Three days later, Lincoln applied for a patent, the only president ever to do so. Lincoln had long had an engineer’s curiosity about mechanical appliances. When staying with a farmer while traveling on the circuit, he delighted in getting down on the ground and inspecting from every angle a new farm implement. The impetus for this patent grew from his experience on his trip home the previous October, when his boat became stuck on a sandbar. Once back in Springfield, Lincoln built a scale model of his invention with help from Walter Davis, a mechanic with an office near Lincoln’s law office. In his application for a patent, Lincoln stated he had “invented a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steam boat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes.”
Lincoln was pleased with his new patent, but ship owners did not flock to use it. Herndon, always a bit skeptical about his partner’s idealistic schemes, reported that “the threatened revolution in steamboat architecture and navigation never came to pass.”
Lincoln remained in Washington working tirelessly on political patronage and taking part in speaking engagements in cities near Washington. He advocated a number of claims for fellow Illinois citizens with the new administration. As the only Whig congressman from Illinois, he viewed these patronage opportunities as ways to strengthen the Whig Party. Lincoln wrote many letters recommending everyone from Edward Baker for a place in the cabinet to many friends in Illinois for local offices. Despite his efforts, Lincoln bemoaned, “Not one man recommended by me has yet been appointed to any thing, little or big, except a few who had no opposition.”
The leading patronage office in Illinois was the commissioner of the General Land Office, land being the key commodity in the West. The position offered a salary of three thousand dollars per year. Initially, Lincoln lobbied for Cyrus Edwards, brother of Ninian Edwards. But Lincoln’s friend Edward Baker, now a member of Congress from Galena, had his own candidate, Don Morrison. Neither the candidates nor the sponsors could agree to compromise. Some of Lincoln’s friends suggested that he himself become the compromise candidate, but he declined. “I must not only be chaste but above suspicion.”
Finally, on March 20, 1849, Lincoln started the arduous trip home to Illinois. A chastened Lincoln arrived in Springfield on Saturday evening, March 31. His return was not greeted with the well wishes of the press and public with which he had left for Washington only sixteen months earlier. The Whigs, adhering to the rotation system, had run Lincoln’s former law partner Stephen Logan for Congress, but he had suffered a narrow defeat in his effort to become the fourth consecutive Whig to represent the Seventh Congressional District. Lincoln received plenty of blame for the defeat. Democrats murmured that Lincoln had provided “aid and comfort to the enemy.” Wiser pundits recognized that Logan’s crusty manner and lack of speaking ability did not measure up to that of Lincoln and the previous Whig candidates.
The deadlock for the Land Office position threatened to be broken when another candidate suddenly entered the contest. Justin Butter-field, a prominent Chicago attorney and ardent supporter of Clay, had contested the presidential campaign of Zachary Taylor to the end, and had not worked to build up the Whig Party in Illinois. Lincoln wondered aloud why he should now receive this patronage plum. “He is my personal friend, and is qualified to do the duties of the office but of the one hundred Illinoisians, equally well qualified, I do not know of one with less claims to it.”
Learning that Butterfield was Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing’s probable choice, and upset by the cumulative evidence that Taylor supporters were not receiving their deserved patronage positions, Lincoln decided to pursue the position for himself. He quickly orchestrated a letter-writing campaign by his friends to Secretary Ewing, even asking Mary to write letters to supporters on his behalf. He also tried to go around Ewing and appeal directly to President Taylor. But unknown to Lincoln, several Whigs in Springfield had written to Secretary Ewing criticizing Lincoln for his speech in Congress against the Mexican War, “which inflicted a deep and mischievous wound upon the Whole Whig party of the state.”
On June 10, 1849, Lincoln rushed back to Washington to lobby for the job, believing that letters sent to Ewing had somehow been withheld from President Taylor. He arrived on June 19 only to learn two days later that Taylor had followed Secretary Ewing’s recommendation and appointed Butterfield. Lincoln was devastated.
When Lincoln returned to Springfield he wrote Ewing, “I opposed the appointment of Mr. B because I believed it would be a matter of discouragement to our active, working friends here, and I opposed it for no other reason.” He told the secretary of the interior, “I never did, in any true sense, want the job for myself.”
In August 1849, Lincoln was offered a second-place prize: secretary of the Oregon Territory. He quickly wrote to Secretary of State John M. Clayton to decline the office. In September, Secretary Ewing offered him the governorship of Oregon. He took some time to consider this offer, which Mary argued against. Lincoln recognized the future power of the states forming in the Far West, but he also knew that Oregon was at that moment in the hands of Democrats, and thus he saw little future there for a Whig politician. He believed the office would mean political exile. He declined the position.
LINCOLN HAD CAMPAIGNED for the Illinois legislature by vowing to be a legislator who would faithfully advocate the beliefs and opinions of the people he represented; he was now criticized for taking a position on the Mexican War that was unrepresentative of the beliefs of the people of his district. Secretary of State Clayton and Secretary of the Interior Ewing had offered him positions he did not want and refused to give him the one position he would have accepted. Herndon would say later that when Lincoln returned to Springfield, he “determined to eschew politics from that time forward and devote himself entirely to the law.”
CHAPTER 10
As a Peacemaker the Lawyer
Has a Superior Opportunity
1849–52
PERSUADE YOUR NEIGHBORS TO COMPROMISE WHENEVER YOU CAN.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Notes for a Law Lecture ca. July 1, 1850
BRAHAM LINCOLN RETURNED TO ILLINOIS IN THE SPRING OF 1849, his single term in Congress ended by his principled but unpopular stand against the Mexican War. His only career option was to resume practicing law. Ever since 1832, when he made his first unsuccessful run for the state legislature, Lincoln had been campaigning for political office. With time now to devote to his law firm, Lincoln hoped to increase its reputation and boost his income to better support Mary and their two boys. Grant Goodrich invited him to Chicago for what might have become a lucrative law partnership, but Lincoln replied, “If [I] went to Chicago then [I] would have to sit down and Study hard—That would kill [me].” Lincoln preferred the kind of law he could practice in the federal and superior courts in Springfield, as well as the small rural communities of central Illinois’s Eighth Judicial Circuit. Years later, Lincoln would recall, “From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, [I] practiced law more assiduously than ever before.”
William Herndon had kept the firm busy during Lincoln’s time in Washington. From 1847 to 1849, Herndon used a fee book in which there was a heading: “These cases attended to since Lincoln went to Congress.” Herndon offered to share with his senior partner the fees collected for these cases, but Lincoln refused, saying that he had no right to any of these monies.
After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose and meaning of his life. In 1850, Lincoln told Herndon, “How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s country no better than if one had never lived.” Herndon noticed the marked effect the downturn in his political fortunes had upon Lincoln in these years. “It went below the skin and made a changed man of him.”
As Lincoln returned to the practice of law, he determined to continue his self-education.
He looked forward to traveling alone for hours, or even a whole day, on the open prairies, well-worn editions of Shakespeare and the Bible as his traveling companions. He found mental refreshment in the poetry of Lord Byron and Robert Burns, whose rhyming stanzas he always read aloud. At the end of each carnival-like day in court, Lincoln always found time for solitude and reflection.
As Lincoln traveled the vast physical territory of the circuit, he ventured into new intellectual territory. He bought a copy of Euclid’s Elements and set himself the task of memorizing the Greek mathematician’s six geometrical theorems. He would often study by candlelight late at night while his fellow lawyers slept.
Lincoln’s reading offered him the opportunity to go deeper into his own spirit and broader into the land of imagination. From 1849 to 1854, Lincoln would cultivate a profound interior life.
FOR MUCH OF 1849, Lincoln walked the nearly seven blocks from his home to his office in Springfield every day, sometimes arriving as early as 7 a.m. For a Whig committed to order, Lincoln kept his law office mostly in disorder. The floor was never clean. John H. Littlefield, who studied law with Lincoln during this time, discovered while attempting to clean the office that a variety of discarded fruit seeds had sprouted in the dirt and dust. Attorney Henry C. Whitney described the windows in Lincoln’s office as “innocent of water and the scrubman since creation’s dawn or the settlement of Springfield.”
When Lincoln arrived at his office, he immediately stretched out on the worn leather couch, the central piece of furniture in the room. It was too small for his large frame, so he would put one foot on a chair and the other on a table nearby. Once positioned, Lincoln began to read the newspapers—always out loud, no matter who was present. Lincoln’s reading aloud annoyed Herndon. Once, when Herndon asked his senior partner why he read aloud, Lincoln answered, “When I read aloud two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can remember it better.”
Both Lincoln and Herndon read newspapers insatiably. After returning from Washington, Lincoln subscribed to the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley’s influential national newspaper; Washington’s National Intelligencer, the great Whig newspaper; and the Chicago Tribune, founded in 1847, which advocated a Whig and Free Soil opinion on slavery. Herndon encouraged Lincoln to subscribe to several leading antislavery papers as well, including the Anti-Slavery Standard, the official weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society; and the National Era, a weekly abolitionist paper published out of Washington.
Sometimes, when Herndon pressed his antislavery views upon Lincoln, the senior partner would counter that it was important to hear the Southern side as well. As Lincoln struggled with the issue of slavery, he wanted to consider all points of view. Out of these exchanges, Lincoln decided to subscribe to several Southern newspapers. The Richmond Enquirer set the standard in Southern journalism and had become a leading voice in the surge toward secession. The Charleston Mercury espoused a fierce pro-slavery position and regularly let loose journalistic attacks on the North, especially abolitionists. These divergent newspapers became instruments for Lincoln’s thinking and brooding about slavery. “Let us have both sides at the table,” Lincoln told Herndon. “Each is entitled to its day in court.”
Lincoln delegated some of his legal research to Herndon, but the senior partner always wrote out his own pleadings. He had written many when he worked as a junior partner with John Todd Stuart, but nearly all of the pleadings for the Logan and Lincoln firm had come from Stephen Logan’s hand. Now Lincoln returned to the laborious practice of writing these long legal documents in his elegant penmanship.
The law had changed a great deal in the twelve years since Lincoln began practicing with Stuart in the spring of 1837. Formality in the courtroom began to replace the informality that had reigned during the 1830s and ’40s. Legal precedent had become ascendant over argument. Spontaneous oratory, for the most part, had been replaced by careful preparation and presentation. Instead of the clear meaning of the law applying to all cases, now the complex meaning of the law applied to specific cases.
A POPULAR SAYING in Lincoln’s day was that the Bible, Shakespeare, and Blackstone ’s Commentaries made up the foundation of any well-stocked legal library. The best lawyers in the first half of the nineteenth century were typically well versed in both literature and law. After the Civil War, the trajectory of law would point to professional training and specialization. From this perspective, some observers describe pre–Civil War lawyers as wanting in their preparation, but from another point of view we can see that they approached law from the established traditions of Western literature and religion. One can find frequent descriptions of lawyers’ eloquence in the pre–Civil War courtroom, where literary and rhetorical expression had a high value. As for Lincoln, his growing eloquence sprang not from a knowledge of legal precedent, but from his familiarity with the classic resources of the Bible, works of history and biography, and literature, especially Shakespeare.
Lincoln used Blackstone’s Commentaries as a foundation of self-education in the law.
Some lawyers who practiced with Lincoln reported his knowledge of the law was lacking. But one needs to qualify this observation by understanding both the observer and the context. Stephen Logan, Lincoln’s second partner, remembered, “Lincoln’s knowledge of law was very small when I took him in,” but, of course, this recollection came from a man who wanted to be remembered for helping tutor the young Lincoln. Judge David Davis, who would become one of Lincoln’s best friends out on the circuit in the 1850s, offered a more balanced assessment. Lincoln may not have been a meticulous student of the law but, when pressed by necessity, he used the available sources of legal information. Davis said, “Sometimes Lincoln studied things, if he could not get the rubbish of a case removed.” In many ways Lincoln approached the practice of law in a way typical of the busy lawyers who traveled the large judicial circuits in frontier states.
When Lincoln did need to brush up on the law, he would walk across the street to use the resources of the Illinois Supreme Court Library housed in the statehouse. He also relied on published digests containing summaries of important cases. The United States Digest covered cases from both state and federal courts; the Illinois Digest was also a fast and reliable tool for researching cases.
TWICE A YEAR, in the spring and fall, Lincoln traveled more than five hundred miles for a cycle of the Eighth Judicial Circuit. The circuit, which expanded and contracted during this time, stretched across an area of nearly fifteen thousand square miles, larger than the state of Connecticut. Lincoln’s schedule was the exception to that of other lawyers of his day: Most practiced law in only a few counties surrounding their hometown and office.
Lincoln enjoyed the itinerant lifestyle of a circuit lawyer. When he rejoined the circuit in the fall of 1849 for the first time after leaving Congress, he switched from traveling by horseback to a buggy pulled by his horse “Old Buck,” who had seen better days. Instead of saddlebags, he now carried his legal papers, a few books, and an extra shirt in a carpetbag. On September 17, 1849, he bought a large cotton umbrella for seventy-five cents as protection from the Illinois weather. He had his name sewed inside with white thread and tied the umbrella together with twine to keep it from flying open.
Lincoln had grown up in the forests of Indiana, but he became enthralled by the endless prairies of Illinois. The prairies were a striking mixture of blue stem, Indian, and Canadian white rye grasses. By summer’s end, they were a foot higher than Lincoln’s head. As the Indian summer of late September gave way to October’s cooler nights, the prairies turned from green to tawny and vermilion. Black-eyed Susans, goldenrod, and sawtooth sunflowers came into final bloom, thriving not simply from the fall rains, but also from the rich subsoil beneath the prairies. In the woodlands, the foliage of red and white oaks blazed orange and dark purple in the last days of October and early November. The prairies were wondrously silent, with only the voice of an owl or
a fox to break Lincoln’s solitude.
For all of their beauty, however, the prairies could be treacherous. The weather was always changing. By October, Lincoln had to be prepared for thunderstorms, winds, and sleeting snow, which could turn the roads into rivers of mud. Fire, generated by just a spark in the autumn’s tall grass, could roar across the prairies with tremendous speed, overtaking travelers and destroying farms. Blizzards could suddenly blow out of the north and produce drifts that could kill man and beast.
Nonetheless, after spending sixteen months in the nation’s capital, Lincoln seemed to relish traveling the byways of the Eighth Judicial Circuit. The circuit was growing in population and offered new legal opportunities as well as friendships. He set to work reestablishing old relationships and making new ones that would become key to regaining his prominence as a lawyer, as well as to his future reentry into politics.
Lincoln was especially eager to see Judge David Davis again. Lincoln had first met lawyer Davis in 1835. While Lincoln served in Congress, the legislature had elected Davis judge of the Eighth Circuit. Born on his grandfather’s plantation in Sassafras Neck on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1815, Davis had graduated from Kenyon College, in the interior of Ohio, in 1832. One of his classmates was Edwin M. Stanton, a young man from Steubenville, Ohio, who suffered from asthma.
After graduation, Davis worked in the law office of Henry W. Bishop in Lenox, in western Massachusetts. In 1835 he decided to travel west to practice law. After first settling in Pekin, Illinois, he moved twenty-five miles east to Bloomington, a town of 450 residents built north of a large grove of trees known as Blooming Grove.
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