Book Review

Forty people spent fourteen years compiling this collection of over 200,000 documentary images and 1.5 million discrete facts. The collection comprises 96,386 documents describing 5,173 cases and 496 nonlitigation activities. More than cases and pleadings are included. Newspaper reports on cases help provide context. Essays on Abraham Lincoln, the court structure, and the legal practice of his age provide further background. A subject index guides readers to case summaries, an overview of the law practice of Lincoln, a statistical portrait of the cases, biographies of major players, and bibliographies on Lincoln and on nineteenth-century law. There are maps setting forth state and federal judicial districts as well as major transportation arteries. There are lists of state and federal circuit judges and their terms, a monetary conversion table to allow modern comparisons with Lincoln's economic environment, a file on land measurements of the time, and introductions to the forms of pleading. There is even a perpetual calendar for those who wish to know that Lincoln's birthday was on a Friday in 1828! The editors seem to have thought of everything that might help the user of this collection. Furthermore, being in DVD format, the materials are almost instantly available as research proceeds. Even this novice found his way through the user-friendly files.	1
These documents bring Lincoln out of his monument and into the mundane world, a world of law that absorbed most of his adult life. Lincoln spent more time being a lawyer than he spent doing anything else he ever did. If there is an entrée to revealing or discovering the real Lincoln, this is an indispensable place to look. Some historians have argued that those years and days of law practice made the sixteenth president essentially a conservative. Here is a place to find out.	2
Yet it is important to recall that these are legal papers, created within the context of legal rules and practices. What the documents reveal is that Lincoln practiced law to make a living, not especially to advance a cause. He represented debtors and creditors, fugitive slaves and fugitive slave chasers, railroads and people injured by railroads. He wrote deeds, registered land, and collected debts. Lincoln and his partners tried over 3,000 debtor-creditor cases, 2,300 contract cases, over a thousand cases focused on trial by jury, 987 cases where women were litigants, 110 divorces, and lesser numbers of almost every kind of case imaginable. His practice had no area of specialty but included every kind of law that would provide a fee.	3
A statistical portrait of the cases and practices provides a most helpful picture of law practice in the Midwest in Lincoln's time. There are enough gaps in the record to make generalizations tentative, as the editors admit, but intriguing data do emerge. For example, Lincoln has been called a railroad lawyer, yet that fact does not mean he was in the pocket of the roads. The tables inform us that Lincoln and his partners represented railroads 71 times but opposed them 62 times.	4
Thus the materials gathered here are clearly and obviously foundational for understanding what Lincoln did with most of his life. They show him "thinking like a lawyer." But they move beyond Lincoln. They provide the best picture we have of what lawyers did in the mid-nineteenth century.	. . .