Lincoln (28 page)

Shortly afterward he was ensnared in the very trap that he was trying to avoid. It became clear that the highest appointment to be given to any Illinois Whig would be that of commissioner of the General Land Office, a
position that not merely paid the handsome salary of $3,000 a year but carried with it a great deal of power and some patronage. The commissioner was in general charge of all the public lands; his decisions determined how and when the lands were sold. He could do much to encourage the settlement of the West, and, since he controlled the sale of public lands to the state governments, he could promote the building of railroads and other internal improvements. Westerners thought it important to have the office filled by someone who knew Western laws and understood the needs of Western farmers and railroad developers; Illinois Whigs saw in the appointment a way of strengthening their party.

Some of Lincoln’s friends urged him to apply for the post. It would be better than returning to his law practice, which, Judge David Davis warned, “at present promises you but poor remuneration for the labor.” “Were I in your place,” Davis suggested, “could I get it, I would take the Land Office.” The judge might also have mentioned that this need not be a dead-end job, instancing that James Shields, Lincoln’s old enemy, had held the office under President Polk, only to go on to election as senator from Illinois.

But Lincoln’s interest was, at most, tepid. He was confident that “almost by common consent” the Whigs in Congress would support his candidacy, and he knew the job would pay him more than he could otherwise make; but he was reluctant to make “a final surrender of the law” as a career. Anyway, well before Taylor’s inauguration he had promised to give his support to Cyrus Edwards, a former Whig legislator and unsuccessful Whig candidate for governor, who was a relative of his brother-in-law, Ninian W. Edwards.

But Edwards, it turned out, could not get the job because Baker disliked him and favored another candidate, James L. D. Morrison. As letters supporting both Edwards and Morrison piled up on the desk of Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing, there was a stalemate, and it seemed likely that Illinois might not receive the land commissioner’s appointment after all.

At this point Lincoln’s friends insisted that he must seek the position himself. He continued to hesitate, because he and Baker had agreed that if either Morrison or Edwards could be persuaded to withdraw they would support the other. “In relation to these pledges,” Lincoln told his supporters, “I must not only be chaste but above suspicion.” He could take the appointment only if both Edwards and Morrison declined it.

In April a new candidate appeared on the scene. Whigs in the rapidly growing northern section of Illinois felt that all appointments were going to the central and southern counties. “Mr. Lincoln,” one of them grumbled, “can see nothing North of Springfield and Jacksonville in a favorable light.” They were joined by E. B. Washburne and his Galena friends, eager to cut down Baker’s influence. Jointly they came up with the name of Justin Butterfield, a distinguished Whig lawyer of Chicago who had served as United States attorney under Harrison and Tyler. Butterfield had the endorsement of both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and Secretary Ewing
considered him “the most profound lawyer in the state, especially as a Land lawyer.”

The news of Butterfield’s candidacy aroused Lincoln. “He is my personal friend, and is qualified to do the duties of the office,” he admitted; “but of the quite one hundred Illinoisians, equally well qualified, I do not know one with less claims to it.” Butterfield had supported Clay, not Taylor, for the 1848 nomination and had hardly lifted a finger for the President’s election. His appointment would be “an egregious political blunder,” which would “gratify no single whig in the state, except it be Mr. B. himself.” Lincoln resolved to enter the field himself, and he began soliciting letters of support from leading Illinois Whigs and from congressmen he had known in Washington. In order to blanket the country, he even enlisted Mary to write letters.

His campaign was strong enough to persuade the President to delay the appointment for three weeks, so that both Butterfield and Lincoln could rush to Washington and present their cases in person. Favoring Butterfield from the start, Secretary Ewing was impressed by the endorsements he gathered, including an anti-Lincoln petition signed by disgruntled Whigs from Springfield itself, who declared they were “dissatisfied with the course of Abraham Lincoln as a member of Congress from this Congressional District.” One of them followed up with a letter declaring that Lincoln’s stand on the Mexican War had rendered him “very unpopular, and inflicted a deep and mischievous wound upon the Whole Whig party of the State.” In the end, Taylor followed his standard practice of allowing each cabinet member to make the appointments in his department and gave the office to Butterfield. Fuming, Lincoln declared that the President was getting “the unjust and ruinous character of being a mere man of straw.”

Lincoln was disappointed, not so much for himself as for the Whig party. “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 wrote Ewing. “I never did, in any true sense, want the office myself.” In his view Butterfield belonged to the “old fossil” wing of the party, content to live on occasional federal appointments without ever building a strong state organization. Lincoln saw the land commissioner’s appointment as a means of building a viable Whig party in Illinois, which had never won in a presidential election or in a gubernatorial race. Properly used, that office could supplement the active local organizations that Lincoln had encouraged and the convention system that he had helped to establish.

At the end of his congressional career Lincoln returned to private life, discouraged about the prospects of his party. It did not relieve his gloom when Secretary of State John M. Clayton offered him, as a consolation prize, the office of secretary to the governor of the Oregon Territory, which he promptly declined. Then Interior Secretary Ewing, realizing the snub they had given to the most active Illinois Whig, tendered him the governorship
of the Oregon Territory. Lincoln briefly toyed with the possibility but quickly concluded that it led nowhere. Oregon was strongly Democratic, and once it was admitted to the Union, it would hardly choose a Whig like Lincoln as governor or senator. Anyway, moving to the West Coast would be difficult and dangerous, especially because Eddie’s health was uncertain. He declined the offer, putting the blame, as husbands so often do, on his wife, who, he said, put her foot down about moving.

With that his public career was apparently over. As he settled back in Springfield, he must have remembered a note he gave a few months earlier to an autograph collector who requested his “signature with a sentiment”: “I am not a very sentimental man; and the best sentiment I can think of is, that if you collect the signatures of all persons who are no less distinguished than I, you will have a very undistinguishing mass of names.”

At the Head of His Profession in This State

“F
rom 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, [I] practiced law more assiduously than ever before,” Lincoln wrote in an 1859 autobiographical sketch. This was a time for redirecting his career. He needed, first, to resettle his family after his sojourn in Washington, and the Lincolns moved back into their little house on Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield. Next he had to resume his law career, his sole source of income now that he was no longer receiving a government salary. He turned down the tempting offer of Grant Goodrich to join his Chicago law firm, saying that if he moved to the city he “would have to sit down and study hard” and “it would kill him,” because “he tended to consumption.” Instead he and Herndon continued their partnership.

Political prospects played little part in these decisions. As he noted in an 1860 biography, “His profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind.” Illinois offered no future for an ambitious Whig politician. He recognized that his public career was at an end.

In these years of relative tranquillity Lincoln had time for self-examination. His years in Washington did nothing to undermine his supreme self-confidence, but he could not help observing that he had less education and professional training than most of his fellow congressmen. In a brief autobiography prepared for a congressional biographical directory, he commented tersely: “Education defective.” He began, as Herndon said, “to realize a certain lack of discipline—a want of mental training and method.” Believing, as did most of his contemporaries, that mental faculties, like muscles, could be strengthened by rigorous exercise, he secured a copy of Euclid’s principles of geometry and with determination set himself to working
out the theorems and problems. With quiet pride he reported in 1860 that he had “studied and nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid.”

Though some of his clients had drifted away during his term in Congress, it did not take long for Lincoln to reestablish his position at the bar. He retained some clients whose cases had begun before his election to Congress and were still pending. For instance, he continued to be involved in the never-ending litigation of Nancy Robinson Dorman to recover land in Gallatin County wrongfully diverted by her stepfather. After becoming Dorman’s attorney in 1842, Lincoln kept an interest in her suit while in Congress and finally succeeded in winning a judgment in her favor in 1852. He had little difficulty in attracting new clients, because people remembered his enviable record of success in the courts before his election. Doubtless his reputation got a boost when he was admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court in 1849, where he effectively argued a case.

After his return to Springfield he developed a sizable practice before the Illinois Supreme Court. Some of his early cases were trivial. For example, in 1851 he was asked to appear in the case of one Robert Nuckles, who was suing for damage Elijah Bacon’s cattle did to his corn. Not satisfied with the $2.50 awarded him by the local justice of the peace, Nuckles employed a local attorney to sue Bacon in the Macon County Circuit Court. This time a jury awarded him damages in the amount of $3.33. Unhappy with the verdict, Bacon wanted his lawyer to engage Lincoln’s services for an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. But soon Lincoln was involved in more important litigation, such as the suit of Oliver. W. Browning, who fell and broke his leg on an unrepaired street in Springfield and sued the city for failing to maintain its roads. The common law provided no remedy for Browning, but Lincoln argued that the city charter required Springfield to keep its streets in repair. Adopting Lincoln’s arguments, the supreme court ruled for Browning, establishing an often cited precedent in municipal law.

In these supreme court cases Lincoln and Herndon worked as a team. An omnivorous and rapid reader, Herndon made it his job in each case to go through all the relevant decisions he could locate in the well-stocked State Library and the Supreme Court Library, which had the reports of all the state supreme courts and the federal courts, as well as the usual legal reference works and dictionaries. Because so many of the subjects of litigation were repetitious, he compiled a kind of legal index in a large commonplace book, where he recorded the precedents he discovered on a wide variety of topics, from Streets and Improvements (a subject directly relevant to the Browning case) and Negligence in Building Bridges to larger subjects such as Corrupt Motives, Physical or Moral Nuisances, Trusts, and Specific Performances. As Lincoln & Herndon came more and more to deal with business firms, the junior partner prepared a separate, smaller notebook he entitled “Corporations,”
where he listed precedents on topics like Organization, Subscription, Forfeiture of Stock, and Forfeiture of Charter. In addition, he drew up briefs for many individual cases, outlining the principal issues and precedents.

For his part, Lincoln did virtually all the paperwork involved in these supreme court cases, preparing even the most formal and routine documents in his own hand. Because Herndon in 1848 began serving as deputy clerk of court, he was not free to make frequent appearances before that bench, and Lincoln usually appeared alone or with some other attorney. But both partners recognized the contribution that Herndon’s research made to Lincoln’s courtroom victories, and they continued to divide the fees from these cases equally.

Lincoln & Herndon also developed a thriving practice before the United States Circuit and District courts in Illinois, which handled suits between citizens of different states, suits brought by the United States government, and other miscellaneous types of cases. Admitted to practice before the United States courts in 1839, Lincoln had appeared in at least sixty-two cases before he left for Congress, and on his return he naturally sought to pick up additional business in the federal courts, where cases were likely to involve larger questions and greater fees than the purely local litigation of the state courts. Because the court system had changed somewhat during his absence, he found abundant opportunity. The growth of Chicago made it imperative to hold sessions of the federal courts there as well as in Springfield, and Congress in 1855 divided the state into two judicial districts, with Judge Thomas Drummond presiding in Chicago and Judge Samuel H. Treat in Springfield. This multiplication of jurisdictions was a boon to lawyers, and Lincoln was soon making fairly regular appearances in the United States courts in Chicago as well as in Springfield.