Lincoln the Lawyer

2. The Brethren

Chapter Two The Brethren I n many ways, Lincoln enjoyed less camaraderie with his partners than he did with the Illinois bar in general. It was a large brotherhood. Springfield was home to eleven other lawyers when Lincoln first entered the profession. Most of the surrounding communities, if they were of any size or substance at all, sported at least one or two attorneys. Illinois was not unusual. Nationwide, the number of lawyers had increased dramatically since the Revolution, serving the needs of a growing populace and a booming commercial economy.1 They stood out, these men. Their little rectangles of advertising space in the hometown newspaper were accompanied by other advertisers who created, bought, or sold tangible things. Logan and Lincoln’s August 1841 advertisement in the Sangamon Journal, for example, appeared near Ethan T. Cabiness’s ad for his service as a portrait painter and a box for John F. Rague, “architect and Builder—manufacturer of Stucco Work.” Lincoln and Herndon’s ad in the 1850 Illinois Daily Journal lay beside that of Mr. C. C. Phelps, “manufacturer of a large assortment of chairs” (complete with a little woodcut engraving of a chair); Lowery, Lamb and Company’s ad for “Hollow Ware”—sugar kettles, lard kettles, “odd lids,” and skillets; and other ads for a Springfield lumber company, rope factory, leatherworks, and carpet maker.2 This was pre–service industry America, where most people produced , bought, and sold things and defined themselves by the quality and quantity of those things: chairs, hollow ware, carpets, or more often the crops they dug out of the ground. White men, most of them 34 . Lincoln the Lawyer farmers, knew who they were when they picked up, say, an ear of corn, shook the dirt off it, and saw healthy yellow kernels staring back at them. What stared back at Lincoln when he shook the dirt off his law practice and tried to get at what he contributed to society? What exactly did a lawyer create? Farmers had their crops, and merchants had the goods they bought and sold. Mill owners had their mills and what they ground, cattlemen their cows and the milk and beef they produced, raftsmen their rafts and the cargoes they carried. Even other professionals could point to something tangible. Ministers had the souls they saved, the reformed drunkard here, the baptism there. Doctors displayed their medicine and instruments. They could exhibit healed wounds, delivered babies, and saved lives. But lawyers? They made words, and lots of them. Words written in books like Blackstone’s Commentaries got Lincoln and his fellow lawyers into the law, and once there they found themselves awash in a sea of words—in casebooks, docket books, pleadings, interrogatories, court orders, and writs. There were also spoken words: negotiations between lawyers and their clients, trial arguments between lawyers and before judges,­ cross-examinations of witnesses, opening and closing arguments to juries. Attorneys differentiated among themselves based on what they could or could not do with words. An attorney could earn the respect of his peers with ­well-crafted pleadings and finely honed writs and interrogatories; and he could gain the respect of those outside the bar with a good jury argument or courtroom speech. Jacksonian America was fascinated by oratory. Debate societies sprang up in nearly every major American town; Lincoln made his first major speech before the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838 on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” “In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era,” began Lincoln’s speech, “We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.”3 The Gettysburg Address it was not; but flowery oratory was considered high entertainment in 1838, and a ­speech-making attorney could ride that skill into the statehouse or higher. Many did so, Lincoln included. But for every admiring gaze directed at lawyers who could invoke “the great journal of things happening under the sun,” there was also The Brethren . 35 a scowl, a shaken head, a muttered disdain. “A common man goes to a lawyer as a supernatural being, possessed as by inspiration, all knowledge of matters of law,” noted one ­early-nineteenth-century observer, “the ignorant have nearly the same...