Abraham Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of America's Greatest President

A. Lincoln, Debtor-Creditor Lawyer

81 A.Lincoln,Debtor-CreditorLawyer Roger Billings Introduction Biographers of Abraham Lincoln’s legal career tend to focus on his most famous cases. The Rock Island Bridge, Illinois Central Railroad, McCormick Reaper, Duff Armstrong, and Matson slave cases are well known. Little attention is paid, however, to the routine debtor-creditor cases that were the bread and butter of Lincoln’s practice. One can imagine Lincoln’s arrival at a county courthouse in the Illinois Eighth Judicial Circuit where potential clients were waiting to hire him to defend a debtor or collect on a note. The Lincoln Legal Papers bring to light the importance of debtorcreditor cases in Lincoln’s law practice, cases he needed to make a living, but which were often routine and boring.1 Debtor-creditor work required a minimum of the trial work Lincoln loved and a maximum of document drafting. When Lincoln did sue on a note, the chances of the debtor showing up in court were slim, and Lincoln’s court appearance often resulted in a default judgment. Putting the spotlight on Lincoln’s debtor-creditor cases leads to a more balanced portrait of Lincoln’s career while revealing the everyday problems caused by the shortage of money on the frontier. Lincoln’s work in the debtor-creditor field occurred during tumultuous developments in the U.S. economy, when banks were not capable of supporting business growth, and trade was carried on with personal notes rather than bank loans or the sale of stocks and bonds. Thanks to the Lincoln Legal Papers, we can study an Illinois circuit lawyer as he practiced during the panic-stricken 1830s and the railroad-building and corporation-forming 1840s and 1850s. We find in Lincoln a leading lawyer who excelled in litigation but was relegated mostly to debtor-creditor work. 82 Roger Billings Was Lincoln a Specialist? Lawyers in the small county seats on the Eighth Judicial Circuit had too little business to practice law full time, let alone specialize. They were forced to supplement their legal work with other work, such as farming.2 Lincoln, on the other hand, practiced in the state capital, where he could make a living as a full-time lawyer, provided he was willing to take any kind of case. Restriction of a law practice to one kind of case would have been impossible, although the Lincoln Legal Papers show that Lincoln had more debtor-creditor cases than any other kind. Specialization as a debtor-creditor lawyer was not unknown. Lincoln’s great patron, Judge David Davis, had a so-called collection practice in Bloomington, Illinois, before he became a judge on the Eighth Circuit.3 The Lincoln Legal Papers reveal the breadth of Lincoln’s debtor-creditor practice. If one clicks on the term “Business” in the index, a table titled “A Statistical Portrait: Common Subjects” appears. The editors developed the table as a general guide to a variety of topics within his legal practice. It shows in descending order of frequency those topics that describe a hundred or more Lincoln cases. The most common topic assigned to Lincoln’s cases is “Debtor and Creditor,” with 3,145 cases, followed by “Contracts” (subentry: “Breach of Contract.”) with 2,322, and “Negotiable Instruments” (subentry: “Promissory Notes.”) with 1,892. Skipping the fourth-largest topic, “Real Property,” the fifth-largest is “Default Judgment” with 1,351 cases. A default judgment is most often a judgment on an overdue mortgage or promissory note, in other words, a debtor-creditor case. Contracts, too, frequently involve the creation of debt. Thus, four out of the five largest topics reflect Lincoln’s huge debtor-creditor practice. In contrast, there are only 821 cases dealing with “estates,” 318 dealing with “criminal offenses,” and 110 dealing with “divorce.” Under another index heading, “A Statistical Portrait: Legal Actions,” the editors make the point even clearer. In a pie chart called “Debtrelated Actions Compared to Other Actions by Division,” Lincoln’s practice is broken down into “Debt-related actions (62%),” “Other common law actions (21%),” “Other chancery actions (17%),” and “Other probate actions (1%).” For the first time, the Lincoln Legal Papers clearly document that Lincoln, like his contemporaries, concentrated on debtor-creditor law. Lincoln himself became a plaintiff when his clients neglected to pay his fee. In most of Lincoln’s debtor-creditor cases the fee was about $10, a A. Lincoln, Debtor-Creditor Lawyer 83 relatively small...