systematic, and the firm's papers were deposited in drawers, in pockets, and, especially, in Lincoln's stovepipe hat. From time to time the partners had to apologize to clients for loss of papers or neglect of business. On one occasion, after Stuart left for Was.h.i.+ngton, Lincoln had to ask his partner how to silence one client who "is teasing me continually about some deeds which he says he left with you, but which I can find nothing of" and how to answer "a d--d hawk billed yankee" who was besetting him about a claim that had not been settled.

Despite careless bookkeeping, the firm was a successful one, and it afforded Lincoln a remarkable opportunity to begin his career at the bar. He quickly discovered that his brief and unsystematic training made him the match for other self-taught lawyers and even for those who had studied, usually without much direction, in the office of some older attorney. After Stuart left to serve in Congress, Lincoln had no doubts about his ability to run the firm in his partner's absence, and he marked the new era in the fee book: "Commencement of Lincoln's administration 1839 Nov 2."

IV

Much of the time during these early years Lincoln seemed to think of his legal career as an adjunct to his political aspirations. He had hardly settled in Springfield before he took on a case that became the occasion of a.s.sailing his political opponents. In May 1837, Mrs. Mary Anderson, together with her son Richard, engaged Stuart & Lincoln on a contingent fee to recover ten acres of land lying just north of Springfield-later to become the site of the Oak Ridge Cemetery. The tract was held by James Adams, a prominent Democratic officeholder in Springfield, but Mrs. Anderson claimed it was part of the estate of her recently deceased husband. On looking into the records, Lincoln became convinced that Adams's deed to the land was fraudulent and that Mrs. Anderson's claim was valid. Enlisting Stephen T. Logan, one of the ablest and most experienced lawyers in Springfield, as fellow counsel, he brought suit in the Sangamon County Circuit Court.

Up to that point his conduct was entirely professional, but soon his bitter political animus against Adams began to show. Adams was in fact a man with a shady past, who had fled New York rather than face charges that he had forged a deed to six hundred acres. But what angered Lincoln was Adams's candidacy for the lucrative office of judge of the probate court, for which Dr. Anson G. Henry, a Whig and a special friend of Lincoln's, was also running. While the court case against Adams was pending, Lincoln and his fellow lawyers began to try it in the newspapers. In six letters, signed "Sampson's Ghost," which they published weekly in the Sangamo Journal, they attacked Adams as a Tory and a supporter of the Hartford Convention, called on him "to explain to the citizens of this county by what authority he holds possession of two... lots of ground in Springfield, upon which he now resides," and hinted that Adams's t.i.tle to the Anderson land was also fraudulent.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1837, Springfield papers were filled with these charges against Adams and with countercharges by Adams and his friends. Though Lincoln may not have written all the "Sampson's Ghost" letters, Adams correctly identified him as his primary enemy and struck back with public letters that challenged his facts and his logic. Seeking to take advantage of Lincoln's unconventional religious views, Adams labeled him "a deist." Lincoln responded in a handbill, followed by two public letters, which tried to discredit Adams's witnesses and ridiculed his efforts to "tear, rend, split, rive, blow up, confound, overwhelm, annihilate, extinguish, exterminate, burst asunder, and grind to powder all his slanderers."

The unedifying and unprofessional controversy lost much of its point when Sangamon County voters in the fall election showed how little credence they gave to Lincoln's allegations by defeating Henry and electing Adams probate judge. The suit over the Anderson property, together with other related actions, dragged on for several years, but Adams remained in possession of the land at his death in 1843.

Lincoln exhibited the same fierce partisans.h.i.+p in the state legislature, which continued to meet in Vandalia, pending the completion of the new state capitol in Springfield. Now one of the more experienced members, he was twice the unsuccessful candidate of the Whigs for speaker of the house of representatives. In the 18381839 session he served on no fewer than fourteen committees, including the influential finance committee, but much of his work was done behind the scenes in organizing and managing the Whig minority. On the floor of the house he partic.i.p.ated in the debates more easily and freely, occasionally lightening the proceedings with a bit of levity. When a representative from Montgomery County expressed fear about the mounting debts and deficits caused by the internal improvements plan, Lincoln said he was reminded of an eccentric Hoosier bachelor, "very famous for seeing big bugaboos in every thing," who went hunting and fired his gun repeatedly at a squirrel which he claimed was at the top of a tree. Unable to see anything in the tree, his brother examined the hunter's person carefully and "found on one of his eye lashes a big louse crawling about." "It is so with the gentleman from Montgomery," Lincoln joked. "He imagined he could see squirrels every day, when they were nothing but lice."

Lincoln's main objective in the legislature was to protect Springfield. He introduced legislation to incorporate Springfield as a town and to secure state funds for the completion of the new statehouse. Until the actual removal of the state government in 1839, supporters of Vandalia made repeated efforts to repeal the legislation making Springfield the capital. In the 1837 session, for example, General W. L. D. Ewing, who represented Vandalia in the legislature, denounced "the arrogance of Springfield-its presumption in claiming the seat of government" and charged the legislation removing the capital had been obtained "by chicanery and trickery." Chosen by the Sangamon delegation to respond, Lincoln struck back with such severity that observers expected Ewing to challenge him to a duel.

Closely related to Lincoln's defense of Springfield's interests was his position on the ambitious internal improvements plan, which had foundered after the panic of 1837. In view of falling revenues and the collapse of the market for Illinois bonds, most leaders of both parties favored curtailing or abandoning the scheme to crisscross the state with railroads and ca.n.a.ls. But not Lincoln. Admitting "that Sangamon county have received great and important benefits... in return for giving support, thro' her delegation to the system of Internal Improvement," he announced that the county was "morally bound," though "not legally bound," to support that system. To those who wanted to modify the scheme, he said the legislature had "gone too far to recede, even if we were disposed to do so." "We are," he added, "now so far advanced in a general system of internal improvements that, if we would, we cannot retreat from it, without disgrace and great loss."

Something more than face-saving lay behind Lincoln's support of internal improvements. He continued to think of America as buoyant and prosperous, a land of opportunity where poor boys like himself could get ahead. He had no doubt of the rich resources of Illinois, which, he said, "surpa.s.ses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe, in fertility of soil" and was therefore capable of "sustaining a greater amount of agricultural wealth and population than any other equal extent of territory in the world." Railroads and ca.n.a.ls were desperately needed to bring the state's produce to the world's markets. It was a terrible misfortune that the panic had occurred when the internal improvements plan was getting under way, just at the time when the largest investment was required and the least return could be expected. Consequently the state found itself "at a point which may aptly be likened to the dead point in the steam-engine-a point extremely difficult of turning." But he was confident that, "once turned," it would "present no further difficulty, and all again will be well." Using a different metaphor, he argued that stopping support of these projects now would be "very much like stopping a skift in the middle of a river-if it was not going up, it would go down."