Although historians have reviewed, analyzed and critiqued in great detail Lincoln’s presidency, relatively few have focused upon his legal career.1 But for most of his working life, Lincoln toiled as a lawyer. Based upon the Lincoln Legal Papers database, which is publicly available, we can state confidently how Lincoln and his partners handled at least 5,173 cases. We know now that Lincoln and his partners took more than 1,000 cases to jury verdicts.2 As a lawyer, he rode the Eighth Judicial Circuit, traveling with other lawyers and judges and sharing not only a room, but often sleeping four in a bed.
Lincoln handled all kinds of cases, for all kinds of people and businesses. He is sometimes identified as a railroad lawyer, but he regularly represented six railroads (including Illinois Central) and he regularly sued seven.3 There weren’t many retainers in those days, causing his third law partner to remark that “the greatest as well as the least had to join in the general scramble for practice.”4 Sound familiar?
Lincoln was also an excellent appellate lawyer. He and his partners handled more than 400 appeals to the Illinois Supreme Court, and in nearly 200 of those appeals, they were first retained for the appeal.5
In an address he gave in 1838 to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, at the (now inconceivable) age of 28, he offered an early glimpse of his concerns about the law. “We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.”
In his call to remind people about the unfinished work of those who fought for freedom in founding our country just 50 years earlier, Lincoln confirmed his belief in the importance of the rule of law. He feared what he saw as: “the increasing disregard for law, the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mob, for the executive ministers of justice.”6 Lincoln was, of course, referring to recent incidents of civil disorder – from burning churches, ravaging provision-stores, throwing printing presses into rivers, shooting editors, and hanging gamblers in Mississippi and blacks suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection.7 As a lawyer, he knew that “the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law . . . till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.”
Lincoln viewed his profession as a call to represent clients faithfully but also to do public service. In this regard, many have commented that he possessed a service mentality;8 and while he was ready to represent any client, he also drew upon his love of the rule of law as a springboard for public action. While engaged in the practice of the law, Lincoln ran and served four terms in the Illinois General Assembly. He also served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847-1849), went back to practice law in Springfield, later became President and signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
This view that lawyers should perform some public service is also what drives lawyers 150 years later to continue this tradition. Today, for example, lawyers provide free representation to families facing foreclosure, advocate for the civil rights of immigrants as well as those detained at Guantánamo Bay, and helped the victims of the crash of flight 3407 in Buffalo. Lincoln’s great legacy as a lawyer is to remind us that the work is still unfinished and the law is still a higher calling.
President, New York State Bar Association
Endnotes:
1. Lincoln’s litigation files were first completely collected in 2000. See Lincoln Legal Papers Project, sponsored by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, which is available online at www.lawpracticeofabrahamlincoln.org.
2. M.E. Steiner, “Does Lawyer Lincoln Matter?” Texas Bar Journal February 2009 [hereinafter "Steiner"].
3. Id. at 102.
4. W.H. Herndon & J.W. Weik, “Herndon’s Lincoln,” 124 (1889).
5. Steiner at 102.
6. A. Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” Jan. 27, 1838.
7. Id.
8. Steiner at 102.
