Popular legend has long held the notion that Abraham Lincoln was a joke-cracking good old boy who spent his lengthy legal career breezing into courtrooms completely unprepared, but then winning jurors over with his affable and homespun style.
Lincoln buffs have had an inkling otherwise, based largely on an obscure story about how the prairie lawyer once discounted a witness’ account of a moonlight fistfight by researching the rising and setting of the moon on the night in question.
As is usually the case with figures long dead, there hasn’t been much in the way of facts to shed light on the life of Lincoln the lawyer–a title he bore for more than half his life.
But all that is about to change, thanks to historians working on the Lincoln Legal Papers Project. For more than seven years, the Springfield-based team has been culling thousands of legal documents from cases Lincoln worked on from courthouses all over Illinois and from private collections around the country.
A complete facsimile of the project’s more than 100,000 documents is due out later this year on CD-ROM, presenting historians with all-new source material on a significant and largely unexplored aspect of Lincoln’s life. (The CD-ROM will cost $1,000-$1,500; a later bound volume of 50 top cases, $200-$300.)
The collection contains details on some 5,000 civil and criminal cases Lincoln worked on during a law career that spanned 25 years–from 1836 to 1861–and the entire state of Illinois.
Even though the real extrapolation hasn’t yet begun, historians already say the project’s findings dispel popular misconceptions about Lincoln.
Among the highlights:
– Despite what his law partner, William Herndon, would later write about Lincoln’s being an expert at improvisation, he was an aggressive litigator who scoured law books and involved himself in the minutiae of his cases–once intimately studying the currents of the Mississippi River to defend a steamboat owner charged with ruining a bridge.
– Lincoln was no crusading do-gooder. Depending on who hired him, he was just as willing to represent a slave owner as a slave seeking freedom, a rioter as a shopkeeper who had lost his wares in a riot or a charged murderer as a victim seeking recompense.
– His work wasn’t not-for-profit, either. By the 1850s, Lincoln was charging fees substantial enough to support a wealthy Springfield lifestyle and a political career.
Harvard University scholar David Herbert Donald calls the project “the most important archival investigation now under way in the United States.”
“If you want to get into the question of how Abraham Lincoln was prepared for greatness, you have to look at his legal career,” says Donald, author of the 1995 book “Lincoln” (Simon & Schuster).
“The legal profession was more than half his life. It’s what he studied, what he really knew about. This is what I think shaped him in so many ways and, in particular, his style.
“We have largely been left with two or three good books that are kind of quick surveys, simply saying, `That’s how he made a living. Now let’s get on with politics.’ But there are many things we can understand only if we study his legal career.”
In researching his book, Donald was the first historian to delve into the legal documents.
But he won’t be the last. Project director Cullom Davis says the team has been barraged with inquiries from social and legal historians eager to find out what treasures the collection harbors for them from the pre-Civil War period. Already, historians are using it to examine the status of women of the period through the dowry and divorce cases Lincoln handled.
First and foremost, though, it is anticipated to open a new window upon the life of the Great Emancipator. After all, what better way to understand a great man than to examine the work he did day in and day out for a quarter of a century?
That’s what historians had in mind when they conceived of the project in 1986. Historians at the Abraham Lincoln Association had wanted to delve into the legal documents years before, when they launched a major collection of his writings in the 1950s, but decided it was too big a project for them.
But historians drafted a proposal to resurrect the project in the mid-1980s. The governor at the time was James R. Thompson, a die-hard history buff who made sure the seed money was there.
Later, federal money, private donations and help from Sangamon State University (now the University of Illinois at Springfield) would bring the project to fruition.
The first historians on the team set up shop in the Old State Capitol, the very building where Lincoln once spent hours poring over legal books in the state library.
The job of collecting the documents, which began in 1990, was even harder than they expected. It turned out that Lincoln had been far more productive than they originally thought. He handled twice as many cases as projected, and in some 92 of Illinois’ 102 counties.
To make matters more difficult, some county officials were skeptical about opening up their vaults to outsiders. That problem quickly vanished after the first couple of courthouses yielded significant Lincoln documents and excited stories in local newspapers; local clerks warmed up after that.
“They got to the point where they were asking us, `When are you going to come?’ ” recalls Dennis Suttles, a historian on the team. “Especially during election year.”
Once the historians got inside the courthouses, though, they discovered the tougher task would be finding the records. Many of the legal papers had been destroyed by fire or flood or stolen by collectors, and those that remained were “lost” somewhere in a courthouse. If not for a handful of janitors with long tenure in their courthouses, many significant papers would still be tucked away in forgotten closets.
As for the volume of work, only patience could overcome that. It took about three months to raid each courthouse, and five years to visit them all. Since then, it has taken the last two years to catalog, photocopy, study and scour the assemblage for future leads.
For the last few weeks, the team has focused on the final phase of research, chasing down the loose ends in their so-called “X File.”
The Tazewell County Courthouse in Pekin, not far from Peoria, has been a gold mine from the start.
This courthouse has yielded the most Lincoln documents, even though about half of Lincoln’s cases were in Sangamon County, where his Springfield home was located. (Before federal laws protected old documents, Sangamon officials apparently threw them away when they ran out of storage space.)
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In the dusty vault in the courthouse basement, a three-member team begins its X-file checks one unusually warm January morning.
Suttles, Susan Krause and Chris Schnell search for several documents they’re pretty sure are there. The work goes faster this time around than on their first three-month visit. By now, the handwriting is familiar, the blue-colored paper used by courts of the time (they call it “Lincoln Blue”) easily spotted.
After poring over a court docket, Krause finds a case file she has been searching for. She gingerly unfolds an indictment from 1854, which begins to fill in the holes on a criminal case against a Lincoln client named Robert Sickler, who was charged with taking part in a mob riot. From the parched old indictment, Krause learns at last what Sickler was charged with and eventually convicted of doing.
“(He) did destroy four barrels of vinegar, three half-barrels of beer, three jars of pickles, one box of putty, 20 pounds of sugar, a keg of indigo, a keg of madder, whatever that is, and a keg of pepper,” she reads aloud.
Rifling through the rest of the case file, she shakes her head.
“Were they fined?” she wonders about Sickler and the other rioters. “Were they sent to jail? I don’t know. Sometimes the record tells you; sometimes it doesn’t. It’s hit or miss.”
Nearby, Schnell works on a jigsaw puzzle of his own, piecing together bits of a torn court summons for copying on the team’s portable copy machine. (Most of the documents stored in the team’s headquarters at the Old State Capitol are copies of the originals, although some originals have been donated to the collection.)
“Lucky for us, he left a huge paper trail,” says Schnell. “Unfortunately, the paper isn’t always in one piece.”
Once it’s put together, though, Schnell hopes the trail will lead other historians through significant and ordinary days in the life of Lincoln. Coupled with old newspaper reports, the courthouse papers he’s looking for could provide a glimpse of the popular circus of the day.
“People would come and watch the court proceedings as a form of entertainment,” says Schnell. “The newspaper would list who was in town for court that day, and people would go watch them. Afterward, (the court-watchers would) gather on the lawn for a debate on the issues between Lincoln and other attorneys. They had quite a fan following.”
In fact, Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had been a town square sideshow for years before their famous series of debates.
Now, scholars may be able to figure out what they were talking about.
“Until now, the day-by-day work has not been adequately covered, because we didn’t know how to get at it,” says author Donald.
“The legal papers have pulled together not merely the documents Lincoln wrote, not just his side of the cases, but the full report of every case Lincoln was involved in–what he says, what other lawyers said, the judges’ opinions. That has already taught us a lot.”
The most remarkable find was the only known transcript of a Lincoln trial, which offers almost a movie viewer’s perspective of the lawyer at work.
In most other cases, though, the newly collected documents contain puzzle pieces for historians to put together.
For instance, they offer new information about Lincoln’s “light-of-the-moon” case. For years, legend has held that in Beardstown, Lincoln once defended a rowdy young man charged with murder for hitting another guy with a slingshot and killing him in a drunken brawl.
Lincoln successfully argued that the defendant didn’t intentionally commit murder, the story goes, in a trial that hinged upon the testimony of an eyewitness who claimed he saw the whole 11 p.m. fight by the light of the moon.
Lincoln supposedly proved that the sky had been completely black after 8 o’clock that night. But that was about all people knew about the case.
Now, though, records reveal that there may have been a larger uprising beginning in the surrounding Mason County area at the time. The local docket book for the following court term is filled with indictments for rioting, offering new leads for researchers.
The documents may also shed new light on better-known cases, such as the famous one Lincoln won for a slave owner named Robert Matson in Coles County in 1847. Abolitionists had sued Matson, seeking freedom for his slaves.
Scholars are eager for any new information on that case, which seems to conflict with Lincoln’s earlier defense of a slave woman’s right to her freedom.
Yet taken as a whole, says Krause, the survey of Lincoln’s career seems to answer the larger question of what kind of lawyer he was.
“One biography said he never took a case for a client he thought was wrong,” says Krause. “We now know that’s not true. He took cases of people who gave him money, and he represented them well. He was a good lawyer.”
In fact, so aggressively did Lincoln research river currents for one client that, at first blush, he seemed to have employed an engineer to help him write about the case in technical jargon.
And yet the documents recorded in his hand grew remarkably more reader-friendly as his career progressed–further evidence of how his legal career prepared him for public life, says Donald.
“He had a couple of form books, and he followed them quite literally in the early cases,” says Donald. “They would read, `Whereas the party of the first part claims the party of the second part . . .’
“As Lincoln went on, he got the realization this didn’t go over with jurors. By the time of the 1850s, his briefs are straightforward, devoid of legalese.
“They read almost like the state papers he wrote as president.”
Judgment of Lincoln’s legal career will ultimately be left to those writers and researchers soon to begin their scrutiny of the legal papers. But historians on the project think the newly available facts will temper popular myth.
At the very least, one project flier promises, they’ll show “he could split hairs as well as rails.”
