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5 ReassessingLincoln’sLegalCareer Harold Holzer At the beginning of the historic 2008 presidential campaign, an aspirant for the Democratic nomination appealingly described himself as another “tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer.”1 Barack Obama’s declaration hardly represented the first or only example of a politician striving to identify himself with Abraham Lincoln. But it was rare indeed—perhaps unique— because then-Senator Obama called to mind not Lincoln the orator, writer, emancipator, or union-preserving commander in chief, but Lincoln the attorney—a profession that has hardly enjoyed universal approval in recent years (or even in Lincoln’s time). One might more rationally begin this essay by talking not about Lincoln himself, but about a movie—a movie that most lawyers probably know and hate. The Fortune Cookie is about an ambulance chaser, played by Walter Matthau, whose name in the film is “Whiplash Willie Gingrich.” Willie’s brother-in-law, Harry Hinkle, played of course by Jack Lemmon, works as a television cameraman at sports events. One Sunday, an errantly thrown football and a pass receiver crash into Harry and his camera. The next thing we know, he is in a hospital bed. But miraculously, except for some aches and pains, he’s ready to go home and forget that the accident ever happened. Enter Whiplash Willie. He tries to convince his brother-in-law to fake a serious injury so he can sue for millions. Harry is about to fall under Willie ’s spell, when he glimpses what is playing on TV: an old movie about that paragon of honesty, Abraham Lincoln. Worried that his brother-in-law is falling under the TV’s spell, Whiplash Willie steps in front of it and utters this classic line: “Abraham Lincoln. Great president. Lousy lawyer!” Most good laugh lines are based on an element of truth, or at least what 6 Harold Holzer passes for truth at the time. And this one is no exception—at the time. For generations, Americans were taught that our greatest president had first been one of our most hapless attorneys. He never finished a law book, never researched a case, seldom bothered to collect his fees, and spent most of the time in the squalid room that passed for his law office lying on a couch with his feet in the air, swapping stories with friends. It was almost as if the more mundane his law practice was made to seem, the more miraculous his rise to greatness would appear. Hagiographers could catapult him from the log cabin of his birth directly to the White House with hardly a professional rest stop in between. Movies like the one cited above fueled the fire of this log cabin-to-White House fairy tale. In the most influential of these, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, the future president is pretty indifferent about lawyering until an old friend’s son is unjustly accused of murder. In the film, Lincoln devotes most of the trial to insulting the prosecuting attorney,throwingpunchlinesatthejudge,orjokingwithanenthralledjury.2 But at the climactic moment, he produces a farmer’s almanac that reveals that there was no moon at all on the night that the prosecution’s key witness swore he saw the defendant kill the deceased from 150 yards away. Lincoln’s client is acquitted. Then Lincoln refuses his fee and goes wandering off on horseback, while the music of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” swells over the credits. So an entire generation was indoctrinated to perceive Lincoln’s entire career as an attorney-at-law. As Lincoln had modestly put it himself, in notes for a law lecture he never gave: “I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.”3 Then, suddenly, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s—in the midst of a great deal of revisionism about Lincoln—an entirely new image of his law practice suddenly began taking shape, identifying him as a ruthless and enormously successful corporate attorney. Writers in the anti-Lincoln tradition have kept the notion alive ever since.4 In this re-perception, Lincoln seemed anything but a simple country lawyer. He was portrayed instead as one of the sharpest legal minds in the West, and unscrupulous as well. He represented the railroads in their rape of the prairie in order to build unsightly railroad tracks that despoiled the landscape, or...

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