Lincoln as Hero

2. Lincoln as a Lawyer: The Foundation of a Hero

13 c h a p t e r t w o Lincoln as a L aw yer: The Foundation of a Hero It was not an accident that Lincoln became a hero or a mythic legend. His career served as an opportunity to sow the seeds of leadership that he collected through his observation and study of others during his childhood. Before he was president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer, and before he was a lawyer, he was a politician. The combination of these professions—which he practiced simultaneously—helped further shape Lincoln into the ultimate lawyer-statesman who, as the nation’s sixteenth president, would lead the nation through civil war, save the Union from disintegration , and eliminate slavery in America. Heroes, like great lawyers, need the ability to stay the course even when they stand alone, as Lincoln so often did. Attorneys must exercise scholarship and common sense when standing up for their clients. They have a duty and, in fact, a professional obligation to clearly articulate their arguments, which ultimately lead to the decisions that help shape and define how people in communities live, how they interact with one another, and how they should conduct themselves in their transactions and in their daily lives. Lincoln practiced law for twenty-four years, from 1837 until his presidency began in 1861. He embodied what makes a great lawyer. During his quarter-century career as a lawyer, Lincoln honed his political skills. He learned the art of debate, the weight of words, and the skill of negotiating. As a result, he was sharper than John C. Calhoun 14 | Lincoln as a Lawyer in understanding the foundation of democratic political theory; he could more than hold his own in the debates with Stephen A. Douglas , the political “Little Giant,” who would “blow out the moral lights around us” with the extension of slavery in the territories, and he was more than a match for the aging Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Roger B. Taney—majority author of the infamous Dred Scott decision with its derisive comment that the black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”1 No one knows precisely when Lincoln first decided to become a lawyer. His legal education was largely the product of self-study and all the years he spent as a pioneer child reading and absorbing anything he could get his hands on. After five years living on Knob Creek, Lincoln’s family moved to Indiana, and legend has it that he read his first law book, The Revised Laws of Indiana, while still a youth living in that state. Ironically, Lincoln’s first exposure to the law may have been as a criminal defendant, when he was charged in Kentucky with operating a ferryboat without a license. The charges arose from transporting passengers on his flatboat from the shore to awaiting passenger ferries on the Ohio River. Ultimately, the magistrate presiding over the case dismissed the charges against him after consulting the Kentucky statute and determining that Lincoln’s boat was not a ferryboat under the law.2 The experience illustrated for Lincoln the liberating power from knowledge of the law and likely influenced his later decision to study law. At the age of twenty-one, his family relocated to Illinois, where his training took root. Rather than roaming the woods, he began spending time in courthouses at Rockport and Booneville, watching cases such as quarrels over missing livestock, suits for slander in which women defended themselves against charges of prostitution, disputes over land, disputes over bad debts, and disputes among neighbors. His time as an onlooker in the courtroom offered not only entertainment but also great edification. In some ways, lawyers were Lincoln’s heroes, giving the prairie boy a way out of the hard labor that would otherwise have become his responsibility. Lincoln learned the law by reading legal treatises such as Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Chitty on Pleading, Greenleaf on Evidence, and Story on Equity. “Get the books and read, Lincoln as a Lawyer | 15 read, read, is the main thing” he would tell a young correspondent who wanted to be a lawyer. He also gained practical legal experience by serving as a lawyer’s apprentice. After submitting a certificate of good character—Illinois had no bar examination requirement at the...