The Lincoln Story Book Part 10

It has been seen that creditors treated the struggling Lincoln with the utmost forbearance, countering the adage that "forbearance is not acquittance." He was given the occasion to show how he was neighborly when the turn came. A client of his was long deferring settlement when the lawyer met him by chance on the courthouse steps, at Springfield.

He accosted him cordially, and remarked about an accident that had befallen him.

Cogdale had been blown up by gunpowder and lost a hand. He began to apologize for the business delay, showing that he was crippled manually as well as in his pursuits.

Lincoln plainly expressed his sympathy and sorrow.

"I have been thinking about that note of yours," faltered the unhappy man.

The lawyer drew the paper in question out of his wallet and forced it upon him.

"It is not to be _thought of!_" replied he, laughing in his droll yet saturnine mode.

Cogdale honestly added that he did not know when he really could pay.

But the donee hurried away, saying:

"If you had the money, I would not take it out of your only hand!"

"SKIN WRIGHT AND CLOSE!"

In more than one event the Lincolnian snappy and headlong manner was the fruit of study and deliberation. Apparently holding aloof from politics after his return from Was.h.i.+ngton, in 1849, Lincoln was earning a great name at the bar. His popularity was the wider as he did not disdain poor clients and often won a case without permitting any remuneration. There came to Lincoln & Herndon's office one day a poor widow. She was ent.i.tled to a pension of four hundred dollars, but the agent, one Wright, who had drawn it for her, retained one-half as his fee. This greed so stirred Mr. Lincoln that he at once went to the agent to demand disgorging of the money. On refusal, a suit was inst.i.tuted for the recovery.

At the trial, with his buoyancy, Lincoln said to his partner:

"You had better stay, and hear me address the jury, as I am going to _skin_ Wright and get the money back."

He pleaded that there was no contract between the parties; that the man was not an authorized agent; his charge was unreasonable; he had never given the money due to the soldier's widow, but retained one-half. Next he expatiated on her husband, during the Revolutionary War, experiencing the hards.h.i.+ps of the old Continentals at Valley Forge in the winter; barefoot in the deep snows; ill-clad against the rigors; their feet, cut by ice staining the ground, and so on.

The men in the box were also affected to tears, like the spectators, while the pension "shark" wriggled under the invectives. The verdict was in favor of the relict. Her advocate not only remitted his costs, but paid her fare home and for her stay in Springfield, so that she went off rejoicing.

Lincoln's partner had the curiosity to look at his brief, which concluded:

"_Skin Wright!_ Close!"--(Related by Mr. Herndon, present at the trial.)

HOOKING HENS IS LOW!

Mr. Lincoln had a.s.sisted in the prosecution of a fellow who stole some fowls. The lawyer jogged homeward in the company of the jury foreman.

He eulogized the young man for his good work in the prosecution, and, when the other returned the compliment by speaking warmly of the jury's prompt and speedy deliverance of the verdict, the fereman replied:

"Yaas, the vagabond ought to be locked up. Why, when I was young and pearter than I am now, I didn't mind packing a sheep or two off on my back--but stealing hens--faugh! It is low and shows what the country is coming to!"

"THE STATE AGAINST MR. WHISKY!"

When Lincoln was a briefless barrister, frequenting the courts on their own peregrinations, to catch the eye of client or judge, he was at Clinton, Illinois, where a case came up of a very modern nature.

To be sure, "the Shrieking Sisterhood" was then invented for the advocates of female suffrage and anti-slavery. But these twelve or fifteen young women presented themselves in custody for a novel charge. They had failed to induce a liquor dealer to restrict his license, and "smashed" his wine-parlor incontinently. Although public sympathy was theirs for the act, as well as for their youth, prettiness, and s.e.x, none of the lawyers would take up their defense on account of the influence of the brewers' and distillers' agent.

In this emergency, Abraham Lincoln stepped into the breach and volunteered to defend the defenseless.

"I would suggest, first," began he, "that there be a change in the indictment so as to have it read 'The State against Mr. Whisky!'

instead of 'The State against these women.' This is the defense of these women. The man who has persisted in selling whisky has had no regard for their well-being or the welfare of their husbands and sons.

He has had no fear of G.o.d or regard for man; neither has he any regard for the laws of the statute. No jury can fix any damages or punishment for any violation of the moral law. The course pursued by this liquor dealer has been for the demoralization of society. His groggery has been a nuisance. These women, finding all moral suasion of no avail with this fellow, oblivious to all, to all tender appeal and a like regardless of their tears and prayers, in order to protect their households and promote the welfare of the community, united to suppress the nuisance. The good of society demanded its suppression!

They accomplished what otherwise could not have been done."--(_The Lincoln Magazine_.)

AS CLEAR AS MOONs.h.i.+NE.

In 1858, Lincoln was committed to the political campaign which was a pa.s.sing victory, superficial, to his opponent, Senator Douglas, to eventuate in his accession to the Presidency. So he had let legal strife fall into abeyance, during two years. He was, therefore, vexed to have an applicant for his renewing that line of business, but at once welcomed the suitor on learning her name. It was Hannah Armstrong. He was eager to see her. She was the wife of the bully of Clary's Grove, the locally noted wrestler, Jack Armstrong. After they had become friends, Lincoln had been harbored in their cottage, in the days when poverty held him down so he scarcely could get his head above water. The good soul had repaid his doing ch.o.r.es about her house, such as minding the baby, getting in the firewood, and keeping the highway cows out of her cabbage-patch, after her husband died, by darning his socks, filling up a bowl with corn-mush, at the period when it was a feast to have "cheese, bologna, and crackers," in the garret where he pored over law-books. Her news was painful. The baby, whose cradle Lincoln had rocked, was a man now, and was in what the vernacular phrased "pretty considerable of a tight fix."

It looked as though Mr. Lincoln would have difficulty in loosening the fix, far more to remove it.

At a camp-meeting, the young men had been riotous. Armstrong and a companion had been entangled in a fight for all comers, in which one man was seriously injured by some weapon. The companion, Norris, was tried and convicted for manslaughter of Metzgar, receiving the sentence of eight years' imprisonment. But Armstrong was to be indicted for murder, as the injuries were indicated as inflicted with a blunt instrument, and a witness affirmed that they were done by a slung-shot in Armstrong's hands. It was little excuse that he, like the rest implicated, was drunk at the time. Nevertheless, dissolute as was the young man of two-and-twenty, Lincoln did not need the woman's a.s.surance that her son was incapable of murder so deliberate.

Armstrong averred that any blow he struck was done with the naked fist. Furthermore, it was said that Metzgar was not left insensible on the field of battle, but was going home beside a yoke of oxen when the yoke-end cracked his skull; it was this, and no slung-shot, that caused his death the following day.

Recognizing that the complication forebode a strenuous task, Lincoln none the less accepted it and, a.s.suring his old "Aunt Hannah" that he would not suffer her to talk of remuneration, he resumed the toga to contest the effort to take away Armstrong's life and release Norris, as convicted under error.

He closeted himself with the prisoner to hear his account, and upon that concluded he was guiltless. It has been said that Lincoln would never undertake a defense of a man he believed guilty. This held good in the present instance.

As the statement about the slung-shot blow was made by a man who disputed the ox-yoke accident, and that the fatal hurts were received in the free fight at the camp-meeting, it was necessary that he should be explicit. He had seen the blow and distinguished the weapon by the light of the moon.

Lincoln was accustomed from early life to relieve his brain when toiling or distressed, by the turning to a vein utterly opposed to those moods. His chief diversion from Blackstone and the statutes was his favorite author, Shakespeare. Hackett, the _Falstaff_ delighted in by our grandfathers, p.r.o.nounced the President a better student of that dramatist than he expected to meet.

As the ancients drew fates, as it is called, from Virgil, and the medievals from the Bible, so the lawyer drew hints from his author.

The process is to open at a page and read as a forecast the first line meeting the eye. The play-book opened at "Midsummer Night's Dream."

To refresh himself after his speeches in rehearsal, Lincoln had been enjoying the humor of the amateur-actor clowns. So the line "leaping into sight" was on parallel lines with his thought.

"Does the moon s.h.i.+ne that night?" So the text. Whereupon, _Nick Bottom_, a weaver, cries out: "A calendar! look in the almanack!

find out moons.h.i.+ne!"

The pleader had his cue!

It was not necessary to postpone the trial on the ground that the debate upon the new charge prevented a fair jury in the district.

Besides, the widow would grow mad in the long suspense, even if the prisoner bore it manfully, though sorrowing for her and his misspent life. The trial was indeed the event of the year at the courthouse.

The witnesses for the prosecution repeated about Armstrong much the same story as had convicted Norris: Armstrong had led a reprehensible career, and the deliberate onslaught with a weapon after the fight could hardly have been made by an intoxicated man. It was vindictiveness from being worsted by the unhappy Metzgar in a fair fight. In vain was it cited that he and Metzgar had been friends and that the accuser was a personal enemy of the former.