A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 10
As a Peacemaker the Lawyer
Has a Superior Opportunity
1849–52

PERSUADE YOUR NEIGHBORS TO COMPROMISE WHENEVER YOU CAN.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Notes for a Law Lecture ca. July 1, 1850

ABRAHAM LINCOLN RETURNED TO ILLINOIS IN THE SPRING OF 1849, his single term in Congress ended by his principled but unpopular stand against the Mexican War. His only career option was to resume practicing law. Ever since 1832, when he made his first unsuccessful run for the state legislature, Lincoln had been campaigning for political office. With time now to devote to his law firm, Lincoln hoped to increase its reputation and boost his income to better support Mary and their two boys. Grant Goodrich invited him to Chicago for what might have become a lucrative law partnership, but Lincoln replied, “If [I] went to Chicago then [I] would have to sit down and Study hard—That would kill [me].” Lincoln preferred the kind of law he could practice in the federal and superior courts in Springfield, as well as the small rural communities of central Illinois’s Eighth Judicial Circuit. Years later, Lincoln would recall, “From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, [I] practiced law more assiduously than ever before.”
William Herndon had kept the firm busy during Lincoln’s time in Washington. From 1847 to 1849, Herndon used a fee book in which there was a heading: “These cases attended to since Lincoln went to Congress.” Herndon offered to share with his senior partner the fees collected for these cases, but Lincoln refused, saying that he had no right to any of these monies.
After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose and meaning of his life. In 1850, Lincoln told Herndon, “How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s country no better than if one had never lived.” Herndon noticed the marked effect the downturn in his political fortunes had upon Lincoln in these years. “It went below the skin and made a changed man of him.”
As Lincoln returned to the practice of law, he determined to continue his self-education. He looked forward to traveling alone for hours, or even a whole day, on the open prairies, well-worn editions of Shakespeare and the Bible as his traveling companions. He found mental refreshment in the poetry of Lord Byron and Robert Burns, whose rhyming stanzas he always read aloud. At the end of each carnival-like day in court, Lincoln always found time for solitude and reflection.
As Lincoln traveled the vast physical territory of the circuit, he ventured into new intellectual territory. He bought a copy of Euclid’s Elements and set himself the task of memorizing the Greek mathematician’s six geometrical theorems. He would often study by candlelight late at night while his fellow lawyers slept.
Lincoln’s reading offered him the opportunity to go deeper into his own spirit and broader into the land of imagination. From 1849 to 1854, Lincoln would cultivate a profound interior life.
FOR MUCH OF 1849, Lincoln walked the nearly seven blocks from his home to his office in Springfield every day, sometimes arriving as early as 7 a.m. For a Whig committed to order, Lincoln kept his law office mostly in disorder. The floor was never clean. John H. Littlefield, who studied law with Lincoln during this time, discovered while attempting to clean the office that a variety of discarded fruit seeds had sprouted in the dirt and dust. Attorney Henry C. Whitney described the windows in Lincoln’s office as “innocent of water and the scrubman since creation’s dawn or the settlement of Springfield.”
When Lincoln arrived at his office, he immediately stretched out on the worn leather couch, the central piece of furniture in the room. It was too small for his large frame, so he would put one foot on a chair and the other on a table nearby. Once positioned, Lincoln began to read the newspapers—always out loud, no matter who was present. Lincoln’s reading aloud annoyed Herndon. Once, when Herndon asked his senior partner why he read aloud, Lincoln answered, “When I read aloud two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can remember it better.”
Both Lincoln and Herndon read newspapers insatiably. After returning from Washington, Lincoln subscribed to the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley’s influential national newspaper; Washington’s National Intelligencer, the great Whig newspaper; and the Chicago Tribune, founded in 1847, which advocated a Whig and Free Soil opinion on slavery. Herndon encouraged Lincoln to subscribe to several leading antislavery papers as well, including the Anti-Slavery Standard, the official weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society; and the National Era, a weekly abolitionist paper published out of Washington.
Sometimes, when Herndon pressed his antislavery views upon Lincoln, the senior partner would counter that it was important to hear the Southern side as well. As Lincoln struggled with the issue of slavery, he wanted to consider all points of view. Out of these exchanges, Lincoln decided to subscribe to several Southern newspapers. The Richmond Enquirer set the standard in Southern journalism and had become a leading voice in the surge toward secession. The Charleston Mercury espoused a fierce pro-slavery position and regularly let loose journalistic attacks on the North, especially abolitionists. These divergent newspapers became instruments for Lincoln’s thinking and brooding about slavery. “Let us have both sides at the table,” Lincoln told Herndon. “Each is entitled to its day in court.”
Lincoln delegated some of his legal research to Herndon, but the senior partner always wrote out his own pleadings. He had written many when he worked as a junior partner with John Todd Stuart, but nearly all of the pleadings for the Logan and Lincoln firm had come from Stephen Logan’s hand. Now Lincoln returned to the laborious practice of writing these long legal documents in his elegant penmanship.
The law had changed a great deal in the twelve years since Lincoln began practicing with Stuart in the spring of 1837. Formality in the courtroom began to replace the informality that had reigned during the 1830s and ’40s. Legal precedent had become ascendant over argument. Spontaneous oratory, for the most part, had been replaced by careful preparation and presentation. Instead of the clear meaning of the law applying to all cases, now the complex meaning of the law applied to specific cases.
A POPULAR SAYING in Lincoln’s day was that the Bible, Shakespeare, and Blackstone ’s Commentaries made up the foundation of any well-stocked legal library. The best lawyers in the first half of the nineteenth century were typically well versed in both literature and law. After the Civil War, the trajectory of law would point to professional training and specialization. From this perspective, some observers describe pre–Civil War lawyers as wanting in their preparation, but from another point of view we can see that they approached law from the established traditions of Western literature and religion. One can find frequent descriptions of lawyers’ eloquence in the pre–Civil War courtroom, where literary and rhetorical expression had a high value. As for Lincoln, his growing eloquence sprang not from a knowledge of legal precedent, but from his familiarity with the classic resources of the Bible, works of history and biography, and literature, especially Shakespeare.


Lincoln used Blackstone’s Commentaries as a foundation of self-education in the law.

Some lawyers who practiced with Lincoln reported his knowledge of the law was lacking. But one needs to qualify this observation by understanding both the observer and the context. Stephen Logan, Lincoln’s second partner, remembered, “Lincoln’s knowledge of law was very small when I took him in,” but, of course, this recollection came from a man who wanted to be remembered for helping tutor the young Lincoln. Judge David Davis, who would become one of Lincoln’s best friends out on the circuit in the 1850s, offered a more balanced assessment. Lincoln may not have been a meticulous student of the law but, when pressed by necessity, he used the available sources of legal information. Davis said, “Sometimes Lincoln studied things, if he could not get the rubbish of a case removed.” In many ways Lincoln approached the practice of law in a way typical of the busy lawyers who traveled the large judicial circuits in frontier states.
When Lincoln did need to brush up on the law, he would walk across the street to use the resources of the Illinois Supreme Court Library housed in the statehouse. He also relied on published digests containing summaries of important cases. The United States Digest covered cases from both state and federal courts; the Illinois Digest was also a fast and reliable tool for researching cases.
TWICE A YEAR, in the spring and fall, Lincoln traveled more than five hundred miles for a cycle of the Eighth Judicial Circuit. The circuit, which expanded and contracted during this time, stretched across an area of nearly fifteen thousand square miles, larger than the state of Connecticut. Lincoln’s schedule was the exception to that of other lawyers of his day: Most practiced law in only a few counties surrounding their hometown and office.
Lincoln enjoyed the itinerant lifestyle of a circuit lawyer. When he rejoined the circuit in the fall of 1849 for the first time after leaving Congress, he switched from traveling by horseback to a buggy pulled by his horse “Old Buck,” who had seen better days. Instead of saddlebags, he now carried his legal papers, a few books, and an extra shirt in a carpetbag. On September 17, 1849, he bought a large cotton umbrella for seventy-five cents as protection from the Illinois weather. He had his name sewed inside with white thread and tied the umbrella together with twine to keep it from flying open.
Lincoln had grown up in the forests of Indiana, but he became enthralled by the endless prairies of Illinois. The prairies were a striking mixture of blue stem, Indian, and Canadian white rye grasses. By summer’s end, they were a foot higher than Lincoln’s head. As the Indian summer of late September gave way to October’s cooler nights, the prairies turned from green to tawny and vermilion. Black-eyed Susans, goldenrod, and sawtooth sunflowers came into final bloom, thriving not simply from the fall rains, but also from the rich subsoil beneath the prairies. In the woodlands, the foliage of red and white oaks blazed orange and dark purple in the last days of October and early November. The prairies were wondrously silent, with only the voice of an owl or a fox to break Lincoln’s solitude.
For all of their beauty, however, the prairies could be treacherous. The weather was always changing. By October, Lincoln had to be prepared for thunderstorms, winds, and sleeting snow, which could turn the roads into rivers of mud. Fire, generated by just a spark in the autumn’s tall grass, could roar across the prairies with tremendous speed, overtaking travelers and destroying farms. Blizzards could suddenly blow out of the north and produce drifts that could kill man and beast.
Nonetheless, after spending sixteen months in the nation’s capital, Lincoln seemed to relish traveling the byways of the Eighth Judicial Circuit. The circuit was growing in population and offered new legal opportunities as well as friendships. He set to work reestablishing old relationships and making new ones that would become key to regaining his prominence as a lawyer, as well as to his future reentry into politics.
Lincoln was especially eager to see Judge David Davis again. Lincoln had first met lawyer Davis in 1835. While Lincoln served in Congress, the legislature had elected Davis judge of the Eighth Circuit. Born on his grandfather’s plantation in Sassafras Neck on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1815, Davis had graduated from Kenyon College, in the interior of Ohio, in 1832. One of his classmates was Edwin M. Stanton, a young man from Steubenville, Ohio, who suffered from asthma.
After graduation, Davis worked in the law office of Henry W. Bishop in Lenox, in western Massachusetts. In 1835 he decided to travel west to practice law. After first settling in Pekin, Illinois, he moved twenty-five miles east to Bloomington, a town of 450 residents built north of a large grove of trees known as Blooming Grove.


Judge David Davis would become one of Lincolns closest legal and political friends.

Lincoln differed from Davis in many ways. Judge Davis, a congenial aristocrat, dressed immaculately. By the time Lincoln began traveling with Davis on the Eighth Circuit, the judge, five feet eleven inches tall, weighed nearly three hundred pounds; Lincoln’s six-foot-four-inch frame carried less than two hundred pounds. Davis’s huge size made it impossible for him to share a bed with Lincoln in hotels. He was so large he had to ride about the circuit in a buggy drawn by not one but two gray mares.
Despite these superficial differences, Davis formed a highly favorable opinion of Lincoln. In a letter Davis said, “Lincoln is the best Stump Speaker in the State.” During the 1850s the lives and careers of Abraham Lincoln and Judge David Davis would intertwine repeatedly as they traveled from court to court in the small towns of central Illinois.
IN THE FALL OF 1849, Lincoln met Leonard Swett, a new lawyer on the circuit. Originally from Maine and a veteran of the Mexican War, Swett began practicing law in 1849 in Clinton, Illinois, a small town not far from Bloomington. A tall, erect man with a bright, intelligent face, he started traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit just as Lincoln returned to it.
In October 1849, they met for the first time in front of the Greek Revival courthouse in Mount Pulaski. Immediately Swett, sixteen years younger, and Lincoln formed a friendship that would last sixteen years.
That fall, Lincoln, Davis, and Swett formed what the lawyers on the circuit would call “the great triumvirate,” an homage to Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. Enjoying one another’s company, they traveled everywhere together and often stayed in the same hotel rooms. Other lawyers admired their abilities and chuckled at their invariable high jinks and humor. This triumvirate would not only become significant in the legal courts of central Illinois, but one day in political circles in Illinois and beyond.
WHILE THERE HAVE always been many lawyers who became politicians, Lincoln was one of the few politicians who later became a lawyer. Lincoln was a Whig in the statehouse before he became a Whig in the courthouse. He brought to the practice of the law a constellation of Whig ideas.
As a first principle, Whigs believed in order. Lincoln thought that the nation could not modernize and expand so long as lawlessness and violence remained prevalent in society. As a Whig, Lincoln was convinced that laws could be used to build a political and social framework. Lincoln also embraced the Whig idea of government serving as a protector of community ideals and moral values.
Lincoln’s politics were not of the cut-flower variety, which bloomed only for the moment; rather, they grew from the deep soil of tradition. In the 1850s, he referred more and more in his speeches and writings to the ideas of the nation’s founders—especially George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—citing them as precedents for the problems and possibilities of his own day.
Lincoln was also coming to believe that every generation needed to redefine America for its own time. Back in 1838, in his speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, he had declared that the role of his generation was quite limited—they were to “transmit” the ideas and institutions of the founders to their own and future generations. But by the 1850s, Lincoln was beginning to arrive at a creative balance—often a creative tension—between past traditions and the new and different possibilities of the present and future.
AS LINCOLN TRAVELED THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT, he kept abreast of the political events in Washington. He applauded the efforts of Senator Henry Clay, who in January 1850 was busy cobbling together a series of measures to ease the growing tensions between the North and the South. The seventy-year-old Clay had introduced eight resolutions proposing “an amicable arrangement of all questions in controversy between the free and slave states, growing out of slavery.” Clay hoped his resolutions, which would become known as the Compromise of 1850, would promote “a great national scheme of compromise and harmony.”
Clay’s initiatives produced high drama. His two celebrated senior colleagues, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, also at the end of their years of service, determined to respond.
On March 4, 1850, Calhoun, sixty-seven, sat at his Senate desk, too weak to speak, coughing incessantly, as the last major speech of his life was read by Virginia senator James M. Mason. In the speech, Calhoun asked, “How can the Union be preserved?” and then followed with a second question, “How has the Union been endangered?” He answered both questions by rehearsing how first the Northwest Ordinance and then the Missouri Compromise had kept Southern interests out of Western territories and states. Calhoun declared that the spiritual cords that bound the nation together had already been broken in the recent divisions of three leading Protestant denominations—Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian. He saw this separation as a dire trend and wondered whether the political cords would be severed also. He warned against further compromise.
Three days later, Calhoun returned to the Senate to hear Daniel Webster speak in favor of Clay’s resolutions. Expectations reverberated throughout Washington, and all the seats in the Senate chamber were filled, with people sitting in the aisles. Webster began, “I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American.” He declared, “I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union.” He then surprised his audience by chastising abolitionists and declaring that he could never support the Wilmot Proviso, which would keep slavery out of any territory acquired from Mexico. In the end, he supported each of Clay’s proposals, including the strengthening of the fugitive slave law.
Even from afar, Lincoln understood that the Compromise of 1850 was only a temporary truce. Each of the Compromise’s planks had been acrimoniously debated. California would enter the Union as a free state. The territories of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah would be organized without a declaration about slavery, leaving it to the citizens to decide. The slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in Washington and the District of Columbia. The Compromise settled a boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico. In the deepest bow to the South, which had not received another slave state in the deal, the Compromise amended the old Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 to require citizens to assist in recapturing runaway slaves and denying those slaves a jury trial.
Although it held the nation together, the Compromise of 1850 satisfied no one. Abolitionists only increased their efforts to end slavery once and for all. Conductors on the Underground Railroad stepped up their activities so that between 1850 and 1860 more than twenty thousand slaves traveled from farms to safe houses along the track from the United States to Canada. The new fugitive slave law instituted a reign of terror with free blacks being detained and sent to the South without trial. Many Southerners were extremely dissatisfied as well, arguing that Clay, the Great Compromiser, had sold out his native South.
For three old actors—Clay, Calhoun, and Webster—the debate on the Compromise of 1850 would be their last curtain call in the Senate. Calhoun died on March 31, 1850, before the debate ended. Clay and Webster would both die in the next two years. The vexing issue of slavery, if temporarily defused, would be left to the will and wiles of America’s next generation to resolve. Far away from the Washington stage, Lincoln read reports of the Compromise of 1850 in the Congressional Globe and in his regular diet of newspapers, but made no public comment.
IN THE SUMMER of 1850, Lincoln started taking notes for a lecture on the law and lawyers. Although there is no record of Lincoln ever delivering this lecture, the ideas expressed in the notes reveal his self-understanding of his profession.
“I am not an accomplished lawyer,” Lincoln began with self-deprecation. He confessed, “I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points where I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.” Lincoln here gave voice to a principle—the willingness to both admit mistakes and learn from them—that was becoming a part of his moral character.
He believed “the leading rule” for any lawyer was “diligence.” Lincoln counseled, “Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done today. … Whatever piece of business you have in hand, before stopping, do all the labor pertaining to it which can then be done.” He advised lawyers preparing a common-law suit to “write the declaration at once.”
Lincoln also offered a brief on the utility of public speaking. “It is the lawyer’s avenue to the public. Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated.” Though he recognized that there were many qualities of a successful lawyer, he believed this one virtue trumped all others. “However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.”
At the heart of his lecture was a definition of his understanding of the calling of a lawyer. “As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.” Here Lincoln offered his most practical advice: “Discourage litigation.” Life in the frontier states was marked by disputes. Rural and townsfolk were ready to “go to law” over the least aggravation. Lincoln’s counsel: “Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often the real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time.” At this point, Lincoln seems to anticipate a question from his imagined audience: Is not litigation the very source of a lawyer’s business and fees? He answers, “There will still be business enough.”
LINCOLN UNDERSTOOD HIS ROLE as a lawyer to be a mediator in the various small communities in which he practiced law. Abram Bale, who moved to the New Salem area from Kentucky in 1839, hired Lincoln in February 1850 to represent him in a dispute with the Hickox brothers over $1,000 of “good, merchantable, superfine flour.” Lincoln, drawing upon both his farming and storekeeping experience, argued that the twenty barrels of flour were not fairly characterized; they were instead inferior in quality. He knew he had a good case, but in the midst of the proceedings he counseled his client to settle. “I sincerely hope you will settle it. I think you can if you will, for I have always found Mr. Hickox a fair man in his dealings.” Lincoln then told Bale, “I will charge nothing for what I have done, and thank you to boot.” He further encouraged his client, “By settling, you will most likely get your money sooner; and with much less trouble and expense.”
Lincoln was a mediator more than a prosecutor. Just as in his speeches he was sensitive to the attitudes and questions of his audiences, in the courtrooms of the Eighth Judicial Circuit he worked hard to understand the motives and attitudes of clients, witnesses, and judges. He was responsive to the differing local contexts in which he practiced. He was often the only lawyer who stayed out on the circuit over the course of an entire fall and spring cycle. Lodging in homes, he shared folks’ leisure time on the weekends and learned their concerns, struggles, and questions. In his understanding of the lawyer as mediator, Lincoln recognized that cases that at first glance seemed to be between two persons almost always involved the whole community in these small towns. His active presence in these communities gave Lincoln both a standing and sensitivity to local institutions and sentiments. Even though justice was universal, Lincoln appreciated that in crucial ways law was local.
In the spring of 1850 the Illinois Citizen in Danville captured both Lincoln’s abilities and his growing reputation as a lawyer.
In his examination of witnesses, he displays a masterly ingenuity … that baffles concealment and defies deceit. And in addressing a jury, there is no false glitter, no sickly sentimental-ism to be discovered. In vain we look for rhetorical display. … Seizing upon the minutest points, he weaves them into his argument with an ingenuity really astonishing. … Bold, forcible and energetic, he forces conviction upon the mind, and, by his clearness and conciseness, stamps it there, not to be erased. … Such are some of the qualities that place Mr. L. at the head of the profession in this State.
Lincoln practiced law as a peacemaker. His early cases concerned individuals, not companies or corporations. Whether about hogs, cooking stoves, land, or slander, they almost always involved persons who knew each other face-to-face and had got crossways.
The reason Lincoln urged so many of his clients to settle was that he knew these people needed to go on living next to one another in their small villages and towns after they had their day in court. The skills he was developing as a lawyer—especially the subtle art of mediation—would one day soon be put to use on a much larger circuit.
WITH LINCOLN SPENDING more and more time traveling, his life as a lawyer, a politician, and a family man teetered out of balance. Politics, for the moment, had diminished while his legal practice had become all consuming. Any hopes that Mary may have had that Abraham would be home more often now that he was back from Washington were soon dashed. In 1850, his first full year home, Lincoln was away from Springfield 175 days.
Mary bore these absences as one who felt abandoned. At age six, she had lost her mother. One year later, her father had married a woman to whom Mary never grew close. For much of Mary’s childhood her father was absent, often away on business or politics.
She dealt with her sense of desertion and loss by focusing intently on her children. Whereas family manuals from this period advised nursing children for up to ten months, Mary nursed each of her boys for nearly two years. One of the boys always slept with her, whether or not Lincoln was home. With no nurse and no grandparents nearby, Mary raised her children almost as a single mother.
And then death tumbled in. In July 1849, just as the family was returning from Washington, Mary’s father, Robert Todd, died suddenly of cholera while campaigning for the Kentucky Senate. Five months later, little Eddie Lincoln, age three and a half, fell ill. Mary nursed the boy through December and January, but the medical practice of the day could do little to combat what was probably pulmonary tuberculosis. After fifty-two days of suffering, Eddie Lincoln died at 6 a.m. on February 1, 1850.
The death of Eddie brought tremendous sadness to both Abraham and Mary. The Lincoln home was filled with the sound of Mary weeping. She probably did not go to the cemetery, where she might break down, for the convention of the time dictated that women grieve in private. Everything we know about Mary suggests that Eddie’s death struck a tremendous blow to her sense of self and her stability.
How Lincoln responded to the death of his young son is more difficult to determine. Herndon reported that Lincoln sank deep into melancholy. A friend recalled Lincoln trying to comfort Mary by entreating her, “Eat, Mary, for we must live.” Three weeks after Eddie’s death, Lincoln wrote, “We miss him very much.”
IMMEDIATELY AFTER EDDIE’S DEATH, Abraham and Mary attempted to contact the man who had married them, Reverend Charles Dresser of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where Mary worshipped, to ask him to conduct the funeral service. Unfortunately, Dresser was out of town.
And so the Lincolns turned to the Reverend James Smith, the new minister at Springfield’s First Presbyterian Church. The funeral service was held at the Lincolns’ home at 11 a.m. on February 2. Both before and after the funeral, Smith brought pastoral care and comfort to the grieving parents.
Less than two years later, Mary joined First Presbyterian, a congregation founded in 1828 that had first met in the home of her uncle John Todd. In joining First Presbyterian, Mary reconnected with the Presbyterian church she had attended as a girl in Lexington. She became a member on October 13, 1852, “by examination.” The ruling elders of the congregation heard her narrative of faith, what they called in the session minutes “experimental religion.” The Lincolns rented pew number twenty in the seventh row for an annual fee of fifty dollars.
Originally from Scotland, the Reverend James Smith immigrated to the United States as a young man who was a confirmed deist, having read Constantin Volney and Thomas Paine. He took pleasure in challenging the religious ideas of camp-meeting preachers near his home in southern Indiana. But upon listening to the preaching of a Cumberland Presbyterian Church minister, Smith was converted. He was licensed to preach in 1825.
Smith wrote The Christian’s Defence in 1843. The book grew out of his debates with a popular freethinker, Charles G. Olmstead, over eighteen successive evenings in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1841. Smith defended the authority and truthfulness of the Old and New Testaments. In critiquing contemporary deviations from true faith, he was concerned that “the exercises of the understanding must be separated from the tendencies of the fancy, or of the heart,” a reference to the emotional, revivalist faith from which he was just then emerging.
Smith’s increasing intention to embrace a more rational faith gradually led him to the Presbyterian Church in 1844. He was called to First Presbyterian Church in Springfield in the spring of 1849, less than one year before the death of Eddie Lincoln. In October 1849, after the death of Mary’s father, the Lincolns traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, to help settle her father’s estate. While browsing in the library at the Todd home, Lincoln came across Smith’s 650-page treatise.
When Lincoln met Smith in Springfield, around the time of Eddie’s death, he either asked for or was offered a copy of The Christian’s Defence. Robert Lincoln remembered that a copy of Smith’s book sat on the bookshelf in the Lincoln home at Eighth and Jackson. Smith’s logical presentation of the Christian faith must have appealed to Lincoln’s penchant for order and reason. Put off by the emotionalism of the revivalist religion of his youth, Lincoln would have likely agreed with Smith’s proposal that when pondering religion “the mind must be trained to the hardihood of abstract and unfeeling intelligence.” Smith contended that in matters of faith “everything must be given up to the supremacy of argument.”
In the early 1850s, Lincoln attended First Presbyterian Church infrequently. He was away traveling on the Eighth Circuit each fall and spring, in addition to other travels as a lawyer and politician. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1853, Lincoln accepted an invitation to be one of three lawyers to represent the church in a suit in the Sangamon Presbytery.
John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s former law partner and a member of First Presbyterian, remembered that Lincoln began to attend church on a more regular basis in the late 1850s. Both Abraham and Mary appreciated Smith, “an intellectual, powerful man,” who, in the words of Mary’s close cousin Lizzie Grimsley, “could thunder out the terrors of the law as well as proclaim the love of the Gospel.” Lincoln, who had pushed away his father’s emotional expressions of faith when he moved to New Salem in the 1830s, began to take another look at religion.
LESS THAN A YEAR after Eddie’s death, Mary’s grief was relieved in part when she gave birth to William Wallace Lincoln on December 21, 1850. He was named after Mary’s brother-in-law Dr. William Wallace. The Lincolns’ third son would grow to become the boy most like his father.
A fourth son, Thomas Lincoln, was born on April 4, 1853, named after Abraham’s father. He quickly acquired the nickname “Tad,” short for “Tadpole,” the way he looked at birth. Tad grew to be a prankster in a family of boys who were mischief makers—with their father’s consent and often encouragement.
Tad Lincoln was baptized at First Presbyterian Church on April 4, 1855. Thomas was the only son born after Mary joined First Presbyte rian Church and seems to have been the only one of the Lincoln boys who was baptized. All the boys regularly attended Sunday school at the church. The Lincolns were becoming fond of Pastor James Smith and frequently invited him to their home. Lincoln discovered in Smith someone who had also doubted as a young man, had also read Volney and Paine, but had come to affirm both reason and faith.
LINCOLN, THOUGH NOT SEEKING PUBLIC OFFICE himself, continued to lobby for public offices for his friends. He wrote to President Taylor in January 1850, to recommend Stephen T. Logan for U.S. judge of the District Court of Illinois. In the spring of 1850, Lincoln’s name was put forward by a Whig newspaper for another term in Congress, but he quickly quashed the idea.
In July 1850, while in Chicago to participate in a case before the U.S. District Court, Lincoln learned that President Taylor, after participating in patriotic ceremonies on a hot July 4, had contracted a stomach ailment and died five days later. In Chicago, two committees immediately planned an event to memorialize the dead president. Receiving word that Lincoln was in town, they invited him on July 22 to give a eulogy. Honored by the request but concerned that he had less than two days to prepare, Lincoln replied, “The want of time for preparation will make the task, for me, a very difficult one to perform, in any degree satisfactory to others or to myself.”
Nevertheless, on July 24, 1850, Lincoln offered a eulogy at city hall. The address had all the marks of words prepared in a hurry. Lincoln took much of his eulogy from Taylor’s 1848 campaign biographies, some of which contained inaccurate information.
Lincoln did, however, use the occasion to offer his perspective on contemporary politics. “I fear the one great question of the day, is not now so likely to be partially acquiesced in by the different sections of the Union, as it would have been, could Gen. Taylor have been spared to us.” Lincoln, never as enamored of Taylor as he was of Henry Clay, nonetheless had hoped that the president, a slave owner, would be a mediating figure in the growing crisis over slavery.
In Lincoln’s unusual conclusion, he reminded his audience “that we, too, must die.” He concluded with six entire stanzas from the poem “Mortality” by Scottish poet William Knox, which he had discovered in a newspaper in 1846 and committed to memory.
The eulogy said as much about Lincoln as it did about Taylor. Lincoln, through the poem, evoked his own struggles with the meaning of life and death.
Yea! Hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,
Are mingled together in sun-shine and rain;
And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge,
Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.
Lincoln had known melancholy and despondency.
’tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,
From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death.
From the gilded saloon, to the bier and the shroud.
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!
The poem, with its summoning of eternal and unchanging rhythms of life, appealed to Lincoln in his quest for meaning and fulfillment.
SOON AFTER THE BIRTH of Willie, Lincoln received a letter from his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, telling him that his father was quite ill and might not recover. Thomas Lincoln and his second wife, Sara Bush Lincoln, had lived on a farm on Goosenest Prairie in Coles County in southeastern Illinois since 1840. Johnston reminded Lincoln that he had written two previous letters and wondered why he had received no reply. Lincoln, acknowledging the receipt of both letters, wrote, “it is no[t because] I have forgotten them, or been uninterested about them—but because it appeared to me I could write nothing which could do any good.” Lincoln added, “You already know I desire that neither Father or Mother shall be in want of any comfort either in health or sickness while they live,” and added that his stepbrother should use his name “to procure a doctor, or anything else for Father in his present sickness.” Lincoln then asked his stepbrother to convey to his father a consolation of faith: “Tell him to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great and good, and merciful Maker, who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him.”
It has been suggested by some that Lincoln’s religious words were an unconvincing appeal to the language of the primitive Baptist faith adhered to by Lincoln’s parents. But it is more plausible that Lincoln offered heartfelt language that he himself had heard from the Reverend Smith eleven months earlier at the funeral of his son Eddie and now conveyed as a consolation to his own father.
In his conclusion, Lincoln wrote of the distance that had grown between son and father. “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”
Thomas Lincoln died five days later on January 17, 1851. Lincoln did not attend the funeral. The distance could not be bridged.
AS SOLE HEIR, Lincoln inherited the eighty-acre farm on the Goosenest Prairie. He had no wish to benefit from the farm and sold it to his stepbrother for one dollar on August 12, 1851.
When, near the end of that year, he learned that Johnston was considering selling the land and moving to Missouri, Lincoln could not restrain his outrage. “I have been thinking of this ever since; and can not but think such a notion is utterly foolish.” He peppered Johnston with questions. “What can you do in Missouri, better than here? Is the land richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn, & wheat & oats, without work? Will any body there, any more than here, do your work for you?” Lincoln did not mince words. “I feel it is my duty to have no hand in such a piece of foolery.” He was particularly upset on “Mother’s account,” that the lack of Johnston’s labor and income would leave his stepmother destitute.
Lincoln, in reading over this strong letter, began his final paragraph, “Now do not misunderstand this letter, I do not write it in any unkind-ness.” He told his stepbrother he wrote “to get you to face the truth … your thousand pretences for not getting along better are all non-sense—they deceive no body but yourself.” Lincoln’s final sentence articulated not simply his hopes for his brother, but his own creed. “Go to work is the only cure for your case.”
SENATOR HENRY CLAY died in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 1852. On July 6, Springfield suspended all city business in recognition of a day of national mourning. The citizens of Springfield held two memorial meetings, one at the Episcopal church led by the Reverend Charles Dresser, who read the “Service for the Dead” from the Book of Common Prayer, and the second at the state capitol with a eulogy delivered by Lincoln. What Jefferson had meant to Madison, Clay had meant to Lincoln.
Lincoln began his speech by relating the birth of the nation to the birth of Clay. “The infant nation, and the infant child began the race of life together.” Lincoln built his eulogy around the lessons that Clay’s life could still offer the country. Commenting on Clay’s “comparatively limited” education, Lincoln said that it “teaches at least one profitable lesson,” that “one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” Lincoln may have exaggerated Clay’s lack of education, but in introducing this theme he offered his identification with the politician he idealized.
Unlike hundreds of other eulogies to Clay, Lincoln’s highlighted the Kentuckian’s vigorous engagement with slavery throughout his political life. He emphasized that Clay, from the beginning of his public career, “ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery.” Acknowledging the paradox that Clay was a slave owner, Lincoln declared that he had nonetheless been “in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky.” Lincoln admired Clay for opposing “both extremes” on slavery: those who would “shiver into fragments the Union” and those who would “tear to tatters the Constitution” in their desire to overthrow slavery immediately. Lincoln was intent to “array his name, opinions, and influence,” against “an increasing number of men” who, Lincoln feared, were beginning to assail “the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’ ”
Lincoln offered this tribute to Clay three years after he had last held public office. He had no future political office in sight. His eulogy memorialized his ideal politician, but it also enunciated the ideals that would bring Lincoln once again into public life, much sooner than he anticipated.


This photograph from October 17, 1854, by Polycarp Von Schneidau in Chicago, captures an intellectual if not crafty, Lincoln in the year he reentered politics.