Realizing that they could not raise a family in a hotel room, the Lincolns began looking for a house of their own, but money was scarce. Lincoln no longer had his salary from the legislature, and his income from his law practice had diminished during the final months of his partnership with Stuart. Joining with Logan opened the prospect of a brighter future, but it offered no immediate increase in Lincoln’s income. He was probably still paying off some of the debts he had accumulated during his New Salem days, and he felt obliged to contribute to the support of his father and stepmother, who were now settled in Coles County, on an unprofitable homestead called Goosenest Prairie.
The best the Lincolns could do was to rent a small, three-room frame house on South Fourth Street, to which they moved in the fall of 1843. There Robert S. Todd, Mary’s father, found them shortly before Christmas, when he came to visit his four daughters who lived in Springfield and to inspect his newest grandchild and namesake. Todd took a great liking to his son-in-law, who was already representing him in a highly technical case before the Sangamon County Circuit Court involving some Illinois lands Todd had purchased. Todd was obviously touched by the meagerness of Mary’s surroundings and without comment dropped a gold piece in her hand. Afterward he arranged for her to receive $120 a year for the rest of his lifetime—a considerable sum, which would more than cover the cost of hiring a maid at $1.50 a week. Todd also deeded to the Lincolns—as he did to each of his other married Springfield daughters and their husbands—eighty acres of Illinois land.
By 1844 the Lincolns felt able to buy a home of their own, and they purchased a cottage on the corner of Eighth and Jackson streets owned by the Reverend Charles Dresser, the Episcopal minister who had married them. It was small, to be sure. On the ground floor there were three rooms—a parlor, a sitting room, and a kitchen; in the half loft above, there were two bedrooms, but the ceilings under the sloping roof slanted so that there was only a small area, about four feet wide, in which Lincoln could stand erect. Over the kitchen there was an attic used for storage or as a maid’s room. The downstairs rooms were heated by fireplaces and there were wood-burning stoves in the upstairs bedrooms. Of course, there was no gas or electric light. Water came from a cistern and a well in the backyard. A latrine near the back fence offered the only sanitary facilities. Despite its limitations, it was a sturdy, well-built house, and the Lincolns thought it worth every penny of what it cost—$1,200, plus a town lot on Adams Street, which Lincoln owned, valued at $300.
II
Running a household required money, and Lincoln set about earning it with greater energy than he had ever before demonstrated. A few years later, in notes he prepared for a lecture on the legal profession, he began, “The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man, of every calling, is diligence.” He was speaking from experience. He worked incessantly, handling virtually every kind of business that could come before a prairie lawyer.
In the early months of his partnership with Stephen T. Logan, he spent much of his time in appearances before the United States District Court under the Bankruptcy Act, which went into effect on February 1, 1842. Designed to allow businessmen to escape some of the losses brought about by the unrelenting depression, the act permitted federal judges to declare petitioners bankrupt if their debts were greater than their assets. Of the 1,742 applicants in Illinois, nearly all employed lawyers. Before the law was repealed in 1843, Logan & Lincoln handled 77 of these cases—a number exceeded by only three other firms in the entire state. In most of these cases, which generally were uncontested, they earned fees of $10.
Though bankruptcy cases provided a welcome source of income during the first year of Lincoln’s marriage, most of his earnings came from office work, like drafting wills and petitions, from petty suits before the justices of the peace or county commissioners, and especially from actions before the Sangamon County Circuit Court. On a single day at fall term of that court in November 1842, for instance, Logan & Lincoln had seventeen cases. They represented Thomas W. Sparks in his suit against Henry and Thomas Bird, who, he claimed, unlawfully withheld the possession of 106 acres of land; they appeared in behalf of John R. Herndon, administrator of the estate of John Wilson, who complained that one Seth Cutter failed to pay $220 for goods he had purchased; they obtained a divorce for John Jackson from his wife, Maria; and so on and on.
Business was so good that the partners could afford to leave their crowded quarters on North Fifth Street and move to the premier business location in Springfield, the newly constructed Tinsley Building, on the southwest corner of Sixth and Adams streets. The post office occupied the ground floor, and the United States District Court, before which both Logan and Lincoln frequently appeared, was on the second floor. Their office was just above it, in a front room overlooking both the state capitol and the county courthouse.
Billy Herndon, who was studying law with Logan and Lincoln, described how Lincoln dealt with a prospective client. He would listen to the man’s story “well—patiently, occasionally now and then breaking in as the story progressed by asking a question: the man would answer it, and then he would proceed and end his story.” After the man had finished, Lincoln would often say: “I am not exactly satisfied about some point—Come into the office in an hour or so, and I will give you my opinion—a positive one.” When the client returned, Lincoln might say, “You are in the right,” and they would proceed to draw up the papers leading to a suit. But he might also tell the client: “You are in the wrong of the case and I would advise you to compromise,... do not bring a suit on the facts of your case, because you are in the wrong.”
Lincoln learned much from Logan, unquestionably the leading figure in the Sangamon County bar. Nine years older than Lincoln, Logan had made a name for himself as commonwealth’s attorney in his native Kentucky before moving to Illinois, where his merits were so promptly recognized that he was elected circuit court judge. In that position he had certified Lincoln’s enrollment in the Sangamon County bar in 1837. Unhappy over the meager compensation given judges, he resigned and returned to private practice with Edward D. Baker, a spellbinding orator who could mesmerize juries. Logan’s sharp analytical mind and his knowledge of legal precedents and technicalities made him a formidable opponent in the courtroom. But his harsh, cracked voice kept him from becoming an effective public speaker, and juries were often put off by his wizened figure and his wrinkled countenance, topped by a mass of frowzy hair.
It was to compensate for these deficiencies that, after the breakup of his partnership with Baker, Logan turned to Lincoln, thinking, as he said later, he would be “exceedingly useful to me in getting the good will of juries.” Lincoln’s years as a surveyor and his service in the state legislature had given him a wide range of acquaintances. It was hard to find anyone in Sangamon County who did not recognize his lanky figure, and his remarkable memory enabled him to identify by name, residence, and family connections nearly every person called to jury duty.
In the courtroom Lincoln maintained that personal connection, seeming to speak to each juror individually and in a conversational tone. He rarely used technical language, and he was a master of the homespun anecdote to illustrate his point. In a McLean County case where a physician claimed that a man charged with murder was insane, evidencing that he frequently picked at his head, Lincoln, appearing for the state, skillfully deflated the doctor’s testimony. “Now,” he remarked, “I sometimes pick my head, and those joking fellows at Springfield tell me that there may be a living, moving cause for it, and that the trouble isn’t at all on the inside. It’s only a case for fine-tooth combs.”
He knew the importance of an effective summing-up statement. In a lecture prepared for young lawyers he advised: “Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer’s avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business, if he cannot make a speech.” But he also knew that lawyers could not make “a more fatal error..., tha
n relying too much on speech-making,” instead of looking up precedents and logically examining the evidence. In his concluding remarks to a jury he usually spoke from a short but carefully prepared outline, and he avoided the flowery pastures of rhetoric into which he had strayed in his lyceum and temperance lectures. As he warned Herndon: “Billy, don’t shoot too high—aim lower and the common people will understand you. They are the ones you want to reach.”
To Logan’s surprise, Lincoln proved to be much more than a courtroom litigator. Up to this point his knowledge of the law was, as Logan recalled, “very small,” for he had largely imitated Stuart, who “never went much upon the law.” But now he “began to pick up a considerable ambition in the law.” Observing the care and precision with which his senior partner drafted his pleadings, Lincoln sought to make his own equally succinct and correct. On occasion, he would seek Logan’s advice on technical points. Very early in the partnership, representing the plaintiff in a slander case, Lincoln drew up a declaration charging that the defendant had called his client “a damned rogue.” Reviewing the document, Logan recognized that the words, though offensive, were not legally significant and inserted the necessary formula: “And the plaintiff... says that the Defendant thereby meant and intended to charge the plaintiff with the crime of Larceny and that he was so understood by those who heard him.”
Mostly, though, Lincoln learned by reading. Logan’s example taught him that there was more to the law than common sense and simple equity, and he began studying procedures and precedents. The partners had no considerable law library of their own, but after the Illinois Supreme Court moved into its quarters in the statehouse in 1841, attorneys had access to an excellent collection of legal reports and standard reference works.
Lincoln never did become a devoted reader of general texts or theoretical books on the law. Years later Herndon claimed that Lincoln “never thoroughly read any elementary law book. In fact... I never knew him to read through and through any law book of any kind.” The charge was largely true. “I cannot read generally. I never read text books for I have no particular motive to drive and whip me to it,” Lincoln explained. “I don’t, and can’t remember such reading.” But Herndon’s remark was really beside the point, for Lincoln spent night after night in the Supreme Court Library, searching out precedents that applied to the cases he was working on. This was work he enjoyed. “When I have a particular case in hand,” he explained, “I... love to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind.” Logan’s final judgment on Lincoln’s legal accomplishments was more perceptive than Herndon’s: “I don’t think he studied very much. I think he learned his law more in the study of cases.... He got to be a pretty good lawyer though his general knowledge of law was never very formidable. But he would study out his case and make about as much of it as anybody.”
Lincoln’s growing mastery of the law became evident in his increasingly frequent appearances before the Illinois Supreme Court. In his earliest ventures before the high court he based his case on the hairsplitting technicalities of which young lawyers are so often fond. In 1841, for instance, he represented a man named Amos Worthing, who had won a verdict in the Tazewell County Circuit Court, which his opponent, Jacob Maus, appealed. The law required Maus to post an appeal bond—a document guaranteeing that he would pay the costs of the appeal if he lost. The bond was supposed to be “under seal.” In earlier days signatures on such legal documents had been attested by the impression of a signet ring in sealing wax, but by the 1840s a signer merely made a vaguely circular scrawl, looking something like a child’s drawing of a puffy cloud, under his name. Discovering that Maus’s surety had carelessly failed to add such a scrawl below his signature, Lincoln asked the supreme court to dismiss the case. A majority of the judges agreed, to the dismay of Justice Sidney Breese, who dissented: “The rule ... seems to me to be destitute of any good reason on which to base it, and altogether too technical for this age.”
In subsequent years Lincoln had many more cases before the Illinois Supreme Court, but, perhaps through Logan’s influence, they less and less frequently depended on such technicalities. He came to feel very much at home in this court, where, as Herndon said, an attorney had “ample time to read the record and gather up the facts of the case—the issues and the law arising thereon.” The court required attorneys to prepare “abstracts of the case ... stating the facts in a condensed form and the issues made thereby.” The supreme court limited oral arguments and made its decisions largely on the basis of these written briefs, which were sometimes elaborate, with extensive citations of precedents. In preparing his presentations for the court, Lincoln took nothing for granted and frequently offered precedents that stretched back to the beginnings of English common law. When Herndon asked why he went to so much trouble, he responded: “I dare not trust this case on presumptions that this court knows all things. I argued the case on the presumption that the court did not know any thing.” His care and thoroughness made him one of the most successful practitioners before the court, and by the time he left for Washington in 1861 he had appeared before the highest court in Illinois in at least three hundred cases.
III
In the fall of 1844, Logan and Lincoln decided to dissolve their highly successful partnership. The senior partner told Lincoln that he wanted to go into business with his son, David Logan, and Lincoln did not argue with his decision. Perhaps he was not satisfied to receive less than half the income from the partnership; perhaps he realized that his political aspirations must clash with those of Logan, since both wanted to go to Congress. But there were no hard words as the partners decided, as Logan said, to go their ways “amicably and in friendship.” The severance was not an abrupt one. Logan and Lincoln continued to appear together in the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, and their professional notice ran in the Sangamo Journal until March 1845. They continued to join forces on important cases throughout the remaining years of Lincoln’s practice.
Lincoln took a new partner. One fall morning in 1844 he came dashing up the stairs to the third floor of the Tinsley Building, where he found William H. Herndon busily studying. “Billy,” he asked breathlessly, “do you want to enter into partnership with me in the law business?” Herndon managed to stammer, “Mr. Lincoln this is something unexpected by me—it is an undeserved honor; and yet I say I will gladly and thankfully accept the kind and generous offer.” Sensing that the young man was flustered with gratitude, Lincoln remarked easily, “Billy, I can trust you, if you can trust me,” and the partnership came into being.
Many found the new partnership puzzling. Now an established, prominent lawyer, Lincoln could have had his pick of distinguished Illinois attorneys. Herndon heard that John Todd Stuart very much wanted to renew his association with Lincoln and was resentful when a beginner was chosen instead. Lincoln left no record of his reasons, but it is clear that he was tired of being a junior partner and wanted to head his own firm. He was already attracting all the business he could handle, so that he did not need a partner with a name to draw in clients. He thought Herndon had considerable promise as a lawyer. He had watched him read law for two or three years in the office of Logan & Lincoln and found him “a laborious, studious young man... far better informed on almost all subjects than I have been.”
There were also political reasons behind his choice of Herndon. Lincoln aspired to go to Congress, but the Whig party in central Illinois was split into two distinct factions. In the past, leadership had come from the eminently respectable Stuarts and Edwardses, few in number but rich in family tradition, but the majority of the Whig voters were now “self made men—men who had power,” scorned the older leadership, and wanted a hand in shaping party policy. Lincoln needed the support of both factions. Marriage to the elegant Mary Todd gave him a connection to the silk-stocking element of the party, but the “shrewd, wild boys about town” favored the enormously popular Edward D. Baker. Recognizing that Herndon was
a leader of this populist element in the party, Lincoln chose him as partner in part to give a signal to the insurgent young Whigs that he had not deserted them.
More important than any of these calculations was an essential fact: Lincoln really liked Herndon. He respected Stuart and he admired Logan, but for neither of them did he have genuine affection. Toward Herndon, however, he had an almost paternal feeling, and Herndon, in turn, gave him absolute and unquestioning loyalty. During the long years of their partnership he always addressed Herndon, nine years his junior, as “Billy,” while Herndon invariably called him “Mr. Lincoln.”
There was much to like about this new partner. He bubbled over with ideas and enthusiasm. He longed to be part of the larger intellectual world, and, though he had been born in Kentucky, he wrote that he steadily “turned New Englandwards for my ideas—my sentiments—my education.” He developed an unmanageable appetite for books. A credulous law student believed that “in addition to all his professional reading, Mr. Herndon read every year more new books in history, pedagogy, medicine, theology, and general literature, than all the teachers, doctors, and ministers in Springfield put together.” On his shelves were authors almost unknown in the Mississippi Valley—Kant, Renan, Fichte, Buckle, Froude. Perhaps he did not always understand what he read, but he learned enough to become a kind of frontier evangelist for transcendentalism, that Emersonian faith that the questioning heart could, without mediation of religion or authority, discern truth. He prided himself on his “mud instinct,” his “dog sagacity,” which enabled him to see “to the gizzard” of questions. What he saw encouraged him to believe in illimitable progress, and he greeted the unseen with a cheer: “The Struggles of this age and succeeding ages for God and man—Religion—Humanity and Liberty ... may they triumph and Conquer forever, is my ardent wish and most fervent soul-prayer.”
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