This Lincoln was neither shy nor retiring. He was choosing a different path; as he spent more time in the legislature, he was becoming more comfortable with becoming sharply partisan, following Clay’s example by destroying the competition before it could destroy him. Lincoln was testing the limits of such fierce attacks. He lived in a community—and a state—dominated by Democrats. First in New Salem and then in Springfield, most of Lincoln’s friends and neighbors, even those he worked for and learned from, such as the lawyer Bowling Green and surveyor John Calhoun, were Democrats. Incredibly, Lincoln managed to remain cordial to his friends on the other side. His adept balancing of his friendships with the increasing need for partisanship was evident in December 1839 in a series of debates held in a church in Springfield between leading Democrats on the one side and leading Whigs on the other. As one Lincoln biographer relates, “In Springfield in the winter following, when the legislature was in session, a new form of campaigning sprang up. It was called the Three day debate.”73 This newly fangled debate was informal and lengthy, and yet observed some simple rules—respect for your opponent and no spurious attacks. Among the Whigs who regularly participated in the debates were several of Lincoln’s closest friends in the bar, including Edward Baker, Orville Browning, and Stephen Logan. Among the regular, prominent Democratic participants were Stephen Douglas and Ebenezer Peck, who would later become a prominent Chicago lawyer and Republican leader. “The debate was so good natured, informal, and helpful that a request was presented that the format be repeated and similar debates were held in nearby towns in the spring of 1840.”74 Lincoln did more than merely hone his debating skills in these contests. The friendships and trust forged among the regular participants endured in spite of sharp political differences in the ensuing years. Nevertheless, though Lincoln engaged with Democrats, he was actually becoming less tolerant of the spirit of compromise. The more time he spent with devout Whigs, the more Whiggish he became. That would become increasingly evident in the stretch ahead.
VI
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In April 1841, John Todd Stuart amicably ended his law partnership with Lincoln. It was a business decision, which was intended to benefit them both. Stuart realized that, given Lincoln’s passion for politics, his junior partner might not always be able to cover the firm’s work when Stuart was in Washington. He needed someone younger, for whom the law, not politics, was the driving passion. Stuart took on a young, Yale-educated Whig, Benjamin Edwards, who was from Springfield. Stuart suggested Lincoln partner with another Springfield lawyer, the aforementioned Stephen Logan.
Lincoln and Logan already knew each other well. Logan, then a state court judge, heard the first case Lincoln tried with Stuart. He had watched Lincoln’s campaign speeches closely. Logan was well known as one of the state’s premier legal minds and well respected in the Illinois bar, a reputation upheld despite the fact that he dressed sloppily, never wore a necktie, and dribbled tobacco juice while he spoke in court.75 He was widely feared, with a reputation for being difficult and demanding. (Logan was once described as “snappy, irritable [and] fighting like a game fowl.”)76
Lincoln became friendly with Logan while they both rode the circuit together, which involved traveling with a judge and another lawyer or two to handle disputes in the counties comprising a particular region of the state, in this case the First Judicial Circuit of Illinois. Lincoln and Logan were among the lawyers who rode the ten-county First Judicial Circuit until 1839, when Sangamon County was included in the newly created Eighth Judicial Circuit, which covered nine counties. Besides Logan, Lincoln met several other lawyers and judges in those days who remained close friends and political allies over the years, including David Davis, a friend from the state legislature, and Leonard Swett, a fellow lawyer in Springfield. Browning sometimes rode the circuit, as did another young lawyer, Abraham Jonas, the first Jew admitted to the Illinois bar. Jonas had begun his career as an apprentice to Browning.
Logan, as the historian Michael Burlingame has noted, was “a better lawyer” but “a worse politician than Stuart.”77 Certainly Stuart was not alone in thinking that Logan was the best attorney in Springfield. In 1843, the Sangamo Journal declared that Logan “is regarded as perhaps the best lawyer in the State.”78 The article noted that, while Logan’s “voice is not pleasant,” he had “a most happy faculty of elucidating, and simplifying the most obstinate questions.”79 Such illumination was appealing not only to judges and jurors but also to Lincoln.
Logan accepted Lincoln as a partner mostly because he had been impressed with his speaking abilities—a skill, Logan said, “exceedingly useful to me in getting the goodwill of the juries.”80 Yet Logan also quickly realized Lincoln’s limitations as a lawyer. Logan could see that although Lincoln had read some legal texts, Lincoln had little meaningful experience in the actual practice of law. Logan learned that Stuart might have taught Lincoln how to sway a jury or negotiate a contract but would not have taught him other important legal skills—how to argue before judges, draft legal documents, and file pleadings. Logan knew Lincoln was “never a reader of law; he always depended more on the management of his case.”81 Indeed, Logan was not surprised to find that, even after a few years of practicing law, “Lincoln’s knowledge of the law was very small.”82 However, he knew Lincoln “would work hard and learn all there was in a case he had in hand.” In the end, Lincoln became, in Logan’s estimation, “a pretty good lawyer though his general knowledge of law was never very formidable.”83
Under Logan’s stern tutelage from 1841 to 1843, Lincoln “tr[ied] to know more and studied how to prepare his cases.”84 Logan instructed Lincoln on how to use the legal materials he had read to make his arguments stronger. While Stuart was skillful at cajoling and charming juries, Logan instead taught Lincoln how to better organize his arguments and to integrate the facts and the law of a case in order to persuade judges and juries. Logan required Lincoln to observe him in court, paying special attention to his arguments before juries. After watching, Lincoln stated “that it was his greatest ambition to become as good a lawyer as Logan,”85 who was “the best [trial] lawyer he ever saw.”86 Lincoln never praised Stuart in such a manner. He admired how Logan could “make a nice distinction in law, or upon the facts, more palatable to the common understanding, than any lawyer he ever knew.”87 The lessons learned from Logan, including how to frame or adapt arguments to different audiences, would turn out to be important not only in Lincoln’s development as a lawyer, but also as a politician.
When the Illinois Supreme Court and federal courts moved to Springfield in 1839, thanks to his partnership with Logan, Lincoln was an ideal position to expand his own practice.88 As Michael Burlingame notes,
Of the 411 Supreme Court cases that Lincoln appeared in during his twenty-four-year legal career, a substantial number were tried during his brief partnership with Logan. In response to the hard times following the Panic of 1837, Congress enacted a short-lived bankruptcy law in 1841 to relieve debtors, many of whom enlisted the services of Logan and Lincoln. They handled seventy-seven such cases, more than any other firm in Springfield and the fourth largest of any firm in the state.89
Lincoln continued to ride the circuit in order to earn additional money, and as he became more familiar with the law’s complexities, he, like other lawyers at the time, had to deal with the jarring reality that judges varied in quality. Some judges knew and cared about the law, while many others did not. Outcomes often did not depend on the facts but on a judge’s politics. In the nineteenth century, judges rose to the bench because of their political connections, rarely because of their acumen or distinction as lawyers. Their courts were often poorly run and their decisions erratic. Lawyers were representing different parties constantly, so an opponent one day could be an ally the next or vice versa. The legal system was much like the rest of the Old West at that time, where order did not strictly follow the law.
Lincoln was equipped to fare well in such a world. A common descr
iption of him as a lawyer in those years was that he was plainspoken, and this quality, along with his natural and well-honed penchant for storytelling, made him more effective with juries than judges. It also made him more effective on the hustings. Logan pushed Lincoln harder to not just repeat the points made by others but to make his arguments in his own words. Lincoln’s 1840 textbook critique of Van Buren’s fiscal policies demonstrated that he was improving in the clarity and coherence of his political attacks, putting them into plainer language and simpler metaphors that he could more effectively hammer home.
Even as Lincoln earnestly took Logan’s counsel to heart, they both understood the extent to which partisan forces could shape outcomes. Perhaps no incident better illustrates this than Lincoln’s unsuccessful effort as the Whig minority floor leader in the Illinois House to stop a Democratic initiative to remake the state’s highest court in order to favor Democratic objectives. Stephen Douglas, four years younger than Lincoln, led this effort.
In 1839, the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision in Field v. People of the State of Illinois, ex rel. John McClernand, provoked Democrats in the state legislature to introduce a court-packing plan.90 Thomas Carlin, a Democrat, was elected governor of Illinois in 1839. Upon assuming office, Carlin nominated John McClernand as secretary of state, even though the office was occupied and had no set term. The current occupant, Alexander Field, was a Whig who had no intention of leaving. The Whigs and a small number of Democrats blocked the nomination on the ground that the governor could not remove Field without the legislature’s approval. (A similar argument would be made later by Radical Republicans in response to President Andrew Johnson’s dismissal of his secretary of war Edwin Stanton.) Carlin waited for the legislative recess, then named McClernand as the acting secretary of state. Field still refused to leave office and filed a lawsuit to block the governor. The trial judge, a Democrat, ruled against Field, who appealed the judgment to the state supreme court. The state supreme court at that time had four justices: three Whigs and a Democrat. One Whig recused himself, the other two voted to reverse the trial judge, and the Democrat voted to affirm the trial judge’s decision.91
That is how things stood until 1840 when Democrats increased their control of the Illinois legislature. The Illinois state constitution was unclear on whether foreigners without U.S. citizenship were entitled to vote, but by 1840 more than nine thousand had joined the ranks of the Whigs, while barely a thousand supported the Democrats. The Democrats filed a lawsuit barring the noncitizens in the state in voting in statewide elections and then followed the lead of Stephen Douglas, whom the legislature had appointed secretary of state and who urged the legislature to expand the size of the state supreme court from four to nine. As a result of the 1840 elections, the newly constituted state legislature, with a Democratic majority, would have the power to appoint five new justices. In 1841, it did that, bringing the total number of Democratic appointees on the state supreme court to six against three remaining Whigs. Lincoln and thirty-four other Whig representatives in the state legislature denounced the scheme “as a party measure for party purposes,” which manifested “supreme contempt for the popular will.”92 Lincoln’s hand in crafting the attack is evident in the characteristic wordplay of the response, the repetition of party to underscore the clever use of supreme to ridicule what the party did. The Whigs further argued that the Democrats’ “party measure” undermined “the independence of the Judiciary, the surest shield of public welfare and private right” and set a “precedent for still more flagrant violations of right and justice.”93 (Here again was Clay-like repetition to underscore the magnitude of what was lost—not just a particular right of the people but a safeguard of all rights.)94 In April, an anonymous letter, likely written by Lincoln (it was similar in style and content to his public remarks), suggested that the bill probably passed the legislature because one member had delivered his vote in exchange for his appointment as clerk of the state supreme court.95 The letter went further to ridicule Douglas, who was one of the five new additions to the state supreme court (thereby becoming the youngest person ever appointed to the court), dubbing him a hypocrite for publicly opposing life offices but then accepting one when he was appointed.96
With the newly reconstituted supreme court to back him, the Democratic governor again fired Field. Field appealed the decision, as he had done before, but this time the court was literally stacked against him. He lost the appeal and his job.
It was not the last time that Lincoln witnessed the Democrats use their majority on the state supreme court to ratify the party’s power and agenda. In 1843, the Illinois legislature enacted a law that allowed white men who were residents but not citizens of the state to vote in state elections. The Illinois Supreme Court, including Douglas, upheld the policy, this time in a move that seemed to undercut Douglas’s and the Democrats’ earlier concerns about noncitizens voting. And this time, Lincoln objected, believing that the law was designed to make it easier for Democrats from other states to reside just long enough in Illinois to tip elections in Democrats’ favor. He argued that only citizens should be allowed to vote, but simply because he felt the Democrats were trying to manipulate elections. Broadening the entry into citizenship was consistent with Clay’s American System, an attempt to maximize the contributions people could make to the productivity of the United States. Lincoln believed that this expansion of the vote was designed for partisan purposes, not democracy and not the economy.
In later years, Lincoln rarely mentioned the threats to judicial independence posed by the partisan court stacking, but it is possible he never felt the need to do so. He agreed with one of the foundations of Jacksonian democracy, the spoils system—the practice of giving plum appointments in return for political favors and campaign donations. As New York Democratic governor William Learned Marcy baldly explained the idea in the Senate in 1832: “They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”97 It was not a new idea to give allies and friends the offices that would have gone to the opposition had it won the election, and Marcy lived by the code through three terms as governor until he finally lost reelection to an ambitious young Whig, William Seward, in 1838. Seward practiced the same philosophy as Jackson and Marcy, distributing rewards to patrons and friends when he came into power, just as Lincoln himself would try to do when the time came.
VII
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The 1841–1842 session was Lincoln’s fourth and last full term as a representative in the Illinois House. He had a few good reasons for leaving the legislature. The first was that his chances for reelection were becoming increasingly slim. The success of the Democratic Party in Illinois, built on Jackson’s popularity and appeal as the champion of the working man, along with some popular policies, such as ending the national bank, likely accounted for the Whigs’ and Lincoln’s dwindling margins of victory. Aside from riding a wave of support resulting from its policy of allowing resident aliens to vote in state elections, Lincoln and his fellow Whig legislators were running out of ways to help the state avoid insolvency from paying for all the internal improvements that they had gotten the state legislature previously to approve. Lincoln’s support in each election was less than in the previous one, and there was no reason to think the trend would reverse.
In leaving the state legislature, Lincoln was following the lead of his former partner and mentor John Todd Stuart, who had abandoned his seat in the Illinois House to run his congressional campaigns. Lincoln wrapped up his work in the state legislature in time to make a run for the Whig nomination for Illinois’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives, but he entered too late and lost his party’s nomination to a friend and distant cousin of Mary Todd’s, John J. Hardin.
Hardin was a popular, handsome newspaper editor, a rival to Lincoln for leadership of the Whig Party in the district. Lincoln was also indebted to him politically and personally. As Lincoln was completing his service in the statehouse, t
he Democrats and Whigs were yet again embroiled in heated argument over the fate of the national bank. James Shields, a prominent Democrat who was the state auditor, publicly weighed in against the national bank shortly after the Democrats had swept the statewide elections in 1842. In response, Lincoln followed a tack he had before, publishing anonymous letters (in this case attacking Shields) in the Sangamo Journal. As Sidney Blumenthal relates, “One of the telltale characteristics of Lincoln’s writings and speeches throughout his career was his appropriation of the rhetoric of his opponents to turn against them.”98 Lincoln had learned the technique from both Clay and Stuart, but as he soon learned, he had yet to master it. It went one step too far in the way he demeaned Shields.
Shields was greatly offended by the numerous attacks made against him in the anonymous letters. The writer insinuated that Shields supported Mormonism, a new Christian denomination whose ten thousand members had settled in Illinois after being expelled by mobs and militias from their villages in New York and Missouri because of their biblical revisionism, fervent abolitionism, amity with Native Americans, prosperity, and insularity. The letters called Shields a “fool,” a “liar,” and a bumbling lover bound to marry one of the lovely ladies making fun of him.99 Shields wanted an apology or a retraction and pressed the publisher of the Sangamo Journal to disclose the author of the offending letters. The editor relented.100 It was Lincoln.
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