|
|
|
Reviews
| An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln. By Mark E. Steiner (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Pp. x, 272. Notes, bib., index. Cloth, $42.00.)Lincoln the Lawyer. By Brian Dirck. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 228. Notes, bib., index. Cloth, $29.95).In Tender Consideration: Women, Families, and the Law in Abraham Lincoln's Illinois. Ed. Daniel W. Stowell; Foreword by Michael Grossberg. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 240. Illus., notes, index. Cloth, $35; paper $15.)
|
|
Here are three fine books about Abraham Lincoln's career as a lawyer, which also have much to say about general legal practice in frontier Illinois in the period 1830 to 1860. Such books are possible thanks to the Lincoln Legals Project, sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. The project mined the courthouse records of Illinois to find documentation for over five thousand cases in which Lincoln participated. A CD-Rom publication, The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition (2000), has made the resulting archive available to all interested students. The first and second books reviewed here focus, as their titles suggest, on the law practice of Abraham Lincoln. The third, but first to appear, is a collaborative effort by the editor and five assistant editors of the Lincoln Legals Project. Lincoln and his partners - especially William H. Herndon - were involved in many of the cases mentioned here, so this book is an important item for one's Lincoln bookshelf. It is also an essential contribution to the history of women, children, and the family in antebellum Illinois. |
1
|
|
Mark E. Steiner, Professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, brings both analytical and narrative skills to make sense of what this material tells about Lincoln the lawyer. So does Brian Dirck, Professor of History at Anderson University in Indiana, and author of a comparative biography of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. The resulting books are similar in some ways, quite different in others. |
2
|
|
Both authors discuss the legal profession in the United States as it was evolving during Lincoln's lifetime. Both review Lincoln's haphazard education, and the books he studied to become a lawyer, though Steiner is more systematic than Dircks in describing the law books of the era. Both describe Lincoln's partners, the types of cases that made up his practice, his extensive travel around legal circuits, and the impact of a burgeoning economy on legal business. Both debunk the notion that Lincoln would accept only worthy clients, and both demonstrate that Lincoln the lawyer would never have enjoyed a place in historical memory had it not been for Lincoln the politician, president, and martyr. Both agree that, for his time and place, Lincoln was an honest, effective, and successful lawyer. Finally, both agree that Lincoln and the legal system he represented worked more to effect reconciliation among their quarreling clients than always to have clear winners and losers. |
3
|
|
Steiner devotes an entire chapter to Lincoln's cases involving African Americans, and more particularly those concerned with those claimed as slaves. Such attention is wildly disproportionate, considering how little this amounted to, either in Lincoln's career or in the tragic history of black Americans. But proportion is not the only criterion for historical relevance. It is a matter of considerable interest that Lincoln accepted, as clients, both people defending the freedom of alleged slaves, or slaveholders attempting to reclaim their human property. Steiner also has much to say about Lincoln's off-and-on again relations with the Illinois Central Railroad, and especially about Lincoln's successful lawsuit against that railroad. At issue was his compensation for a case of great benefit to the railroad; the Illinois Central initially paid $500, and Lincoln, estimating the vast amounts he had saved the company, sued for $5,000, eventually winning most of that—$4800. |
4
|
|
Brian Dirck shapes his chapters to develop themes reflecting on Lincoln's character, his interaction with his contemporaries, and ongoing changes in society. "The Brethren" describes Lincoln among his fellow lawyers; "Promissory Notes" explains the various types of debt collection suits and the ways in which attorneys and their clients managed or failed to manage them; "The Energy Men" validates Alexis De Tocqueville's description of Jacksonian America as a place where men were driven by the spirit of gain. "The Show" takes us back to the profession of law, dwelling especially on the way in which Lincoln and his contemporaries dressed and acted to persuade judges and juries. "Death and the Maidens" considers Lincoln's occasional involvement with murder trials, and serious cases involving women, most of whom were probably not best described as maidens. "Storytelling" appears late in the book, the best place for it, because the reader will have a fair idea of Lincoln's law practice before entering into a discussion of the legends that developed about it after his death. "Grease" is Dirck's colorful title for his consideration of Lincoln's Whiggish tendency to minimize conflict and achieve reconciliation as often as possible. Dircks sees in this a character trait which, developed over years of legal practice, shaped Lincoln's behavior as politician and especially as president. A startling conclusion follows: "... there has always been a sense among Lincoln's many admirers that he possessed some ineffable quality of seeing deeper and understanding better what made people tick than anyone else of his time. |
5
|
|
... In fact, however, Lincoln's insight rested on the entirely opposite belief that there were a great many things he could not know, and did not really need to know, about the people around him ..." (p. 171) There is probably no way to prove who is more correct on this point, "Lincoln's many admirers" or Dircks. Meanwhile his larger point makes sense: Lincoln liked to settle cases while achieving the greatest amount of reconciliation possible—a tendency, which carried over into his management of men and affairs during the Civil War. |
6
|
|
Daniel W. Stowell, the senior scholar in the enterprise, contributes an introduction and two essays to In Tender Consideration: "Femes UnCovert: Women's Encounters with the Law," and "Her Day in Court: the Legal Odyssey of Clarissa Wren. "The latter describes a remarkable series of cases involving adultery, divorce, alimony and dower rights, in which a woman and lawyer Lincoln took full advantage of the legal protections women could seek, even when something less than model citizens. Stacy Pratt McDermott contributes "Dissolving the Bands of Matrimony: Women and Divorce in Sangamon County, Illinois, 1837–60," and "The Law in an Illinois Corner: the Impact of the Law on an Antebellum Family. "The first essay demonstrates that women found it increasingly easy to secure divorce in Illinois, both because the legislature gradually added to the list of suitable grounds, and because county courts were likely to be liberal in applying divorce law. Not surprisingly, the frequency of divorce increased, though at "4.13 divorce decrees per 10,000 people during the 1850's" (p. 95) the legal dissolving of marriages remained rare. McDermott's second essay traces a case that unfolded over many years, in which Abraham Lincoln and an attorney helped a (once) young woman and her husband reclaim inherited dower land from a step-father who had claimed it as his own. |
7
|
|
The other essays discuss problems caused by inheritance, with or without wills, and efforts by the legal system to protect the interests of women and children. These are Dennis E. Suttles, "'For the Well-Being of the Child': The Law and Childhood"; John A. Lupton, "Inheriting the Earth: the Law of Succession"; and Christopher A. Schnell, "Wives, Widows, and Will Makers: Women and the Law of Property." Throughout the book there is an ongoing testing of the question, was the social system of antebellum, and still largely rural, Illinois more patriarchal or more paternalistic? One might argue that the two words mean much the same thing, but within the current discourse of social historians the patriarch is the traditional chief of family and clan, while the paternalist is a bit less absolute—somewhere, perhaps, between chairman or ranking member of the family unit. More to the point, the thousands of cases analyzed by this expert team of scholars demonstrates that the political-legal system continued the tradition of acknowledging the primary authority of males as heads of families, but at the same time held them to rules and standards which required them to be responsible and provident. If they were not, their rank and privilege could be curtailed and even ended. With this kindly view of the traditional social structure, the firm of Lincoln and Herndon clearly agreed. |
8
|
|
Incidentally, this book casts Herndon, the junior partner, as an important actor in many cases. He seems to have built up a fine reputation in the practice of family law. |
9
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|