Lincoln the Lawyer

Conclusion

Conclusion L et’s take Billy Herndon at his word, and imagine that Lincoln really did want nothing more than a return to his law practice at the end of his second term; a return to the rusty shingle, “hanging there, undisturbed . . . as if nothing had ever happened,” including John Wilkes Booth’s bullet. This would probably have occurred sometime during the spring of 1869, after he had been replaced by the voters the previous November and remained until March to escort the new president to his ­swearing-in ceremony. Mary later recalled that she, Lincoln, and the boys planned to travel to Europe “when he was through with his Presidential terms,” and perhaps they do so before returning home.1 Then Lincoln, Mary, and Tad (and perhaps Robert) board a train and make their way back to Springfield. The town hosts the inevitable homecoming celebration; and after he shakes many hands and the­ well-wishers finally go away, former president Abraham Lincoln again stuffs papers into his hat, opens the door with the brass nameplate, and heads toward his downtown office. He is now sixty years old, and maybe he calculates that, if the war­ hasn’t aged him too much, he has five, maybe ten good years of law left in him. He needs those years, too. He was not a rich man when he left for Washington, D.C. (one wonders if he could really have afforded a trip abroad), and he would not have been rich when he returned. “We will go back to Illinois,” he told Mary, “and I will open a ­law-office in Springfield or Chicago, and practice law, and at least do enough to help give us a livelihood.”2 174 . Lincoln the Lawyer Perhaps he is able to parlay his fame into a higher income bracket within the law: a judgeship, maybe even at the appellate level. He had been a judge often enough in his circuit days, filling in for David Davis, so the idea was plausible. But then again, maybe he ­doesn’t really want a seat on the bench. Normally not a nostalgic man, Lincoln nevertheless may pine a bit for the old days of the “mud circuit” and its camaraderie. Mary also later recalled that, on the day Lincoln was killed, he ruminated wistfully at length on his “law office, the courtroom, the green bag for his briefs and law papers,” and most of all “his adventures when riding the circuit.”3 But it is not “as if nothing had ever happened,” not nearly so. David Davis is gone, off to the U.S. Supreme Court where Lincoln put him in 1862. Henry Whitney is practicing law in Kansas. Leonard Swett is in Chicago, and Ward Hill Lamon is back in Virginia. His office is different now, too. Billy Herndon will eventually quit the law in disgust, restlessness and the whiskey slowly getting the better of him, so that maybe Lincoln is forced to go looking for a new junior partner. The Old Eighth has changed, as well. This would probably not have been quite so disconcerting—the circuit’s borders underwent constant tinkering throughout Lincoln’s antebellum years, as the legislature added and subtracted counties. But as litigation in a complex world becomes increasingly more complex itself, and as the state grows and develops and settles in, the days of the itinerant circuit lawyer handling cases with whatever books he could stuff into his saddlebags are numbered. The cases are different, too. As time goes on, there would likely be fewer debt collections, and fewer promissory notes, as an increasingly sophisticated economy becomes more ­cash-rich and less prone to using IOUs as a crude form of currency. If Lincoln practices law long enough, he may start to see the rudiments of specialized debt services appear: collection firms and the primitive attempts at a ­credit-rating system. Eventually, new bankruptcy legislation will make that option again available to harassed debtors. In any event, he is likely to see fewer notes crossing his desk. At the same time, maybe he sees more lucrative business in the form of ongoing railroad litigation. The practice had been pointed in that general direction anyway before he left for the White House. Possibly Lincoln finds himself searching for a niche, some area within Conclusion . 175 the law that he can make his own in his twilight years. As litigation...