Lincoln (30 page)

Lincoln was also noted for his fairness to his opponents. Like any other lawyer, he resorted to technicalities in order to save his clients, but in these circuit court cases he preferred to base his arguments on justice rather than on legal precedents. His one standard move in the more serious of these cases was to apply for a change of venue, in the belief that the delay in hearing and the transfer of a case to another county would give his clients a fairer trial.

In court he rarely raised objections when opposing counsel introduced evidence. According to Leonard Swett, the young Bloomington lawyer who traveled the circuit with Lincoln, “he would say he ‘reckoned’ it would be fair to let this in, or that; and sometimes, when his adversary could not quite prove what Lincoln knew to be the truth, he ‘reckoned’ it would be fair to admit the truth to be so-and-so.” But this, Swett noted, did not mean that he yielded essentials: “What he was so blandly giving away was simply what he couldn’t get and keep.” Many a rival lawyer was lulled into complacency as Lincoln conceded, say, six out of seven points in argument, only to discover that the whole case turned on the seventh point. “Any man who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man,” Swett concluded, “would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.”

Rarely did Lincoln object to a judge’s ruling on the admissibility of evidence, usually saying, when the argument went against him, “Well, I reckon I must be wrong.” But when the point was essential to his case, he would vigorously controvert the court’s ruling. In a celebrated 1859 case in the Sangamon County Circuit Court (which by this point was no longer part of David Davis’s Eighth Judicial District), he, Logan, and Shelby M. Cullom represented Peachy Quinn Harrison, accused of stabbing Greek Crafton to death in the vicinity of Pleasant Plains. The stenographic transcript of the trial—the only such transcript for any case in which Lincoln was involved—showed that Lincoln and Logan did not attempt to deny that Harrison had killed Crafton but tried to prove that he did so because Crafton had repeatedly threatened to beat him up. The prosecuting attorney argued that evidence of these threats was inadmissible since it could not be proved that Harrison knew about them before the fatal stabbing. The judge, E. Y. Rice, a lifelong Democrat and political opponent of Lincoln, agreed and excluded the evidence. In a second line of defense, Lincoln and his associates attempted to introduce the testimony of Crafton’s grandfather, Peter Cartwright. The venerable Methodist exhorter, who had once run against Lincoln for Congress, visited Crafton on his deathbed. Cartwright testified that his grandson had shown remorse for having threatened Harrison and said:
“I have brought it upon myself, and I forgive Quinn.”
Again the prosecution objected, arguing that Crafton’s dying statement was inadmissible and irrelevant, and Judge Rice agreed to exclude Cartwright’s testimony.

Angrily Lincoln protested both decisions, saying in court that he “had never heard of such law.” The trial transcript did not include his argument against Judge Rice’s ruling, but Herndon, who was in the courtroom, vividly remembered that Lincoln denounced it as “absurd and without precedent in the broad world.” He “spoke fiercely—strongly—contemptuously of the decision of the court,” just managing to avoid anything that could be held as contempt. Under his withering attack Judge Rice retracted his ruling and allowed both Cartwright’s testimony and the evidence concerning threats to go to the jury, which acquitted Lincoln’s client.

“In his examination of witnesses,” a newspaperman wrote of Lincoln in 1850, “he displays a masterly ingenuity and a legal tact that baffles concealment and defies deceit.” His legendary skill as a cross-examiner was clearly demonstrated in his most celebrated criminal case, the 1858 trial of William “Duff” Armstrong for the murder of James Metzker. Attending a religious camp meeting at Virgin’s Grove, near the now deserted site of New Salem, in August 1857, Armstrong, Metzker, and James Norris, all undoubtedly drunk, got into a fight, and Metzker was killed. Norris was accused of having hit Metzker on the back of his head with a piece of wood, and Armstrong was indicted for striking him in the eye with his metal slungshot. The two cases were separated, and Norris was convicted for manslaughter. Armstrong’s mother, Hannah, asked Lincoln to defend her son. Remembering
his long friendship for the young man’s father, Jack Armstrong, and Hannah’s many kindnesses during his years in New Salem, Lincoln readily agreed. He accepted no fee.

At the trial, which was moved to the Cass County courthouse in Beardstown, the state’s principal witness was Charles Allen, who testified that Armstrong struck Metzker. Though it was eleven o’clock at night and Allen was standing 150 feet away, he claimed that he could see the attack clearly by the light of the nearly full moon shining directly overhead. On cross-examination, Lincoln slowly and with seeming casualness had Allen go through his story a dozen times, asking him to describe just what he had seen and how he was able to see it. Then, with the witness firmly committed to his story, Lincoln produced an 1857 almanac and read from it to show that at the time Allen claimed to have, witnessed the attack the moon had already set. The roar of laughter that followed showed that Allen’s credibility was demolished.

Lincoln’s skill in making the closing argument in a case caused one Illinois journalist to place him “at the head of the profession in this state,” adding, “though he may have his equal, it would be no easy task to find his superior.” On rare occasions he ended with a powerful emotional address to the jury. In the Duff Armstrong case, after carefully reviewing the now discredited evidence advanced by the prosecution, he made an unabashedly sentimental appeal that, as the prosecuting attorney remembered, “took the jury by storm.” He told the jurors “of his once being a poor, friendless boy; that Armstrong’s father took him into his house, fed and clothed him, and gave him a home.” There were tears in his eyes as he spoke, and the story he told with such pathos moved the jury to tears also. “His sympathies were fully enlisted in favor of the young man,” the prosecutor recalled, “and his terrible sincerity could not help but arouse the same passion in the jury.” Armstrong was acquitted. But that summation was unusual, for Lincoln ordinarily ended with a low-key, logical argument that jurors could readily understand. A reporter discovered “no false glitter, no sickly sentimentalism” in his arguments; instead, “bold, forcible and energetic, he forces conviction upon the mind.”

Davis and some of the attorneys were puzzled that Lincoln, up to 1854, generally remained with the court throughout the circuit without returning home, and sometimes they direly speculated that he must be having marital problems. They failed to realize that the law was Lincoln’s only means of support. Unlike Davis, Logan, and a number of other Eighth District lawyers, he did not make a fortune from land speculation, nor did he own a farm or run a business. His law practice brought in a comfortable income of perhaps $2,000 a year, and by 1860 the census taker reported he owned real estate
valued at $5,000 and a personal estate of $12,000. To maintain that level he had to be constantly at work. He stayed throughout the circuit because he could not afford to be absent.

It was fortunate that he could remain in Springfield for most of the summer months and during the winter, when the Illinois Supreme Court and the United States District Court met in the state capital, because he was much needed at home to help with a series of family crises. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was in failing health. Since 1840 the elder Lincolns had been living in a double log cabin on a 120-acre farm on Goosenest Prairie, in Coles County. Though Abraham Lincoln had developed an entirely different set of interests and values from those of his father and stepmother, he was concerned for their well-being and tried to help them live in modest comfort. In the 1840s when Thomas Lincoln got into financial difficulties, probably through partnership with his lazy and unreliable stepson, John D. Johnston, in a saw- and gristmill, Abraham Lincoln came to his rescue by paying him $200 for the east forty acres of his farm—a payment that was really a gift, since the agreement clearly specified that Thomas and Sarah Lincoln were to have “use and entire control” of the land during their lifetimes. From time to time, when his work on the circuit brought him near Coles County—where he had a certain amount of business, though it was not part of the Eighth Judicial District—he would visit his parents. While he was in Congress, Thomas begged him for a “Lone of, Twenty Dollars” to prevent his farm from being sold to settle a long-forgotten judgment against him. Lincoln promptly sent the money, though his letter made it clear that he thought it was “singular” that his father could not pay such a small debt and that such an obligation could have been forgotten for so long. In all probability he suspected Johnston of making up the whole story.

Toward his stepmother Lincoln always had the most affectionate feelings, and he closed his letter, “Give my love to Mother.” Toward his father his attitude was more ambivalent. The two had never been close, and they had drifted apart even more since Abraham left home. Thomas Lincoln’s unambitious, unsuccessful way of life came to represent the values his son wanted to repudiate. He had reason, too, to believe that his father, as he reached seventy, was becoming a little senile and was too much under the influence of the unreliable Johnston.

In May 1849, shortly after Lincoln returned from Washington, he heard from Johnston that Thomas Lincoln was dying. “He Craves to See you all the time,” the stepbrother wrote, “and he wonts you to Come if you ar able to git hure, for you are his only Child that is of his own flush and blood and it is nothing more than natere for him to crave to see you.” At Johnston’s request, Augustus H. Chapman, Dennis Hanks’s son-in-law, reinforced the plea with a letter describing Thomas Lincoln’s “Seizure of the Heart” and his “truly Heart-Rendering” cries to see his only son. Though Lincoln at this point was actively campaigning to secure appointment as commissioner of the General Land Office, he rushed off to Coles County to see his father,
probably missing a second letter from Chapman assuring him that Thomas Lincoln had no heart disease and would “doubtless be well in a Short time.” Lincoln’s visit to Goosenest Prairie delayed by nearly a week his trip to Washington, and it may have cost him the Land Office appointment.

The next winter, when John D. Johnston wrote him two more letters about Thomas Lincoln’s declining health, Abraham Lincoln did not respond. He thought his stepbrother was again crying wolf. Only after he heard independently from Harriet Chapman did he take the news seriously. Repeating his “desire that neither Father or Mother shall be in want of any comfort either in health or sickness,” he explained why he could not come to his father’s sickbed. “My business is such that I could hardly leave home now,” he wrote; besides, his wife was “sick-abed” with “baby-sickness.” Both excuses had some plausibility. A trip by buggy to Coles County would take three days each way, at a time when Lincoln had cases before the United States Circuit and District courts and the Illinois Supreme Court almost every day. But had he truly wanted to go, he could have entrusted his cases to his partner or asked for postponements. It was also true that Mary had given birth to their third son on December 21. Though the delivery was perfectly normal, she doubtless would have been highly nervous if Lincoln left home while she had the entire responsibility of caring for a newborn baby. But, again, her illness was not serious, and there were friends and neighbors who could help her. Once again, the husband allowed his wife to take the blame for an uncomfortable decision.

The rest of Lincoln’s letter, urging his father “to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who... notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads,” was in unconvincing and strained language, really addressed to his backwoods relatives who thought in the clichés of the Primitive Baptists. “Say to him,” he enjoined Johnston, “that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous meeting with many loved ones gone before; and where the rest of us, through the help of God, hope ere-long to join them.” Unable to simulate a grief that he did not feel or an affection that he did not bear, Lincoln did not attend his father’s funeral. He was not heartless, but Thomas Lincoln represented a world that his son had long ago left behind him.

During the years of his father’s final illness, Lincoln had also to deal with family crises closer to home. In December 1849 his second son, Edward Baker, always a feeble child, became seriously sick. His disease was pulmonary tuberculosis, for which there was no known cure. After fifty-two days of acute illness, the little boy, who was not quite four years old, died on February 1, 1850. Both parents were devastated. Lincoln, as always, internalized his emotions, saying only, “We miss him very much.” For his wife, Eddie’s death, coming shortly after deaths both of her father and her beloved grandmother, was harder to bear, especially since she was exhausted from the long vigil of nursing the sick child. Like her husband, she lacked faith in
conventional Christianity and consequently was denied the consolation of believing that her son’s death was all for the best, as part of some divine plan. Restlessly she kicked against the pricks of fate, and more than two years after Eddie’s death she wrote a Kentucky friend, “I grieve to say that even at this distant day, I do not feel sufficiently submissive to our loss.”

A few weeks after Eddie’s death she was expecting again. The Lincolns clearly intended to replace the lost boy. Her pregnancy was uneventful, but, once again, she was alone much of the time, since Lincoln was away on the circuit. The baby was named William Wallace Lincoln, after her physician brother-in-law who had been so helpful during Eddie’s final days. Willie was the most intelligent and the best-looking of all the Lincoln children, and from the day he was born his father doted on him.