Book Review

Nicholas Cage will never make a movie entitled "Honeymoon in Springfield, Illinois." But he could. "Honeymoon in Vegas" took place against a backdrop of Elvis Presley impersonators, a testimony to Elvis's enduring cultural influence, his iconic status. Abraham Lincoln impersonators look a lot different from the Elvis variety, but they have meetings as well and busloads of Abraham Lincolns tool around historic streets where the great man once trod. In addition, there are the biographers. They gather in Springfield as well, meeting annually to scope out the competition and compare notes.	1
Lincoln's Elvis-like cult status explains why a group of scholars have for fourteen years combed eighty-eight Illinois courthouses and other archives looking for every scrap of paper connected to Lincoln's legal practice they can find. All over America courthouse attics and basements contain the case files and record books left behind by nineteenth-century lawyers and litigants. For the most part, these papers rot because they have no constituency. Though sometimes compelling, they more often make formulaic reading. Civil suits can seem a mass of unexplained debts. Criminal case files often contain only the indictment and a handful of subpoenas with no testimony and no clue as to the outcome. The record of past generations' debt and criminality do not generally attract the attention of genealogists. And while these old papers record the complaints and concerns of ordinary citizens, social historians rarely delve into them.	2
As a result, a national historical resource is at risk. Nineteenth-century clerks folded documents in three sections and these papers are now breaking along their creases. Local officials sometimes do not know what to do with their antique files. In Madison County, Mississippi the circuit clerk actually turned the old papers over to the county road crew. They piled the documents haystack-fashion in abandoned jail cells. In another county, the old files had been randomly stuffed in grocery sacks, along with cigarette butts and other filth. Even when circuit court files make it to an archives, their fate is not secure. State archivists often box court papers but leave them folded, their importance not great enough to justify flat filing them. Some universities hold vast collections of old court records. Many remain unsorted and unorganized--the archivists unsure of their value and unable to get funding to organize them for researchers.	3
The papers reproduced in The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln are recognizable to anyone familiar with the papers common to courthouse attics and basements. Lincoln's paper trail consists of grand jury indictments, answers and declarations, questions posed to witnesses, newspaper articles, and his surviving letters (already published in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [1953] and here reproduced from that edition when relevant). Lincoln's status as martyr and icon means that routine court papers, so often ignored and forgotten, matter greatly when they document Lincoln's life as a lawyer. William H. Herndon's Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1889) includes a transcript of cryptic notes Lincoln supposedly wrote for a jury summation in a minor pension case. In Lincoln the Lawyer, published in 1906, Frederick Trevor Hill reproduced in facsimile ordinary Lincoln legal documents. In 1936, Albert A. Woldman quoted such documents in Lawyer Lincoln, as did John J. Duff in A. Lincoln: Prairie Lawyer in 1960. The most ordinary legal document, if it passed through Lincoln's hands, has long been recognized as a national treasure.	4
Such ordinary legal instruments are not valuable because of Lincoln's pioneering contributions to legal doctrine. Lincoln's law partner Herndon called him "purely and entirely a case lawyer" and, indeed, Lincoln advanced no particular legal philosophy. His work in scattered Illinois courtrooms led one journalist to call him the state's top lawyer but that was because Lincoln was a superb fixer, a technician, not a philosopher. The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln recovers 5,173 cases, including 675 cases that began before a justice of the peace and twenty cases that went to the United States Supreme Court. Had Lincoln been a legal strategist instead of a tactician, the author of a learned treatise rather than a litigator, his legal papers would no doubt appear in traditional book form. Instead, The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln appears on three DVDs. This allows the editors to offer researchers images of the documents, rather than transcripts, facsimiles of 96,386 multiple-page documents that can be enlarged, rotated, paged through, printed, and saved to disk. They can be searched. The editors have assigned a series of subject headings to every case. For example, one suit over a promissory note has eighteen subject headings, including "Women as Litigants," "Real Property," "Mortgage," "Murder," "Debtor and Creditor," "Children," and "Animals-Oxen" as well as "Animals-Horses." This means that a researcher can use the powerful search engine to generate a list of every case Lincoln handled that involved, for example, "Women as Litigants" (987) or every murder case (44) or every case involving attorney's fees (520), and so on.	5
Lincoln's practice affords researchers the opportunity to see ordinary law in action at the grassroots. The editors cautiously write that "by all evidence, Lincoln and his partners had a typical practice compared to other attorneys during the same period in the Midwest." While Lincoln's practice fairly represented the work of the courts, the Complete Documentary Edition does not exactly reproduce Lincoln's practice. Since the 1871 Chicago fire destroyed many federal records, the extant documentation underestimates the extent of Lincoln's work in the federal courts. Nonetheless, the documents here allow researchers a peek at the ordinary work of a nineteenth-century lawyer. About half the cases reached a conclusion within three months, while four cases took more than twenty years to resolve. Most were common law cases and most of those (3,145) involved debt. There were more assumpsit cases (1,240) than any other form of action. Some of his cases have reached iconic status, milestones every biographer must engage, but even the "great" cases involved prosaic people trapped in sordid banalities. In the legendary "Almanac Trial," Lincoln defended a ne'er-do-well accused of murdering James Preston Metzker, killed as a gang of rowdies roamed from bar to bar. The state's star witness claimed to have seen Lincoln's client strike Metzker from a distance of 150 feet under a bright moon, high in the sky. Lincoln destroyed the witness's credibility on cross-examination by producing an 1857 almanac showing that on the night of the murder the moon was low in the sky. Lincoln also defended Peachy Quinn Harrison, charged with killing Greek Crafton. The Lincoln Legal Papers document this trial with thirty-eight documents, including the trial transcript and thirty newspaper articles. Lincoln's political opponent presided over the trial and tried to exclude the testimony of Peter Cartwright that exculpated the defendant. According to Herndon, the judge backed down in the face of Lincoln's spirited rebuttal.	6
Each case has a brief summary, a list of participants, and the documents for that particular case. When the local press reported a Lincoln trial, images of newspaper articles are included. People v. Short exists only through newspaper reporting. That case generated a lengthy article in the Illinois State Register, printing a preamble and resolutions prepared at an indignation meeting organized by the angry residents of Pleasant Plains. They were mad because the family of Greek Crafton, frustrated by Peachy Harrison's acquittal, had persuaded a justice of the peace to arrest B. F. Short as an accessory to the crime. Justice of the peace records often do not survive. JPs kept their own records, in their own homes, sometimes passing them along to their successors, but rarely passing them to the courthouse where they might have had at least a chance at preservation. In this case, newspaper reports indicate that the Craftons backed down, failing to show up when the justice held his hearing.	7
William Herndon, not Lincoln, represented B. F. Short. The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln includes not only documents associated directly with Lincoln but with his partners as well. Lincoln had three partnerships and dockets record the firm rather than the individual lawyer involved. When Lincoln became a lawyer, in 1837, he joined the politically ambitious John Todd Stuart as a junior partner. Lincoln did most of the work from their office at No. 4 Hoffman's Row in Springfield while Stuart campaigned for, and won, a seat in the United States House of Representatives. Lincoln worked hard since Stuart, as one of the most prominent lawyers in town, attracted a lot of business but did little of the actual legal work himself. Lincoln was entirely self-taught, learning the law in court and through long hours of reading books he picked up. Lincoln's education, or lack of it, embarrassed him but he soon realized that even lawyers who had "read law" with a senior attorney often had received little real training or guidance. Essentially, all the lawyers were self-taught. In 1841, Lincoln formed a new partnership with Stephen T. Logan, an experienced lawyer, former prosecutor, and circuit court judge. Lincoln probably did learn from Logan. For his part, Logan, while intelligent and knowledgeable was hardly charismatic and needed Lincoln, as he explained later, to win the goodwill of juries. Under Logan, Lincoln began to appear more regularly before the Illinois Supreme Court. Lincoln's profitable partnership with Logan came to an end when Logan decided he wanted to practice with his son. Lincoln and Logan continued to appear together on important cases for the rest of Lincoln's career as a lawyer. In 1844, Lincoln, now a well-established litigator, chose to form a new partnership with the very junior William Herndon. Lincoln had real affection for Herndon and his partnership with the younger man ran until 1861.	8
The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln includes a reference section with a chronology of Lincoln's life, essays on Lincoln the lawyer, nineteenth-century courts, and legal procedures. There are maps and biographies of the key people in Lincoln's legal career. Illinois statute books for 1839 and 1856 have been reproduced and even though images of the actual pages have been incorporated into the collection, they are searchable through their tables of contents. Simply clicking on the topic takes the researcher directly to the appropriate portion of the book. The collection includes images, Fifteen pictures of Lincoln and thirty representations of the courthouses where he practiced law. There is a computerized perpetual calendar, a guide for writing legal citations, information on monetary conversion and land measurement and appropriate bibliographies. Woodrow Wilson saw "Birth of a Nation" and exclaimed that he had seen "history written with lightening." Perhaps no legal historian working today will be prompted to such a naïve declaration, but this is clearly just as revolutionary in the way it represents history. The collection fascinates not just because of the documents it makes available for researchers, but because of the way it presents them. Searchable images of 96,000 pages of nineteenth-century Illinois legal documentation represents a new kind of archive.	9
The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln should be of interest to anyone researching the antebellum era. The editors have made documents usually locked away in courthouse vaults accessible, not just physically accessible, but understandable. The promise of the computer age is that historical resources will be more widely available, not just to senior scholars with big grants, or dissertation writers with little grants, but to all manner of students. These records should be used by high school and college students, professors at teaching colleges as well as the faculty at the leading research institutions. And not just legal historians or the small army of Lincoln biographers that stalk Illinois libraries and archives. Social historians will find important, often overlooked, material here, about the texture of nineteenth-century life. Perhaps The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln will encourage efforts to preserve the work of less famous lawyers and litigants, work that is recorded on papers decaying in American courthouses.	10
Christopher Waldrep San Francisco State University

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