Judge David Davis would become one of Lincolns closest legal and political friends.
Lincoln differed from Davis in many ways. Judge Davis, a congenial aristocrat, dressed immaculately. By the time Lincoln began traveling with Davis on the Eighth Circuit, the judge, five feet eleven inches tall, weighed nearly three hundred pounds; Lincoln’s six-foot-four-inch frame carried less than two hundred pounds. Davis’s huge size made it impossible for him to share a bed with Lincoln in hotels. He was so large he had to ride about the circuit in a buggy drawn by not one but two gray mares.
Despite these superficial differences, Davis formed a highly favorable opinion of Lincoln. In a letter Davis said, “Lincoln is the best Stump Speaker in the State.” During the 1850s the lives and careers of Abraham Lincoln and Judge David Davis would intertwine repeatedly as they traveled from court to court in the small towns of central Illinois.
IN THE FALL OF 1849, Lincoln met Leonard Swett, a new lawyer on the circuit. Originally from Maine and a veteran of the Mexican War, Swett began practicing law in 1849 in Clinton, Illinois, a small town not far from Bloomington. A tall, erect man with a bright, intelligent face, he started traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit just as Lincoln returned to it.
In October 1849, they met for the first time in front of the Greek Revival courthouse in Mount Pulaski. Immediately Swett, sixteen years younger, and Lincoln formed a friendship that would last sixteen years.
That fall, Lincoln, Davis, and Swett formed what the lawyers on the circuit would call “the great triumvirate,” an homage to Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. Enjoying one another’s company, they traveled everywhere together and often stayed in the same hotel rooms. Other lawyers admired their abilities and chuckled at their invariable high jinks and humor. This triumvirate would not only become significant in the legal courts of central Illinois, but one day in political circles in Illinois and beyond.
WHILE THERE HAVE always been many lawyers who became politicians, Lincoln was one of the few politicians who later became a lawyer. Lincoln was a Whig in the statehouse before he became a Whig in the courthouse. He brought to the practice of the law a constellation of Whig ideas.
As a first principle, Whigs believed in order. Lincoln thought that the nation could not modernize and expand so long as lawlessness and violence remained prevalent in society. As a Whig, Lincoln was convinced that laws could be used to build a political and social framework. Lincoln also embraced the Whig idea of government serving as a protector of community ideals and moral values.
Lincoln’s politics were not of the cut-flower variety, which bloomed only for the moment; rather, they grew from the deep soil of tradition. In the 1850s, he referred more and more in his speeches and writings to the ideas of the nation’s founders—especially George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—citing them as precedents for the problems and possibilities of his own day.
Lincoln was also coming to believe that every generation needed to redefine America for its own time. Back in 1838, in his speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, he had declared that the role of his generation was quite limited—they were to “transmit” the ideas and institutions of the founders to their own and future generations. But by the 1850s, Lincoln was beginning to arrive at a creative balance—often a creative tension—between past traditions and the new and different possibilities of the present and future.
AS LINCOLN TRAVELED THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT, he kept abreast of the political events in Washington. He applauded the efforts of Senator Henry Clay, who in January 1850 was busy cobbling together a series of measures to ease the growing tensions between the North and the South. The seventy-year-old Clay had introduced eight resolutions proposing “an amicable arrangement of all questions in controversy between the free and slave states, growing out of slavery.” Clay hoped his resolutions, which would become known as the Compromise of 1850, would promote “a great national scheme of compromise and harmony.”
Clay’s initiatives produced high drama. His two celebrated senior colleagues, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, also at the end of their years of service, determined to respond.
On March 4, 1850, Calhoun, sixty-seven, sat at his Senate desk, too weak to speak, coughing incessantly, as the last major speech of his life was read by Virginia senator James M. Mason. In the speech, Calhoun asked, “How can the Union be preserved?” and then followed with a second question, “How has the Union been endangered?” He answered both questions by rehearsing how first the Northwest Ordinance and then the Missouri Compromise had kept Southern interests out of Western territories and states. Calhoun declared that the spiritual cords that bound the nation together had already been broken in the recent divisions of three leading Protestant denominations—Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian. He saw this separation as a dire trend and wondered whether the political cords would be severed also. He warned against further compromise.
Three days later, Calhoun returned to the Senate to hear Daniel Webster speak in favor of Clay’s resolutions. Expectations reverberated throughout Washington, and all the seats in the Senate chamber were filled, with people sitting in the aisles. Webster began, “I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American.” He declared, “I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union.” He then surprised his audience by chastising abolitionists and declaring that he could never support the Wilmot Proviso, which would keep slavery out of any territory acquired from Mexico. In the end, he supported each of Clay’s proposals, including the strengthening of the fugitive slave law.
Even from afar, Lincoln understood that the Compromise of 1850 was only a temporary truce. Each of the Compromise’s planks had been acrimoniously debated. California would enter the Union as a free state. The territories of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah would be organized without a declaration about slavery, leaving it to the citizens to decide. The slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in Washington and the District of Columbia. The Compromise settled a boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico. In the deepest bow to the South, which had not received another slave state in the deal, the Compromise amended the old Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 to require citizens to assist in recapturing runaway slaves and denying those slaves a jury trial.
Although it held the nation together, the Compromise of 1850 satisfied no one. Abolitionists only increased their efforts to end slavery once and for all. Conductors on the Underground Railroad stepped up their activities so that between 1850 and 1860 more than twenty thousand slaves traveled from farms to safe houses along the track from the United States to Canada. The new fugitive slave law instituted a reign of terror with free blacks being detained and sent to the South without trial. Many Southerners were extremely dissatisfied as well, arguing that Clay, the Great Compromiser, had sold out his native South.
For three old actors—Clay, Calhoun, and Webster—the debate on the Compromise of 1850 would be their last curtain call in the Senate. Calhoun died on March 31, 1850, before the debate ended. Clay and Webster would both die in the next two years. The vexing issue of slavery, if temporarily defused, would be left to the will and wiles of America’s next generation to resolve. Far away from the Washington stage, Lincoln read reports of the Compromise of 1850 in the Congressional Globe and in his regular diet of newspapers, but made no public comment.
IN THE SUMMER of 1850, Lincoln started taking notes for a lecture on the law and lawyers. Although there is no record of Lincoln ever delivering this lecture, the ideas expressed in the notes reveal his self-understanding of his profession.
“I am not an accomplished lawyer,” Lincoln began with self-deprecation. He confessed, “I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points where I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.” Lincoln here gave voice to a principle—the willingness to both admit mistakes and learn from them—that was becoming a part of his moral character.
He believed “the leading rule” for any lawyer was “diligence.” Lincoln counseled, “Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done today. … Whatever piece of business you have in hand, before stopping, do all the labor pertaining to it which can then be done.” He advised lawyers preparing a common-law suit to “write the declaration at once.”
Lincoln also offered a brief on the utility of public speaking. “It is the lawyer’s avenue to the public. Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated.” Though he recognized that there were many qualities of a successful lawyer, he believed this one virtue trumped all others. “However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.”
At the heart of his lecture was a definition of his understanding of the calling of a lawyer. “As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.” Here Lincoln offered his most practical advice: “Discourage litigation.” Life in the frontier states was marked by disputes. Rural and townsfolk were ready to “go to law” over the least aggravation. Lincoln’s counsel: “Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often the real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time.” At this point, Lincoln seems to anticipate a question from his imagined audience: Is not litigation the very source of a lawyer’s business and fees? He answers, “There will still be business enough.”
LINCOLN UNDERSTOOD HIS ROLE as a lawyer to be a mediator in the various small communities in which he practiced law. Abram Bale, who moved to the New Salem area from Kentucky in 1839, hired Lincoln in February 1850 to represent him in a dispute with the Hickox brothers over $1,000 of “good, merchantable, superfine flour.” Lincoln, drawing upon both his farming and storekeeping experience, argued that the twenty barrels of flour were not fairly characterized; they were instead inferior in quality. He knew he had a good case, but in the midst of the proceedings he counseled his client to settle. “I sincerely hope you will settle it. I think you can if you will, for I have always found Mr. Hickox a fair man in his dealings.” Lincoln then told Bale, “I will charge nothing for what I have done, and thank you to boot.” He further encouraged his client, “By settling, you will most likely get your money sooner; and with much less trouble and expense.”
Lincoln was a mediator more than a prosecutor. Just as in his speeches he was sensitive to the attitudes and questions of his audiences, in the courtrooms of the Eighth Judicial Circuit he worked hard to understand the motives and attitudes of clients, witnesses, and judges. He was responsive to the differing local contexts in which he practiced. He was often the only lawyer who stayed out on the circuit over the course of an entire fall and spring cycle. Lodging in homes, he shared folks’ leisure time on the weekends and learned their concerns, struggles, and questions. In his understanding of the lawyer as mediator, Lincoln recognized that cases that at first glance seemed to be between two persons almost always involved the whole community in these small towns. His active presence in these communities gave Lincoln both a standing and sensitivity to local institutions and sentiments. Even though justice was universal, Lincoln appreciated that in crucial ways law was local.
In the spring of 1850 the Illinois Citizen in Danville captured both Lincoln’s abilities and his growing reputation as a lawyer.
In his examination of witnesses, he displays a masterly ingenuity … that baffles concealment and defies deceit. And in addressing a jury, there is no false glitter, no sickly sentimental-ism to be discovered. In vain we look for rhetorical display. … Seizing upon the minutest points, he weaves them into his argument with an ingenuity really astonishing. … Bold, forcible and energetic, he forces conviction upon the mind, and, by his clearness and conciseness, stamps it there, not to be erased. … Such are some of the qualities that place Mr. L. at the head of the profession in this State.
Lincoln practiced law as a peacemaker. His early cases concerned individuals, not companies or corporations. Whether about hogs, cooking stoves, land, or slander, they almost always involved persons who knew each other face-to-face and had got crossways.
The reason Lincoln urged so many of his clients to settle was that he knew these people needed to go on living next to one another in their small villages and towns after they had their day in court. The skills he was developing as a lawyer—especially the subtle art of mediation—would one day soon be put to use on a much larger circuit.
WITH LINCOLN SPENDING more and more time traveling, his life as a lawyer, a politician, and a family man teetered out of balance. Politics, for the moment, had diminished while his legal practice had become all consuming. Any hopes that Mary may have had that Abraham would be home more often now that he was back from Washington were soon dashed. In 1850, his first full year home, Lincoln was away from Springfield 175 days.
Mary bore these absences as one who felt abandoned. At age six, she had lost her mother. One year later, her father had married a woman to whom Mary never grew close. For much of Mary’s childhood her father was absent, often away on business or politics.
She dealt with her sense of desertion and loss by focusing intently on her children. Whereas family manuals from this period advised nursing children for up to ten months, Mary nursed each of her boys for nearly two years. One of the boys always slept with her, whether or not Lincoln was home. With no nurse and no grandparents nearby, Mary raised her children almost as a single mother.
And then death tumbled in. In July 1849, just as the family was returning from Washington, Mary’s father, Robert Todd, died suddenly of cholera while campaigning for the Kentucky Senate. Five months later, little Eddie Lincoln, age three and a half, fell ill. Mary nursed the boy through December and January, but the medical practice of the day could do little to combat what was probably pulmonary tuberculosis. After fifty-two days of suffering, Eddie Lincoln died at 6 a.m. on February 1, 1850.
The death of Eddie brought tremendous sadness to both Abraham and Mary. The Lincoln home was filled with the sound of Mary weeping. She probably did not go to the cemetery, where she might break down, for the convention of the time dictated that women grieve in private. Everything we know about Mary suggests that Eddie’s death struck a tremendous blow to her sense of self and her stability.
How Lincoln responded to the death of his young son is more difficult to determine. Herndon reported that Lincoln sank deep into melancholy. A friend recalled Lincoln trying to comfort Mary by entreating her, “Eat, Mary, for we must live.” Three weeks after Eddie’s death, Lincoln wrote, “We miss him very much.”
IMMEDIATELY AFTER EDDIE’S DEATH, Abraham and Mary attempted to contact the man who had married them, Reverend Charles Dresser of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where Mary worshipped, to ask him to conduct the funeral service. Unfortunately, Dresser was out of town.
And so the Lincolns turned to the Reverend James Smith, the new minister at Springfield’s First Presbyterian Church. The funeral service was held at the Lincolns’ home at 11 a.m. on February 2. Both before and after the funeral, Smith brought pastoral care and comfort to the grieving parents.
Less than two years later, Mary joined First Presbyterian, a congregation founded in 1828 that had first met in the home of her uncle John Todd. In joining First Presbyterian, Mary reconnected with the Presbyterian church she had attended as a girl in Lexington. She became a member on October 13, 1852, “by examination.” The ruling elders of the congregation heard her narrative of faith, what they called in the session minutes “experimental religion.” The Lincolns rented pew number twenty in the seventh row for an annual fee of fifty dollars.
Originally from Scotland, the Reverend James Smith immigrated to the United States as a young man who was a confirmed deist, having read Constantin Volney and Thomas Paine. He took pleasure in challenging the religious ideas of camp-meeting preachers near his home in southern Indiana. But upon listening to the preaching of a Cumberland Presbyterian Church minister, Smith was c
onverted. He was licensed to preach in 1825.
Smith wrote The Christian’s Defence in 1843. The book grew out of his debates with a popular freethinker, Charles G. Olmstead, over eighteen successive evenings in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1841. Smith defended the authority and truthfulness of the Old and New Testaments. In critiquing contemporary deviations from true faith, he was concerned that “the exercises of the understanding must be separated from the tendencies of the fancy, or of the heart,” a reference to the emotional, revivalist faith from which he was just then emerging.
Smith’s increasing intention to embrace a more rational faith gradually led him to the Presbyterian Church in 1844. He was called to First Presbyterian Church in Springfield in the spring of 1849, less than one year before the death of Eddie Lincoln. In October 1849, after the death of Mary’s father, the Lincolns traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, to help settle her father’s estate. While browsing in the library at the Todd home, Lincoln came across Smith’s 650-page treatise.
When Lincoln met Smith in Springfield, around the time of Eddie’s death, he either asked for or was offered a copy of The Christian’s Defence. Robert Lincoln remembered that a copy of Smith’s book sat on the bookshelf in the Lincoln home at Eighth and Jackson. Smith’s logical presentation of the Christian faith must have appealed to Lincoln’s penchant for order and reason. Put off by the emotionalism of the revivalist religion of his youth, Lincoln would have likely agreed with Smith’s proposal that when pondering religion “the mind must be trained to the hardihood of abstract and unfeeling intelligence.” Smith contended that in matters of faith “everything must be given up to the supremacy of argument.”
In the early 1850s, Lincoln attended First Presbyterian Church infrequently. He was away traveling on the Eighth Circuit each fall and spring, in addition to other travels as a lawyer and politician. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1853, Lincoln accepted an invitation to be one of three lawyers to represent the church in a suit in the Sangamon Presbytery.
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