He and Lincoln were in almost every way exact opposites. Lincoln was tall, slow-moving, and careless in dress; Herndon was short, quick, and something of a dandy, affecting patent-leather shoes and kid gloves. Lincoln was melancholy, his depressed moods interrupted by outbursts of antic humor; Herndon was always upbeat and optimistic, and he had no sense of humor at all. The senior partner disliked generalities, and his mind cautiously moved in logical progression from one fact to the next, while his junior leapt ahead, using intuition to arrive at his conclusions.
Once when Herndon urged his partner to talk faster and with more energy when addressing a jury, Lincoln replied by graphically illustrating the difference between his mind and his partner’s. “Give me your woman’s little knife with its short twin blades, and give me that old jack knife lieing [sic] over there,” he told Herndon. Then he opened the short blades of the small knife and said: “See here it opens quickly and at the point travels through but a small portion of space—but see this long bladed jack knife: it opens slowly and its points travel through a greater distance of space than your little knife: it moves slower than your little knife, but it can do more execution.” “Just so with these long convolutions of my brain,” Lincoln added; “they have to act slowly—pass as it were through a greater space than shorter convolutions that snap off quickly I am compelled by nature to speak slowly. I commence way back like the boys do when they want to get a good start. My weight and speed get momentum to jump far.”
The new partners occupied a room in the Tinsley Building, and Herndon took the lead in buying desks, a table, and some basic books, at a cost of $168.65, half of which was charged to his partner. It remained wretchedly bare. Gibson W. Harris, a student in the law office, described it: “The furniture, somewhat dilapidated, consisted of one small desk and a table, a sofa or lounge with a raised head at one end, and a half-dozen plain wooden chairs. The floor was never scrubbed.... Over the desk a few shelves had been enclosed; this was the office bookcase holding a set of Blackstone, Kent’s Commentaries, Chitty’s Pleadings, and a few other books.”
At the outset it was not an equal partnership. Lincoln interviewed most of the clients, wrote the important legal papers, and pleaded the suits in court. Herndon, still the student and the learner, performed routine jobs; he answered inquiries as to Lincoln’s whereabouts or “‘toated books’ and ’hunted up authorities’” for the senior partner’s use. It was also his responsibility to manage the office, preserve the records, and keep the files straight. As Lincoln later told Henry C. Whitney, a fellow lawyer in Urbana, he supposed that Herndon “had system and would keep things in order.”
His hope was misplaced, for Herndon was not an orderly person. It is doubtful, though, that anyone could have kept Lincoln’s papers in order. The firm had no filing cabinets and no files. In one corner of the office was a bundle of papers with a note in Lincoln’s handwriting: “When you can’t find it anywhere else, look in this.” Herndon sometimes took legal papers home, where they were lost. Lincoln frequently stuck documents and correspondence in his stovepipe hat, which Herndon said was “his desk and his memorandum-book.” As a result the partners were constantly looking for misplaced letters and documents, and there were times when they had to confess frankly that papers sent them were “lost or destroyed and cannot be found after search among the papers of Lincoln & Herndon.”
Lincon’s name drew clients to the new firm, and soon the partners had as much business as they could well manage. They appeared in their first case in the Sangamon County Circuit Court in March 1845, and their first suit in neighboring Menard County was called in May of the same year. During the first twelve months of the partnership, the firm had fourteen cases in the circuit court at Springfield; the following year the partners handled more than twice as many. The Lincoln & Herndon fee book for 1847 listed over one hundred cases in which Lincoln participated before he left in October to serve in Congress.
Like most other attorneys, Lincoln and Herndon took on whatever clients came their way. They defended persons charged with murder, burglary, assault, embezzlement, and almost every other kind of crime. Sometimes their clients were innocent and sometimes they were guilty, but the partners felt that all were entitled to be represented. Nor was Lincoln squeamish about the social implications of the cases that he argued. In 1841 he appeared before the Illinois Supreme Court in the case of Bailey v. Cromwell, which concerned the attempted sale of a young black woman, Nance, in Tazewell County. The court followed his reasoning in ruling: “the presumption of law was, in this State, that every person was free, without regard to color.... The sale of a free person is illegal.” But six years later he appeared for Robert Matson, who was trying to recover his runaway slaves in Coles County. Matson had brought his Kentucky slaves across the Ohio River to work on his farm in southern Illinois. When the slaves ran away and, with the backing of local abolitionists, brought suit for their freedom, on the ground that the Northwest Ordinance forbade the introduction of slavery into the state of Illinois, Matson employed Lincoln, along with Usher F. Linder, to defend him. Characteristically Lincoln admitted his opponents’ main argument, that the slaves were free if Matson had brought them to Illinois for permanent settlement, but he invoked the right of transit, which the courts had guaranteed to slaveholders who were taking their slaves temporarily into free territory. He placed great stress on Matson’s public declaration, at the time he brought the slaves into Illinois, that he did not intend the slaves to remain permanently in Illinois and insisted that “no counter statement had ever been made publicly or privately by him.” The circuit court ruled against Lincoln and his client, who, it was reported, left immediately for Kentucky without paying his attorneys’ fees. Neither the Matson case nor the Cromwell case should be taken as an indication of Lincoln’s views on slavery; his business was law, not morality.
The partners’ fees remained small. An appearance before a justice of the peace cost $5, and the usual fee for representing a client in the circuit court ranged from $10 to $25. In a very few cases of special difficulty the firm charged $50, and on one occasion an appearance before the Illinois Supreme Court brought $100. Lincoln believed strongly in making explicit financial arrangements before entering into a case. “The matter of fees,” he noted in his projected lecture to young lawyers, “is important far beyond the mere question of bread and butter involved.” Occasionally he took on a case for a contingency fee. If the client was willing to risk the cost, he promised in one letter, “I will do my best for the ‘biggest kind of a fee’... if we succeed, and nothing if we fail.” But for the most part he worked for fixed and agreed-upon fees, and he advised young lawyers not to take more than a small retainer in advance, lest they lose incentive and interest. He did not hesitate to dun a client: “I would like to have the little fee in the case, if convenient.” He disliked suing for fees, but on at least six occasions he felt obliged to do so.
Despite differences in age and experience, the partners divided all income equally; Lincoln imitated the generosity that Stuart had shown him rather than the niggardliness that Logan had practiced. After the first few months the partners kept no systematic accounts, simply dividing equally the fees they received. As Lincoln told Whitney: “Billy and I never had the scratch of a pen between us; we jest divide as we go along.” But Herndon did keep a record of cases in which the fees due to the partners were not immediately collected, carefully marking them “Paid” as the money was received.
IV
No amount of industry or care could earn a lawyer a satisfactory income from practice in Sangamon County alone. Most Springfield attorneys who were not independently wealthy felt obliged to travel with the judge of the circuit court when he made, twice every year, his pilgrimage from one county seat to another in his district. The vast Eighth Circuit, which eventually encompassed 11,000 square miles, stretched across two-thirds of the width of the state and one-third of its length. Both Stuart and Logan regularly traveled at least part
of the circuit; even Herndon, who disliked the migratory life and preferred to remain in Springfield, estimated that he was on the circuit about one-fourth of the time. Lincoln, who had only occasionally attended courts in neighboring counties during the first years of his practice, became one of the most regular riders of the circuit.
The judge and the more affluent lawyers traveled the circuit in buggies, but Lincoln in the early days rode his rather decrepit horse, “Old Tom,” carrying a change of underclothing, any necessary legal papers, and perhaps a book or two in his capacious saddlebags. When he could afford it, he had a local blacksmith make him a nondescript buggy. The countryside through which the procession traveled was sparsely inhabited, and they could go for miles without seeing another human. The caravan could usually travel only about four miles an hour, because the roads were atrocious. Most were little more than trails, and when the heavy black loam of the Illinois prairie began to thaw in the spring, it became fathomless mud, dangerous not merely to carriages but to horseback riders as well. Many streams had no bridges, and the judge often asked Lincoln, who had the longest legs of any member of the bar, to explore for a ford; if Lincoln could get over, the others would follow.
At night they stopped wherever they could find lodgings. Sometimes, Herndon remembered, they slept “with 20 men in the same room—some on old ropes—some on quilts—some on sheets—a straw or two under them.” When they arose the next morning, a pitcher of cold water outside and a single towel served for their ablutions; those who got up late often found the towel too wet to use. After a breakfast of greasy food and what Leonard Swett, the Bloomington lawyer who regularly traveled the Eighth Circuit, called “pretty tough coffee—pretty mean,” the caravan moved on toward the next county seat. Arriving on a Saturday or a Sunday, the lawyers resorted to a favorite hotel or tavern near the courthouse, where, again, they slept two or three to a bed.
The next morning the lawyers would be approached by litigants, often with their local counsel, who were glad to have the help of more experienced attorneys from Springfield and Bloomington—the two largest towns on the circuit. Business had to be transacted speedily—declarations and traverses drafted, petitions written, lists of witnesses drawn up—so that the judge could hear cases on Monday afternoon. There was little time to study cases closely, much less to look up precedents; lawyers on the circuit had to rely mostly on general knowledge and common sense.
Clients and local counsel eagerly sought Lincoln’s services. On the circuit his reputation for integrity and fairness was even more important than in more technically difficult cases appealed to the state supreme court. In about a third of the cases in which Lincoln appeared on the circuit, he acted alone; in the others he worked with local counsel. He had few criminal cases and not many cases in chancery. Herndon enumerated the kinds of cases that formed the bulk of his circuit practice: “assault and battery—suits on notes—small disputes among neighbors—slander—warranties on horse trades—larceny of a small kind.” Lincoln nearly always had as much business as he could readily handle, but it was never as great as that of the most prominent local attorneys.
After the court adjourned each day the lawyers had leisure to prepare new cases or they could explore the meager resources of the little towns they visited, all of which, except Springfield, Bloomington, and Pekin, had fewer than one thousand inhabitants. Mostly the attorneys had to amuse themselves, and, according to Herndon, they engaged in “fights—foot and horse races—knock down—wrestling—gambling etc.” “Whiskey,” he noted, “was abundant and freely used.” After supper the judge and the lawyers might attend some local amusement, like a circus or a lecture, but if there was no other diversion they would sit before the fire and swap tall tales and anecdotes. When that happened, Lincoln, of course, was a center of attention, and, as Herndon remembered, “Judges—Jurors—Witnesses—Lawyers—merchants—etc etc have laughed at these jokes ... till every muscle—nerve and cell of the body in the morning was sore at the whooping and hurrahing exercise.” By the end of the week the session was ended, and the judge and the attendant lawyers moved on to the next county seat.
It took at least ten weeks to complete the circuit—and then the whole process had to be repeated in the fall. Consequently Lincoln spent about three months of every year traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit—and he sometimes made additional trips on legal business to other counties that were not on this circuit. Many of the other attorneys returned to their homes over the weekends, but Lincoln generally remained with the court. In the early years of his marriage friends reported that he was “desperately homesick and turning his head frequently towards the south,” and he usually broke the long fall term with a visit to Springfield. But it made no sense for him to keep rushing home; he was on the circuit to earn money, and the longer he stayed in the small county towns, the better acquainted he became with the local lawyers who could throw cases his way. His investment of time and energy paid off; he probably earned more than $150 a week, beyond expenses, while he was on the circuit.
Staying in these small towns also gave him a political advantage, and in his future political contests his strongest supporters were attorneys and clients he met on the circuit. He got to know thousands of central Illinois voters by name. In 1847, when J. H. Buckingham, a reporter for the Boston Courier, made a stage-coach trip through central Illinois with Lincoln, he found that he “knew, or appeared to know, every body we met, the name of the tenant of every farm-house, and the owner of every plat of ground.” “Such a shaking of hands—such a how-d’ye-do—such a greeting of different kinds, as we saw, was never seen before,” the newspaperman continued; “it seemed as if... he had a kind word, a smile and a bow for every body on the road, even to the horses, and the cattle, and the swine.”
In addition, Lincoln remained on the circuit because he enjoyed the life. What others considered hardships were matters of complete indifference to him. He did not care where he slept, and he ate whatever food was put in front of him. If there were drawbacks to life on the circuit, the hearty, masculine atmosphere more than compensated for them. Traveling the circuit gave him relief from a domesticity that he sometimes found smothering.
V
The Lincolns’ domestic life was often troubled. Husband and wife were as different in temperament as they were in physique. He was slow, moody, given to bouts of melancholy and long periods of silence. He depended on his inner resources. She was lively, talkative, and sociable, constantly needing the attention and admiration of others. Indifferent to what other people thought, he was not troubled when visitors found him in his favorite position for reading, stretched out at full length on the floor. She, who had grown up in houses with liveried black servants, was embarrassed when he answered the doorbell in his shirtsleeves.
A shortage of money contributed to their problems. Because Lincoln’s income was low during the early years of their marriage, they could afford only a tiny house. Overcrowded when they moved in, it became more so after 1846 with the birth of their second son, Edward—named after Lincoln’s political associate and friendly rival, Edward D. Baker. A minor remodeling of the house to create a new downstairs bedroom did not do much to ease the situation. Yet Mary loyally never made any public complaint about their straitened circumstances nor spoke of financial stringency in her letters. Instead she let gossip blame her for failing to show hospitality, when her house was so small that it had no dining room and meals had to be served in the kitchen. Similarly, she gained a reputation for stinginess when, in fact, she was trying to run a household on a very limited budget.
Lincoln, immersed in his own work, probably had no idea how hard his wife had to labor. She had to cook, clean, and scrub. She had to pump the water in the backyard and haul it into the house for heating. She had to keep the wood fire going in the kitchen stove and, during much of the year, in the living-room fireplace. Though Lincoln had his suits made by Benjamin R. Biddle, the local tailor, she had to sew all her own clothes, a
s well as those of her children; her purchases at John Irwin & Company, the Springfield general store, included needles, buttons, thread, muslin, calico, cambric, whalebones, and corset lace. And, above all, she had to pay close attention to her babies, especially to little Eddie, who was a sickly child. Despite the money her father gave her, she only occasionally had assistance in any of these chores. For a short time Harriet Hanks, one of Lincoln’s cousins, who was attending the Springfield Female Seminary, helped out in the house, but she and Mary did not get along. More often she had an Irish-born maid—one of the “wild Irish,” as she called them—but she thought they were undependable and lazy, and she quarreled with them all.
Mary Lincoln’s bad temper was famous in Springfield. Everybody heard stories about the tongue-lashings that she gave to maids, to workmen about the house, to street vendors—and to her husband. In part, these were the result of overwork and exhaustion on the part of a woman who up to the time of her marriage had never turned her hand. In part, they reflected the unsteady condition of her health. Every spring she was afflicted with excruciating headaches—possibly the result of an allergy—and she suffered much from menstrual cramps. Highly emotional, she was terrified of lightning storms, of dogs, of robbers, and when she was in a panic, she could not control her actions.
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