Abraham Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of America’s Greatest President eds. by Roger Billings, Frank J. Williams (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 80 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Abraham Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of America’s Greatest President Roger Billings and Frank J. Williams, eds. In this day and age, publishing houses are loath to publish edited volumes. Under most circumstances, volumes of collected essays are expensive to produce and difficult to sell. Not so in the Lincoln field. Since 2007, at least a dozen volumes of collected essays have been published about our sixteenth president’s life and legacy (many journals and magazines have also devoted entire issues to him). The fact that publishers are willing to print these collections—when they are unwilling to publish many other edited volumes—is a testament to the enduring relevance of Lincoln to modern America and the world. This particular edited volume is the result of an incredible amount of archival digging. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project has done a remarkable job turning up significant new Lincoln materials throughout the United States. The project’s first major output was the publication of the four-volume The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases (2008) and The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition, a DVD-ROM produced by the University of Illinois Press. The authors in this collection have mined these newly available sources to reveal more about Lincoln’s life as a lawyer than we previously had known. Abraham Lincoln, Esq. opens with an enlightening and entertaining essay by Harold Holzer that traces the ways that Lincoln’s legal career has been portrayed in history and popular culture. Holzer convincingly argues that it is important to understand this aspect of Lincoln’s life because it “informed nearly every aspect of his future, a future that became inseparable from the nation’s future” (8). Whatever the issue—emancipation, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, ordering a blockade, or calling up the militia—President Lincoln made decisions and crafted arguments in lawyerly fashion. His training in the law, in short, was preparation for politics and ultimately the presidency. The next three essays—by Frank J. Williams, Mark E. Steiner, and Brian Dirck—further explore why Lincoln’s career as a lawyer matters. Using anecdotes and many well-known quotations, Williams argues that Lincoln possessed the characteristics and virtues of a “good lawyer.” He was honest, industrious, meticulous, confident, a skilled rhetorician, courageous, zealous, persistent , fair-minded, and humble. Steiner shows how Lincoln, as a Whig lawyer, sought to resolve disputes peacefully and if possible without litigation. Dirck’s excellent essay argues that Lincoln’s legal career helped prepare him for the difficult problems he faced as wartime president. Most of the cases Lincoln took as an attorney involved debt collection ; others involved divorce, custody battles, libel, and other types of litigation. “Day in and day out,” argues Dirck, “Lincoln stared at the heat and friction created by the failings of human beings at war with one another. In a sense, he witnessed over five thousand little civil wars before he got to the big one in 1861.” These experiences were “a great education into the ways people interacted with one another” that helped Lincoln learn “the value of negotiation, accommodation, and compromise” (75-76). The middle section of the volume examines Lincoln’s law practice in Illinois. In his first of three essays, Roger Billings describes Lincoln’s “bread and butter” cases between debtors and creditors; in his second, Billings describes Lincoln’s real estate cases. John A. Lupton analyzes Lincoln’s abilities as a legal writer. Using several little-known cases, Lupton, who worked with the Lincoln Legal Papers Project for almost two decades, BOOK REVIEWS SUMMER 2011 81 finds that Lincoln was a clear, fair-minded, and thoughtful legal writer. “In a surprisingly large number of cases,” writes Lupton, “Lincoln wrote very balanced [jury] instructions , almost giving the other side of the case as much weight as his own” (126). Two essays in this section explore Lincoln’s ethics as a lawyer. The first, by William T. Ellis and Billie J. Ellis Jr., argues that Lincoln’s “exercise of virtue and conscience did not prevent [him] from being a fierce advocate” and having a “lucrative” career (139). By...