Life of Abraham Lincoln Part 1

Life of Abraham Lincoln.

by John Hugh Bowers.

The story of Lincoln, revealing how one American, by his own honest efforts, rose from the most humble beginning to the most high station of honor and worth, has inspired millions and will inspire millions more. The log cabin in which he was born, the ax with which he split the rails, the few books with which he got the rudiments of an education, the light of pine knots by which he studied, the flatboat on which he made the long trip to New Orleans, the slave mart at sight of which his sympathetic soul revolted against the inst.i.tution of human slavery-these are all fraught with intense interest as the rude forces by which he slowly builded his great character.

Great suffering taught him great sympathy. His great sympathy for men gave him great influence over men. As a lonely motherless little boy living in the pitiless poverty of the backwoods he learned both humility and appreciation. Then from a gentle stepmother he learned the beauty of kindness.

As a clerk in a small store that failed, as a defeated candidate for the legislature, as Captain in the Black Hawk War, as student of Law in his leisure moments, as partner in a small store that failed, as Postmaster at the little village of New Salem, as Deputy Surveyor of Sangamon County, as successful candidate for the legislature, as member of the legislature and as country lawyer, he was learning to love his fellow men and to get along well with them, while keeping his own conscience and building a reputation for honesty. When as a member of Congress and as a successful lawyer his proved ability brings him a measure of security and comfort he is not elated. And when his fellow men, reciprocating his great love for them, and manifesting their confidence in his integrity, make him President of the Republic he still remains the humble brother of the common people.

But fate did not decree that he should enjoy the honors he had so richly deserved. The White House was not a resting place for him. In the hour of his election the Nation for which he prayed was divided and the men that he loved as brothers were rus.h.i.+ng headlong toward fratricidal war. He who loved peace was to see no more peace except just a few hopeful days before his own tragic end. He who hated war must captain his dear people through their long and mighty struggle and share in his gentle heart their great sacrifices. As the kindly harmonizer of jealous rivals, as the unifier of a distracted people, as the sagacious leader of discordant factions, he proved his true greatness in the hours of the nation's peril. In many a grave crisis when it seemed that the Confederacy would win and the Union be lost the almost superhuman wisdom of Lincoln would see the one right way through the storm. For good reasons, the followers of Lincoln came to believe that he was being guided by G.o.d Himself to save the Union.

The genealogists of Lincoln trace his ancestry back to Virginia and to Ma.s.sachusetts and to those Lincolns who came from England about 1635. The name Abraham recurs frequently among the Lincolns and our President seems to have been named after his grandfather Abraham who was killed by the Indians in Kentucky in 1778, when Thomas, the father of the President, was only ten years of age. Thus left fatherless at a tender age in a rude pioneer community, Thomas did not even learn to read. He worked about as best he could to live, became a carpenter, and in 1806 married his cousin, Nancy Hanks, the daughter of Joseph Hanks and his wife, Nannie s.h.i.+pley, a sister of Thomas Lincoln's mother, Mary.

The first child of Thomas Lincoln and his wife Nancy was a daughter. Our President, the second child, was born February 12, 1809, in a log cabin, three miles from Hodgensville, then Hardin, now LaRue County, Kentucky. When little Abraham was seven years old his father moved to Indiana and took up a claim near Gentryville, Spencer County, and built a rude shelter of unhewn logs without a floor, the large opening protected only by hanging skins. In this discomfort they lived for a year, when they erected a log cabin. There was plenty of game, but otherwise the fare was very poor and the life was hard. In 1818 little Abraham's mother, delicate, refined, pathetic and too frail for such rude life, sickened and felt that the end was near. She called her little children to her bed of leaves and skins and told them to "love their kindred and wors.h.i.+p G.o.d," and then she died and left them only the memory of her love.

Thomas Lincoln made a rude coffin himself, but there were no ceremonies at that most pathetic funeral when he laid his young wife in her desolate grave in the forest. Little Lincoln was nine years old, and the mystery of death, the pitiless winter, the lone grave, the deep forest-s.h.i.+vering with his sister in the cold cabin-it all made a deep impression on the sensitive boy.

Late in the year 1819 Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky, and there courted and married a widow named Sarah Buck Johnston, who had once been his sweetheart. She brought with her some household goods and her own three children. She dressed the forlorn little Lincolns in some of the clothing belonging to her children. She was described as tall, straight as an Indian, handsome, fair, talkative and proud. Also she had the abundant strength for hard labor. She and little Abraham learned to love each other dearly.

Abraham went to school in all less than a year, but this good stepmother encouraged him to study at home and he read every book he heard of within a circuit of many miles. He read the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Murray's English Reader, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, A History of the United States, Weem's Life of Was.h.i.+ngton and the Revised Statutes of Indiana. He studied by the fire-light and practiced writing with a pen made from a buzzard's quill dipped in ink made from brier roots. He practiced writing on the subjects of Temperance, Government, and Cruelty to Animals. The unkindness so often common to those frontier folks shocked his sensitive soul. He practiced speaking by imitating the itinerant preacher and by telling stories to any who would give him an audience. He walked fifteen miles to Boonville to attend court and listen to the lawyers.

At nineteen he was six feet and two inches tall, weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, had long arms and legs, slender body, large and awkward hands and feet, but not a large head. He is pictured as wearing c.o.o.n-skin cap, linsey-woolsey s.h.i.+rt, and buckskin breeches that were often too short. He said that his father taught him to work but never taught him to love it-but he did work hard and without complaining. He was said to do much more work than any ordinary man at splitting rails, chopping, mowing, ploughing, doing everything that he was asked to do with all his might. It was at this age that he went on the first trip with a flat boat down to New Orleans. This was an interesting adventure; and there had been sorrows, also; his sister Sarah had married and died in child-birth.

In the spring of 1830 the roving spirit of Thomas Lincoln felt the call of the West and they set out for Illinois. John Hanks met them five miles northwest of Decatur in Macon County, where on a bluff overlooking the muddy Sangamon they built a cabin, split rails, fenced fifteen acres and broke the prairie. Young Lincoln was twenty-one and free, but he remained at home during the summer, helping his father and his devoted step-mother to establish their new home. The following winter he split the historic rails for Mrs. Nancy Miller-"four hundred for every yard of jeans dyed with walnut juice necessary to make him a pair of trowsers."

In the spring, a pioneer adventurer, Denton Offut, engaged Abraham, with Hanks and one other helper, to take a boat load of provisions to New Orleans, for the wages of fifty cents a day and a bonus of sixty dollars for the three. This and the preceding trip down the river gave Lincoln the sight of slavery which caused him to say, "If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I'll hit it hard."

New Salem was a very small village destined to be of only a few years duration. Here Offut erected a small general store and placed Lincoln in charge while Offut having other unimportant business ventures went about the community bragging that his clerk, Lincoln, was the best man in the country and would some day be president of the United States. Offut's boasting attracted the attention of the Clary's Grove boys, who lived near New Salem, and they determined upon a wrestling match between Lincoln and their champion bully, Jack Armstrong. Lincoln did his best to avoid it, and a prominent citizen stopped the encounter. The result was that Armstrong and his gang became Lincoln's friends and later gave him the most hearty political support at times when the support of just such men as Armstrong was an important political a.s.set.

During this time Lincoln continued his studies, and feeling the need to study English Grammar he ransacked the neighborhood until he found trace of one some six miles away and walked over to buy or borrow it; brought it back in triumph and studied it exhaustively.

About this time we have some narratives concerning his honesty that compare favorably with the story of Was.h.i.+ngton and the cherry tree. While he was keeping Offut's store a woman overpaid him four pence and when he found the mistake he walked several miles that evening to return the pennies before he slept. On another occasion in selling a half pound of tea he discovered that he had used too small a weight and he hastened forth to make good the deficiency. Indeed one of his chief traits all his life was absolute honesty.

He was chosen to pilot the first steamboat, the Talisman, up the Sangamon. At Springfield they held a banquet to celebrate the event but Lincoln was not invited because they only invited the "gentlemen" and Lincoln was only the pilot.

He spent all his spare time studying Law or History, and had been from his youth an admirer of the romantic figure of Henry Clay. He adopted most of Clay's principles as his own, especially that of the gradual, compensated emanc.i.p.ation of slaves, to which ideal he clung all his life. With such interests, it was natural that when Offut failed and his job as store clerk ended, he should announce himself as a candidate for the legislature. His campaign was interrupted by the Black Hawk War. Lincoln volunteered. The Clary's Grove boys enlisted and elected him captain. He showed his kindness and courage when during the campaign he found his whole command, mutinous and threatening; and facing them he placed his own body between them and a poor friendly Indian, who, with safe conduct from General Ca.s.s, had taken refuge in camp. He saw no fighting and killed no Indians but was long afterward able to convulse Congress with a humorous account of his "war record." The war ended in time for him to get back and stump the county just before the election in which he was defeated.

In partners.h.i.+p with a man named Berry they bought out the little store in New Salem; but Berry drank and neglected the business. Lincoln was strictly temperate, but he spent all his spare moments studying Blackstone, a copy of which legal cla.s.sic he had fortunately found in a barrel of rubbish he had obligingly bought from a poor fellow in trouble.

With both members of the firm thus preoccupied the business "winked out." Berry died, leaving Lincoln the debts of the firm, twelve hundred dollars,-to him an appalling sum, which he humorously called "the national debt"; and on which he continued to make payments when he could for the next fifteen years. For a time he was postmaster of New Salem, an office so small that Andrew Jackson must have overlooked it. But the experience shows how scrupulous he always was; for when years afterward a government agent came to Springfield to make settlement Lincoln drew forth the very coins that he had collected in the postoffice, and though he had sorely needed the loan of them he had never even borrowed them for temporary use.

For a time he had a better position as Deputy Surveyor of Sangamon County. His work was accurate and he was doing well when in 1834 he again announced as a candidate for the legislature and was elected.

At Vandalia at the session of the legislature he first saw Stephen A. Douglas, then a lobbyist, and said of him, "He is the least man I ever saw." Lincoln at this session seemed to be learning, studying men and methods and prudently preparing for future success rather than endeavoring to seize opportunities prematurely.

This is the time when Lincoln fell in love with Ann Rutledge, a beautiful young woman of New Salem who was already betrothed to another. The other lover went East and did not return. Lincoln had hopes, but Ann took sick and died of brain fever. He was allowed to see her as she lay near the end, and the effect upon his kindly nature was terrible. There settled upon him a deep despondency. That fall and winter he wandered alone in the woods along the Sangamon, almost distracted with sorrow. When he seemed on the verge of insanity a friend, Bowling Green, took him to his own home and nursed him back to health, and the grief settled into that temperamental melancholy, which, relieved only by his humor, was part of the deep mystic there was in him, part of the prophet, the sadness that so early baptised him in the tragedy of life, and taught him to pity a suffering world.

Again he ran for the legislature, announcing his policy: "for all sharing the privileges of the government who a.s.sist in bearing its burdens; for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females). If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon as my const.i.tuents, as well those that oppose as those that support me. While acting as their representative I shall be governed by their will upon all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will is; and upon all others I shall do what my own judgment teaches me will best advance their interests." He was always fundamentally democratic, was so close to the heart of humanity that he felt its mighty pulsations and knew intuitively what his people were thinking. His contemporaries thought that he had a dependable occult sense of public opinion.

One incident of this campaign shows Lincoln's versatility at repartee. George Forquer, who had been a Whig, changed over to be a Democrat and was appointed Register of the Land Office. His house, the finest in Springfield, had a lightning rod, the only one that Springfield had ever seen. At a meeting near Springfield, Lincoln spoke, and when he had finished, Forquer replied with some condescension, calling Lincoln the "young man." Lincoln listened to the attack with folded arms and then made a spirited reply ending with the words: "The gentleman calls me a young man. I am older in years than I am in the tricks and trades of politicians. I desire to live and I desire place and distinction, but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would change my politics for an office worth three thousand dollars per year, and then feel compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended G.o.d."

The Whig ticket was elected, Lincoln leading, and the Sangamon delegation, seven representatives and two senators all over six feet tall were called the "Long Nine." At Vandalia Lincoln was the leader of the Long Nine and labored to advance legislation for public improvements to be financed by the sale of public lands. He confided to a friend that he was dreaming of the Governors.h.i.+p and was ambitious to become the "DeWitt Clinton of Illinois."

The a.s.sembly voted for a colossal scheme of railroads and ca.n.a.ls, and authorized a loan of twelve millions. These vast projects afforded unlimited opportunities for special legislation and in all this atmosphere of manoeuvre Lincoln was most skillful. He knew human nature and how to handle it. Log-rolling was the order of the day and so skillfully did the Long Nine function that they succeeded in removing the capital from Vandalia to Springfield. Though Lincoln did prove that he knew "the tricks and trades of the politician" he was true to his convictions; as shown by the fact that, when the legislature pa.s.sed resolutions "highly disapproving" of the formation of abolition societies and the doctrines promulgated by them, he voted against the resolutions; and furthermore he drew up a protest against the resolutions, and inducing his colleague, Dan Stone, to sign it with him, had his protest entered on the journal for March 3, 1837. While this protest was cautiously worded it did declare "the inst.i.tution of slavery is founded upon injustice and bad policy." This was a real gratuitous expression of a worthy ideal contrary to self interest, for his const.i.tuents were at that time certainly not in any way opposed to slavery. It was only within a few months after this very time that the atrocious persecution and murder of Lovejoy occurred in the neighboring town of Alton.

When the Long Nine came home bringing the capital with them Springfield planned such a celebration as had not been seen since the day the Talisman came up the Sangamon. To this banquet Lincoln was not only invited but placed at the head of the board; having been only the pilot of the enterprise this time did not exclude him. He made a speech and made many friends in Springfield. The time was now opportune for him to move to Springfield. So in the year 1837, Abraham Lincoln, being twenty-eight years of age and a lawyer, packed his meager possessions in a pair of saddle-bags and moved to the new Capital, then a town of less than two thousand inhabitants, here to begin a new era in his life. Besides being very poor he still carried the burden of the "national debt" left to him from the failure of the partners.h.i.+p with Berry, but he had friends and a reputation for honesty. In time he pays the debt, and his friends increase in numbers.

The morning that Lincoln went into the store of Joshua Speed in Springfield, and indicated that he was looking for a place to stay, Speed said: "The young man had the saddest face I ever saw." Speed indicated that Lincoln could share Speed's own bed in a room above; Lincoln shambled up, dropped his saddle bags, shambled down again and said: "Well, Speed, I am moved." With John T. Stewart, his comrade in the Black Hawk campaign, he formed a law partners.h.i.+p. Lincoln and Stewart were both too much interested in politics to give their undivided devotion to the law. During their four years together they made a living, and had work enough to keep them busy but it was not of the kind that proved either very interesting or lucrative.

He spent much time making public speeches on a variety of occasions and subjects, obviously practicing the art of eloquent address for his own improvement. In 1838 he was again elected to the legislature and was minority candidate for Speaker.

Now Mrs. N. W. Edwards was one of the local aristocrats of Springfield, and her sister, Mary Todd from Kentucky, came to visit her. Mary Todd was beautiful and Lincoln and Douglas were rivals for her hand. Observers at the time thought that with a brilliant and talented girl the graceful and das.h.i.+ng Douglas would surely be preferred. But Miss Todd made her own selection and she and Lincoln were engaged to be married on New Year's day, 1841.

The day came and the wedding was not solemnized. Now there came upon him again that black and awful melancholy. He wandered about in utter gloom. To help him, his good friend Joshua Speed took him away to Kentucky for a trip. Upon his return a reconciliation with Mary Todd led to their marriage, November, 1842. To Lincoln's kindly manner, his considerateness and his self-control, she was the opposite. The rule "opposites attract" may explain the union, and if the marriage was not ideally happy it may be conjectured that one more happy might have interfered with that career for which Destiny was preparing him.

In 1841, Stewart went to Congress and Lincoln dissolved the partners.h.i.+p to form another with Judge Stephen T. Logan who was accounted the best lawyer in Illinois. Contact with Logan made Lincoln a more diligent student and an abler pract.i.tioner of the law. But two such positive personalities could not long work in harmony, so in 1843 Lincoln formed a partners.h.i.+p with William H. Herndon, a man of abolitionist inclinations who remained Lincoln's junior partner until Lincoln's death and became his biographer. But they were very poor. The struggle was hard, and Lincoln and his bride were of necessity very frugal. In 1841 he might have had the nomination for Governor, but he declined it; having given up his ambition to become the "DeWitt Clinton of Illinois." It will be remembered that the internal improvement theories had not worked so well in practice. The panic of 1837 had convinced both him and his supporters of the unwisdom of attempting such improvements on too large a scale at one time. Though he had been mistaken he seems not to have lost the support of his followers, for they were mistaken with him; and the experience shows that "it is more popular for a politician to be with his const.i.tuents in the wrong than to be in the right against them."

Though he declined the nomination for Governor, his ambitious wife encouraged his natural inclination to keep his eye on the political field, and to glance in the direction of Congress. His ambitions were temporarily thwarted. On Was.h.i.+ngton's birthday in 1842, during the Was.h.i.+ngton Temperance movement he made a speech on temperance. While the whole address was admirable and conceived in a high humanitarian tone it did not please all. He was full of a wise and gentle tolerance that sprang alike from his knowledge and his love of men.

When accused of being a temperance man he said "I don't drink."

He was criticised, and because of this, and because his wife was an Episcopalian, and an aristocrat, and because he had once accepted a challenge to fight a duel, which friends prevented, his congressional ambitions had to be postponed. Also there were other candidates. He stood aside for Hardin and for Baker. In 1844 he was on the Whig electoral ticket and stumped the state for Henry Clay whom he greatly admired.

Finally in 1846 the Whigs nominated him for Congress. The Democrats nominated the pioneer Methodist preacher, Peter Cartwright, who used the Was.h.i.+ngton's birthday address against Lincoln and even the charge of atheism, which had no worthy foundation, for Lincoln was profoundly religious, though he never united with any church. He said that whenever any church would inscribe over its altar as the only condition for members.h.i.+p the words of Jesus: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself;" he would join that church. Lincoln's life proved his sincerity in this statement.

Lincoln made a thorough campaign, watching most carefully all the many interests which can contribute to the success of a candidate, and was elected by an unusual majority. Moreover, he was the only Whig who secured a place in the Illinois delegation that year.

In 1847, when he took his seat in the thirtieth Congress, he saw there the last of the giants of the old days,-Webster, Calhoun, Clay and old John Quincy Adams, dying in his seat before the session ended. There were also Andrew Johnson, Alexander H. Stephens and David Wilmot. Douglas was there to take his new seat in the Senate. The Mexican War was drawing to its close. The Whig party condemned the war as one that had been brought on simply to expand slave territory. Generals Taylor and Scott as well as many other prominent army officers were Whigs. This fact aided materially in justifying the Whig policy of denouncing the Democrats for entering into the war and at the same time voting adequate supplies for the prosecution of the war. Lincoln entered heartily into this party policy.

A few days after he had taken his seat in Congress he wrote back to Herndon a letter which closed humorously: "As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself I have concluded to do so before long." Accordingly, soon after he introduced a series of resolutions which became known as the "Spot Resolutions."

These resolutions referred to the President's message of May 11, 1846, in which the President expressed the reasons of the administration for beginning the war and said the Mexicans had "invaded our territory and shed the blood of our own citizens on our own soil." Lincoln quoted these lines and then asked the President to state the "exact spot" where these and other alleged occurrences had taken place. While these resolutions were never acted upon, they did afford him an opportunity to make a speech; and he made a good speech; not of the florid and fervid style that had characterized some of his early efforts; but a strong, logical speech that brought out the facts and made a favorable impression, thus saving him from being among the entirely unknown in the House.

With reference to his future career a paragraph concerning Texas is here quoted. He says: "Any people, anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to raise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right,-a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to a case in which the whole people of an existing government choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit." This political philosophy, so comfortably applied to Texas in 1846, is just what the Confederacy wished in 1861; and just exactly what Lincoln did not wish in 1861.

As Lincoln knew all along, his course concerning the war and the administration was displeasing some of his const.i.tuents; some of whom would rather be warlike than to be right, others honestly favored expansion. Like most of the other Whigs he had voted for the Ashmun amendment which said that the war had been "unnecessary and unconst.i.tutionally commenced by the President." He learned that some of the people of Springfield would be displeased with an att.i.tude that seemed to weaken the administration in a time of stress, but with Lincoln it was a matter of conscience and he met it fairly without evasion or any sort of coloring. And later when Douglas accused him of being unpatriotic he replied that he had not chosen to skulk, that he had voted for what he thought was the truth, and also reminded his hearers that he had always voted with the rest of the Whigs for the necessary supplies to carry on the war after it had been commenced. He would have liked renomination, but Judge Logan was nominated and was not elected.

He was on the electoral ticket and stumped New England and Illinois for Taylor, as soon as Congress adjourned. The New England speeches were full of moral earnestness. In Boston he heard Governor Seward speak and said: "I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question and give more time to it hereafter than we have been giving." In December he went back to Was.h.i.+ngton for the second session and worked consistently for the Wilmot Proviso, designed to exclude slavery from territory acquired from Mexico. At this second session he voted against a bill to exclude slavery from the District of Columbia, because he did not like the form of the bill and then introduced a measure himself designed to serve the same purpose.

When his term as Congressman expired he sought but failed to obtain the position of Commissioner of the General Land Office. He was offered the position of Governor of the newly organized territory of Oregon, but this, due somewhat to the sensible advice of his wife, he declined. Then he went back to Springfield to practice law again, and to travel the muddy roads of the old Eighth Circuit, a somewhat disappointed and disillusioned man; but as ever the same sincere, kindly brother to all his fellow men.

During the years from 1850 to 1860 the tall figure of Lincoln, garbed in black, continued to be familiar to the people of Springfield, as he strode along the street between his dingy law office on the square and his home on Eighth Street. He was clean in person and in dress, and diligent in his law practice, but he was not good at collecting what was coming to him; badly as he needed money in those days. He had finally paid off his debts, but the death of his father had left his devoted stepmother needing some help; and his s.h.i.+ftless stepbrother to be expostulated with in letters full of very kindly interest and wholesome advice.

He worked hard and was rapidly becoming known as an excellent lawyer. He made friends of the best men in the state, and they referred to him affectionately as "Honest Abe" or "Old Abe," but they always addressed him respectfully as "Mr. Lincoln." His humor, never peccant, was related to his brooding melancholy, and was designed to smooth out the little rough places in life, which he so well understood, with all its tragedies and tears. Men loved him, not alone for his stories, but for his simplicity of life, his genuine kindness, his utter lack of selfishness. There was a fascination about his personality. He seemed somehow mysterious and at the same time simple. In fact he was always trying to make ideas seem simple and clear, and told stories to accomplish that purpose. He tried to make the case clear to the jury, and the issues clear to his hearers. In all his life which had ever its heavy sorrows, these years were probably the brightest for him. He enjoyed the confidence of his people and the devotion of his friends. His fellow men of whatever degree in life, judge, lawyers, witnesses, jurors, litigants, all gathered affectionately around him to hear him talk and to tell stories. But he was not a mere story teller. His conversation was such as to draw men to him for its very worth. He was fundamentally serious, dignified, and never given to uncouth familiarities.

Though so notably kind, so deeply sympathetic, and at times so given to humor, when he was aroused he was terrible in his firmness, his resolution to win for the cause that was right, his stern rebuke for injustice, his merciless excoriation of falsehood and his relentless determination to see the truth prevail. False or careless witnesses dreaded his cross-examinations, and his opponents dreaded his effectiveness in handling a case before a jury.

Though he was called homely, there was a commanding dignity about his presence; his appearance inspired confidence; and when in the heat and pa.s.sion of forensic effort, his features lighted up with a strange and compelling beauty and attractiveness. He was never petty, never quibbled and never tried to gain an unfair advantage or even use an unworthy means of attaining a worthy end. Consequently courts and juries believed what he said. He was a poor lawyer when on the wrong side of the case, and would not take a bad case if he knew it. Upon one occasion, when, in the very midst of a trial, he discovered that his client had acted fraudulently, he left the courtroom and when the judge sent for him, he sent word back that he "had gone to wash his hands." He had too much human sympathy to be the most effective prosecutor unless there was a clear case of Justice on his side; and he was too sympathetic to make money-for his charges were so small that Herndon and the other lawyers and even the judge expostulated with him. Though his name appears in the Illinois Reports in one hundred and seventy-three cases,-a record giving him first rank among the lawyers of the state, his income was probably not much over two or three thousand a year. And he was engaged in some of the most important cases in the state, such as Illinois Central Railroad Company v. The County of McLean, in which he was retained by the railroad and successfully prevented the taxation of land ceded to the railroad by the State,-and then had to sue to recover his modest fee of five thousand, which was the largest he ever received. In the McCormick reaper patent litigation he was engaged with Edwin M. Stanton, who treated him with discourtesy in the Federal Court at Cincinnati, called him "that giraffe," and prevented him from delivering the argument which he had so carefully and solicitously prepared. Such an experience was, of course, very painful to his sensitive nature, and it shows how great he was that he could forgive the injury entirely as he did later when he appointed Stanton as his Secretary of War, despite the protest of friends who recalled it all to him.