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Book Review
| Mark E. Steiner, An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Pp. 272. $42.00 (ISBN 978-0-87580-358-6).
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| Steiner's An Honest Calling is one of three recent books (joining a line of others on the same subject) to examine Abraham Lincoln's law practice. The impetus for the most recent spate of books was the publication in 2000 of the Lincoln Legal Papers (The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition, edited by Martha L. Benner and Cullom Davis, University of Illinois Press, 2000), of which Steiner was an Associate Editor. |
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More so than other books about Lincoln as a lawyer, Steiner places Lincoln's law practice in the broader context of antebellum law practice, with an engaging and thoroughly researched examination of the minutiae of Lincoln's life as a lawyer. Steiner emphasizes Lincoln's development as a "Whig" lawyer. Chapter titles, for example, highlight the Whig affiliation ("The Education of a Whig Lawyer," "A Whig in the Courthouse"). Steiner writes: "As a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln developed a distinctive Whiggish attitude toward law and the role of law in American society" (3). Steiner, however, never makes clear what distinguished a "Whig lawyer" from any other type of lawyer in this period. What constitutes a Whig lawyer appears to be simply a reverence for law and order and peaceable resolution of disputes through the court system: "Lincoln early in his law practice had developed a Whiggish attitude toward law and the role of law in American society. Whig lawyers believed that the court system provided a neutral means to resolve disputes and maintain order" (177). These are presumably interests any lawyer dependent upon clients for revenue would share, whether or not politically identified with the Whig party. It is, unfortunately, not convincing to align these general interests with specific Whig political ideology, as Steiner attempts to do. |
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Moreover, Steiner devotes a considerable space to knocking down an argument that antebellum lawyers were "instrumentalists," engaged in shaping the law to further specific economic interests and in imposing a developmental economic agenda. He quite rightly concludes there is no such pattern (as he defines it) visible in Lincoln's practice, nor in that of most other antebellum lawyers. But the claim that this book presents an "alternative portrait of the antebellum bar" (55) depends upon an unrecognizable description of what other scholars have actually claimed—a caricature of sweeping arguments to the contrary. This distracting feature, however, is minor in comparison to the interesting, engaging details of Lincoln's law practice that Steiner skillfully weaves into a larger tale of Lincoln as a representative lawyer of his time, making this book on Lincoln's law career one of the best since John P. Frank's Lincoln as a Lawyer (1961). |
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| Polly J. Price
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| Emory University |
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