Review Essay

Review Essay Lawyer Lincoln, Case by Case MARK E. STEINER George R. Dekle, Sr. Abraham Lincoln’s Most Famous Case: The Al- manac Trial. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2014. Pp. 223. Brian McGinty. Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America. New York: Liveright, 2015. Pp. 259. After John J. Duff and John P. Frank published books on Abraham Lincoln’s legal career in the early 1960s, more than forty years passed before another book on the subject appeared.1 This remarkable drought for the fecund soil of Lincolniana ended, however, when the Lincoln Legal Papers project (LLP) revitalized interest in lawyer Lincoln. Under the leadership of Cullom Davis and Daniel Stowell, the LLP collected, cataloged, and scanned thousands of documents. A complete edition was published in 2000 in DVD format; it has been superseded by an online edition that appeared in 2009.2 A four- volume selected edition was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2008.3 Moreover, members of the LLP staff—the late William D. Beard, Davis, Susan Krause, John A. Lupton, Stacy Pratt McDermott, Christopher A. Schnell, and Stowell—also were producing much of 1. John J. Duff, A. Lincoln: Prairie Lawyer (New York: Bramhall House, 1960); John P. Frank, Lincoln as a Lawyer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961). 2. Martha L. Benner and Cullom Davis, eds. The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: The Complete Documentary Edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), DVD; see also Martha L. Benner, “The Abraham Lincoln Legal Papers: The Development of the Complete Facsimile Edition on CD-ROM,” Documentary Editing 16 (December 1994): 100–107; Martha L. Benner, “The Lincoln Legal Papers and the New Age of Documen- tary Editing,” Computers and the Humanities 30 (1997): 365–72. 3. Daniel W. Stowell, ed., The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases, 4 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2019 © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Mark E. Steiner 71 the new scholarship on Lincoln’s law practice or, more generally, law in Lincoln’s Illinois.4 4. William D. Beard, “Dalby Revisited: A New Look at Lincoln’s ‘Most Far-Reaching Case’ in the Illinois Supreme Court,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 20 (Sum- mer 1999): 1–16; William D. Beard, “‘I Have Labored Hard to Find the Law’: Abraham Lincoln for the Alton and Sangamon Railroad,” Illinois Historical Journal 85 (Winter 1992): 209–20; William D. Beard, “American Justinian or Prairie Pettifogger? Lincoln’s Legal Legacy: Documenting the Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln,” Documentary Edit- ing 14 (December 1992): 61–64; Cullom Davis, “Law and Politics: The Two Careers of Abraham Lincoln,” Quarterly Journal of Ideology 17 (June 1994): 61–75; Cullom Davis and William D. Beard, “Brief of Argument in Abraham Lincoln vs. Illinois Central Railroad,” Documentary Editing 11 (March 1989): 27; Susan Krause, “Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, Attorney and Client,” Illinois Historical Journal 89 (Spring 1996): 35–50; John A. Lupton, “The Power of Lincoln’s Legal Words,” in Abraham Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of America’s Greatest President, edited by Roger Billings and Frank J. Williams (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), 119–31; John A. Lupton, “Basement Barrister: Abraham Lincoln’s Practice before the United States Supreme Court,” Lincoln Herald 101 (Summer 1999): 47–58; John A. Lupton, “A. Lincoln, Esquire: The Evolution of an Attorney,” in Allen D. Spiegel, A. Lincoln, Esquire: A Shrewd, Sophisticated Lawyer in His Time (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002), 18–50; John A. Lupton, “Put- ting the Pieces Together,” Documentary Editing 18 (June 1996): 46–47; John A. Lupton, “Selected Cases of A. Lincoln, Esq., Attorney and Counsellor-at- Law,” in America’s Lawyer- Presidents: From Law Office to Oval Office, edited by Norman Gross (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 138–45; Stacy Pratt McDermott, The Jury in Lincoln’s America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Stacy Pratt McDermott, “‘Black Bill’ and the Privileges of Whiteness in Antebellum Illinois,” Journal of Illinois History 12 (Spring 2009): 2–26; Stacy Pratt McDermott, “Women, Business, and the Law: The Story of Henrietta Ulrich,” in Papers from the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Annual Lincoln Colloquia, edited by Timothy P. Townsend (Springfield, Ill.: Lincoln Home National Historic Site, 2002), 106–11; Christopher Schnell, “A Lawyer’s Frontier: The Growth of the Bar and Middle-Class Society in Abraham Lincoln’s Midwest” (PhD diss., St. Louis University, 2016); Christopher A. Schnell, “Lawyers, Squatters, and the Trans- formation of the Public Domain in Early- Statehood Illinois,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 110 (Fall/Winter 2017): 237–63; Christopher Schnell, “Lincoln and the Kentuckians: Placing Lincoln in Context with Lawyers and Clients from His Native State,” in Abraham Lincoln, Esq., 185–202; Daniel Stowell, “From History to Fiction: Abraham Lincoln’s Most Famous Murder Trial and the Limits of Dramatic License,” in The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning, edited by Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. and Randal Allred (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 137–51; Daniel W. Stowell, “Murder at a Methodist Camp Meeting: The Origins of Abraham Lincoln’s Most Famous Trial,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 101 (Fall/Winter 2008): 219–34; Daniel W. Stowell, “The Promises and Pitfalls of Reminiscences as Historical Documents: A Case in Point,” Documentary Editing 27 (Winter 2005): 99–117; Daniel Stowell, Samuel H. Treat: Prairie Justice (Springfield: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 2005); Daniel W. Stowell, ed., In Tender Consideration: Women, Families, and the Law in Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). The chapters in the edited collection In Tender Consideration were all written by LLP staff: Stowell, Dennis E. Suttles, McDermott, Lupton, Schnell, and Krause. 72 Review Essay In the antediluvian era, biographers paid little attention to Lin- coln’s law practice. Lincoln biographies usually included a couple of chapters that touched on his legal career. Albert J. Beveridge, in his 1928 biography, mentioned a fair number of cases but discussed at length only a handful; those cases have become canonical. Until the onset of the LLP, most biographies only mentioned the same cases that Beveridge had highlighted: In re Jane Bryant (the Matson case); State v. Armstrong (the Almanac Trial); Illinois Central Rail Road v. McLean County; McCormick v. Talcott (the Manny Reaper case); and Hurd v. Rock Island Bridge Company (the Effie Afton case).5 Biographers had neglected Lincoln’s law practice for a couple of reasons. First, as Herndon once wrote, “a law office is a dull, dry place.”6 Biographers weren’t interested in the legal practice, because they believed the legal practice wasn’t interesting. But there were other reasons as well. J. G. Randall, in 1936, noted how important sources for Lincoln’s law practice “still remain difficult of access.”7 Mark E. Neely, in 1993, concluded that “Lincoln’s professional life remains surpris- ingly inaccessible to the historian as well, though the problem in this realm is largely archival.” Neely also believed that “more specialized studies” of the “arcane legal practices” of Lincoln’s day were needed.8 Those two problems—accessibility of documents and demystifying specialized studies—have been met by the publication of the legal papers and by the extensive scholarship by the LLP staff and others. Although David Donald’s 1995 biography was written while the LLP was still collecting and sorting documents, it nonetheless showed 5. Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 1:392–97, 560–71, 575–605. These same cases were discussed in the two most popular biographies published after Beveridge’s. See Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (1952; New York: Modern Library, 1968), 112, 157–59; Stephen B. Oates, With Malice toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: New American Library, 1978), 110, 112–13, 148–50, 154–55. A good sign of canonical status is whether the case is included in Mark E. Neely’s The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia. Neely included entries on William “Duff” Armstrong, “Chicken Bone” Case, Effie Afton Case, McCormick v. Manny & Company, McLean County Tax Case, Matson Slave Case, Trailor Murder Case, and Truett Murder Case. See Mark E. Neely Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: Da Capo, 1982), 8, 57, 96, 202, 204, 207–8, 310, 312–13. For a discussion of the treatment of the law practice in Lincoln biographies see Mark E. Steiner, An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 10–18. 6. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, edited by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 207. 7. James G. Randall, “Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?,” American Historical Review 41 (January 1936), 283. 8. Mark E. Neely Jr., The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 34. Mark E. Steiner 73 the LLP’s impact on Lincoln scholarship. Donald hailed the LLP as “perhaps the most important archival investigation now under way in the United States.” Donald had been able to examine unpublished documents from the LLP files and thus gave the most complete account- ing of Lincoln’s law practice in a biography. The benefits of the LLP were again seen in Michael Burlingame’s magisterial biography, published in 2008. Recent books that have focused on the pre- presidential years also reflect the influence of the LLP in their treatment of the law practice.9 Other writers also have benefited from LLP’s vast riches.

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