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115 6 Abraham Lincoln: The Making of the Attorney-in-Chief Frank J. Williams America’s sixteenth president is best known for his political career, but his quarter-century practice of the law prepared him for his ultimate role as the attorney-in-chief in the executive mansion. His political skills were honed in his training as a lawyer and the practice of the law in Illinois. In many ways, the issues of slavery and secession were legal issues, and he was prepared to tackle them based on his training and the practice of the law that took place within the context of his emerging political career. As a result, he was sharper than John C. Calhoun in understanding the foundation of democratic political theory, he could more than hold his own in the series of debates with the political Little Giant, Stephen A. Douglas, and he similarly was more than a match for the aging chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney. In order to put Abraham Lincoln into the context of his time, we must focus on his life not only as a lawyer but, more specifically, as a circuit-riding lawyer in central Illinois. The time and the place both contributed to his development as a man—and as a lawyer. This chapter explores Lincoln’s legal education and training; his relationship with colleagues; his law practice; and the effect these men and these experiences had on his life, not only in Illinois but, eventually, in the White House. Becoming a Lawyer and a Local Politician Unlike most people then and now, Abraham Lincoln virtually became a lawyer and a politician at the same time. No one knows precisely when he first toyed with the notion of becoming a lawyer. Legend has it that he read 116 Frank J. Williams his first law book, The Revised Laws of Indiana, while still a youth living in that state, and he is believed to have hung around the tobacco-splattered log courthouses at Rockport and Booneville, watching and listening as country lawyers harangued juries, cross-examined witnesses, and bantered with the judge.1 Most of the cases Lincoln witnessed might seem mundane to us—quarrels over missing livestock, suits for slander, disputes over land, bad debts, and the like. But in Lincoln’s time, the courtroom offered the onlooker both entertainment and edification—qualities otherwise in short supply in the Indiana backwoods. And, for all their bluster and strut, country lawyers were, by and large, bright and resourceful men, among the first Lincoln ever saw who prospered on their wits rather than by hard physical labor. Lincoln may have been impressed by the lawyers he saw and heard, but he did not immediately seek to emulate them. With less than a year’s formal schooling, he evidently did not think himself up to the rigors of studying law, and over the next few years—first in Indiana, then in New Salem, Illinois—he seems to have tried almost everything else. While at New Salem, he held at least ten different jobs—from store owner to tender of a whiskey still. Through it all, however, he retained his interest in law: he served on juries, appeared as a witness, wrote out complaints, mortgages, deeds, and other legal instruments for his neighbors, even argued a few cases for free before his friend Bowling Green, the local justice of the peace. Nonetheless, Lincoln was a victorious politician before he seriously began the study of law. While serving in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War and when campaigning for the state legislature in 1834, Lincoln became acquainted with John T. Stuart, a shrewd Springfield attorney who was soon to become the Whig floor leader. It was apparently Stuart who finally persuaded Lincoln that he could master the law, that knowledge of it would make him a better legislator and an abler politician. It is believed that the first law book he actually studied was Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.2 In the 1830s, most American lawyers did not attend law school; indeed, there were only six law schools in the entire country, and all but one were east of the Appalachians. Instead, most would-be attorneys “read law” in a more or less supervised way in the office of a practicing lawyer. Lincoln, however, did it all on his own, poring over books borrowed from Stuart or bought at auction, reading long...

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