Lincoln the Lawyer

8. Grease

Chapter Eight Grease A s storytelling goes, it all comes down to a matter of metaphors. Various people have applied different metaphors to Lincoln the lawyer. He has been a giant (or, for some critics, pygmy) of the Illinois bar; a champion of freedom (or, for some critics, its nemesis) and future emancipator in the courtroom; a frontier philosopher; a moral redeemer of a suspect profession; and a ­keen-eyed student of human nature. Each of these metaphors contains a kernel of truth. But there is a dimension of Lincoln’s law practice—the most important dimension, because it was so prevalent—that none get quite right. Those who would describe Lincoln in terms of a towering professional or moral stature within the Illinois bar overlook the ­day-in, ­day-out grind, the grittiness of his legal career. This oversight is rooted in the post-1865 reminiscences, stories related by men and women who would not have recorded their recollections of Lincoln for posterity’s sake in the first place had they not possessed the a priori assumption that Lincoln was special. Moreover, his admirers often seem to fear even a suggestion of ordinariness where Lincoln is concerned, wishing to avoid the impropriety of shrinking his appropriately lofty reputation in American history. But taking into account not only the reminiscences but also the court records of Lincoln’s more grubby cases—the ­debt-collection work, the minor lawsuits over smaller business and personal transactions , the ­small-scale criminal and civil matters—what sort of metaphor might describe the Lincoln law practice as a whole? Grease . 155 There are of course multiple possibilities. I would suggest that an appropriate metaphor is this: it taught him about the value of grease— that unglamorous, often overlooked but vital substance that lubricates and reduces friction to acceptable levels, that slips between the cogs and devices of machines and allows continuous movement without malfunction. Lincoln’s age sorely needed grease. A literal imagination can see it: the hard iron wheels of the Market Revolution, burred and rough in their newness, throwing sparks and heat from the clashes between old and new ways of farming, old and new ways of moving around, old and new ways of making and selling and exporting. Being so abrasive and new, the wheels threaten to come unbolted from their tracks and run amok, destroying traditional lives, values, and ways of doing things in their path, replaced by God knows what. Honor found itself in competition with commerce, businessmen strapped for cash cast worried glances over their shoulders at creditors, who wondered whether they would be paid so they might in turn meet obligations to their creditors, who were themselves debtors to yet other creditors. Teamsters were vexed about business taken from them on rivers and canals, where flat boatmen scowled at steamboat captains, who in turn scowled at railroad men, who in turn scowled at all those strangers catching rides westward to communities where people of different morals and codes of conduct mixed with other strangers to create all manner of violence, perfidy, and shame—a lot of worry and doubt here, a lot of heat and friction. People with a religious bent turned to revival meetings and Bibles to calm their fears. People with a political bent formed parties designed to do much the same thing through the ballot box or legislation . Reformers created movements that agitated for (and sometimes achieved) changes in troubled social milieus like temperance, insane asylums, prisons, and prostitution, and so eased somewhat the difficult transitions from traditional to modern lifestyles. Americans had a lot of different ways to slap on some grease and quiet the screeching. Abraham Lincoln the attorney applied his own form of grease, in a multitude of visible and not so visible ways. Debt—its avoidance or, more often, collection—was Lincoln’s primary function as a lawyer, and it is the arena in which his role as a lubricator is most clearly evident. Choose any case at random from the thousands of cases he litigated during his ­quarter-century at the 156 . Lincoln the Lawyer bar, and chances are that case will involve a litigant who owed someone money, goods, or services. Between June and December of 1850, for example—roughly the midway point in Lincoln’s law career—he appeared as attorney of record in ­thirty-four cases: twenty involved some form of debt relief, from cash...