Lincoln's Ladder to the Presidency: The Eighth Judicial Circuit

3. Purely and Entirely a Case Lawyer

49 3. Purely and Entirely a Case Lawyer z In terms of time, energy, and preoccupation, Lincoln’s law practice dominated his life. He was a hard-working lawyer, handling a wide variety of cases. Lincoln’s practice reflects no agenda, causes, or philosophy. As Herndon put it, “he was purely and entirely, a case lawyer.”1 Generally, he took a case simply to earn a living and represent his client’s side. Lincoln would take whatever side hired him, without regard to the nature of the cause. In this sense, Lincoln answered the lawyer’s highest calling, to honestly represent the client and let the court concern itself with the morality of the parties’ positions. This admirable tendency is best exemplified by his cases involving the two principal social issues of the day, slavery and alcohol. In his casework, he displayed the moral detachment and objectivity required by the conscientious lawyer’s duty to his profession even though he had strong personal feelings against both slavery and alcohol. Race In 1864, Lincoln said, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. And I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”2 This testimony is supported by that of his contemporaries over his entire adult life and also by his private correspondence. Cousin John Hanks claimed that Lincoln was deeply offended by the New Orleans slave markets when they visited that city in 1831.3 New Salem’s Caleb Carman wrote, “Lincoln regarded slavery as an enormous curse on the land.” Attorney and political ally Joseph Gillespie noted that Lincoln viewed slavery as 50 Lincoln and the Circuit an “enormous national crime.” Circuit associate Samuel Parks, a lawyer from Logan County, recalled Lincoln’s intense hatred of the institution. John T. Stuart cited the political parting of the ways over slavery while the two rode the circuit. Democrat attorney and circuit adversary Orlando Ficklin described Lincoln as “conscientiously opposed to slavery all his life.”4 In 1842, Lincoln visited the slaveholding family of his friend Joshua Speed near Louisville, Kentucky. During this trip, he encountered the transport of twelve slaves chained together on his river boat on the Ohio River. Upon his return, in his thank-you note to Speed’s sister Mary, he wrote of the incident, describing the slaves as “strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot line.”5 A decade later, still haunted by the scene, he wrote Speed, “[T]hat sight was a continual torment to me.”6 In the case of In Re Bryant, this deep hatred of slavery clashed with the moral neutrality reflected in his practice throughout his career. Known as the Matson slave case, it is perhaps his least understood and most controversial case.7 It is the only case involving the issue of slavery in which Lincoln represented a slave owner. Lincoln’s client was Robert Matson, a debt-ridden, slaveholding farmer from Kentucky, who lived with his mistress and their four children on his farm in Coles County, Illinois, while his wife and her children lived on his Kentucky farm. In 1845, he brought five slaves, Jane Bryant and her four children, and her freedman husband, Anthony, to Matson’s farm in Illinois. Although Illinois prohibited slavery, bringing slaves into the state in transit or temporarily did not free them. They had to be domiciled in the state to be freed by their presence in Illinois. Upon learning that she and her children were about to be returned to Kentucky, perhaps to be divided as a family by sale, Jane and her children escaped with Anthony’s help. They were captured under the Fugitive Slave Law and held in custody on a petition by Matson in fall 1847. Two abolitionists hired attorneys Ficklin and Charles Constable, both known to be proslavery, to file a writ of habeas corpus to free the mother and her children. Usher Linder, as attorney for Matson, engaged Lincoln to assist him to legally force the slaves back into bondage in Kentucky. Matson had annually announced his intention to return these slaves to Kentucky to maintain their slave status. Lincoln relied on these self-serving statements to prove Jane’s and her children’s in transitu status to sustain Matson’s rights 51 Purely and Entirely a Case Lawyer to retain his human property. Lincoln lost the case when the judges freed...