Many have wondered why Lincoln invited the young, inexperienced Herndon, who had been studying in the Lincoln-Logan law office, to become his partner. Not only was Herndon given to bouts of heavy drinking, but he was temperamental and sometimes querulous.
Why, then, the choice of Herndon? On a basic level, Herndon respected Lincoln without falsely idealizing him. In the chaotic time just after the Lincoln assassination, Herndon would brush away the mists of hagiography and seek the “real” Lincoln. He interviewed scores of people who had known Lincoln and contributed his research to the biography penned by another of Lincoln’s attorney friends, Ward Hill Lamon. Lamon’s controversial book was attacked because it raised questions about the president’s religious faith and his marriage. A mixed reception also greeted Herndon’s 1889 biography, cowritten with Jesse Weik, which resisted portraying Lincoln as a saint. Intent on being clear-eyed about the president’s flaws, Herndon still found no evidence of intentional dishonesty on Lincoln’s part. Canniness, yes, and secretiveness, self-absorption, and occasional coolness—but not dishonesty. Lincoln had “some defects & a few positive faults,” Herndon wrote, but “he was an intensely sincere and honest man”—so much so, Herndon added in italics, “I would rather doubt any man’s simple word than to doubt Lincoln’s honesty.”17 In fact, “nothing but demonstration of dishonesty or vice could shake him.” Herndon gave a number of examples from Lincoln’s law practice, including one in which, believing that a client involved in a lawsuit had overestimated the size of a disputed piece of land, Lincoln measured her property with surveyor’s instruments, found a small error, and made her revise the terms of her suit accordingly.
With regard to politics, Lincoln’s selection of Herndon after his previous law experiences is analogous to his choice of Mary Todd in the wake of his romances with Ann Rutledge and Mary Owens. If Mary Todd espoused Northern views that complemented her Southern background (unlike the proslavery Owens or the politically neutral Rutledge), so did William Herndon, who said, “I was a southerner—born on a southern soil—reared by southern parents, . . . but I have always turned New Englandwards for my ideas—my sentiments—my education—.”18 He continued turning in that direction. Throughout his partnership with Lincoln, Herndon kept up with the cutting-edge antislavery thought that emanated from New England.
Here he stood in sharp contrast to Lincoln’s previous law partners. Though John Todd Stuart remained fairly close to Lincoln, they parted ways politically over the issue of slavery. Lincoln would later join the emerging antislavery Republican Party, while Stuart went with the proslavery Democrats. During the Civil War, Stuart denounced the Emancipation Proclamation and joined the Copperhead opposition to Lincoln. Also, he envied his former law partner’s success on the national scene. Herndon concluded that “Stuart in his heart hated Lincoln.”19
Lincoln’s second law partner, Logan, was more supportive than Stuart; he remained politically loyal to Lincoln and, as a delegate to the 1860 Republican Convention, assisted in the choice of Lincoln as the party’s candidate for the presidency. However, Logan was quite conservative on the issues of race and slavery. As a state legislator in 1847–48 he played a large role in the passage of the new Illinois constitution, which barred from the state free blacks as well as enslaved persons accompanying their masters. One also wonders about Logan’s active participation in the national Peace Conference of February 1861, in which representatives from twenty-one states met in Washington, DC, in a futile effort to prevent civil war by giving major concessions to the South, including allowing slavery to spread west to the Pacific under a restored Missouri Compromise.
The partnership with the antislavery Herndon, in contrast, put Lincoln in daily interchange with a man who shared his hatred of slavery. It also made the atmosphere of his everyday operations as a lawyer even looser than they had been previously.
Both Lincoln and Herndon loathed the drudge work of the law. An Ohioan of the time noted that the “business of a lawyer’s office, generally has as little interest as a merchant’s accounting room. Declarations, pleas or demurrers, bills or answers in chancery, petitions in dower or partition, conveyances, depositions, the collection of notes, engross the time of an attorney.”20 Gibson W. Harris, who apprenticed with Lincoln and Herndon, remarked, “except to a peculiarly constituted mind, the law is a dry and uninteresting study.”21 Lincoln wrote about “the drudgery of the law” and especially “detested the mechanical work of the office.” Herndon explained, “A law office is a dull, dry place, so far as pleasurable or interesting incidents are concerned.”22
The dryness of law work that the partners complained of was memorably captured in Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The story’s provincial, middle-class narrator is a lawyer of deeds and mortgages who does “a snug business” in “a snug retreat”; his urban office looks out on blank walls, symbols of his dull, confining Wall Street existence.23 Tedious office work is done by the lawyer’s copyists, one of whom, Bartleby, is described as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable,” and who at first is amazingly efficient at copying long documents. This task, today accomplished by photocopying, was, in the lawyer’s words, “a proverbially dry, husky sort of business,” which, in Bartleby’s case, leads to depression and death. Saying that he “prefers not” to copy or obey other commands, Bartleby drifts into a completely passive state and finally is taken to a prison, appropriately named the Tombs, where he dies, curled up before a wall in the prison yard. The soul-deadening work of the law office has sapped the humanity out of Bartleby and has led to alienation and death.
Both Lincoln and Herndon were aware of the perils of losing one’s soul to repetitive drudgery. They managed to avoid much of the boredom that came with the work. Lincoln had done a good amount of copying documents early on in his time with Stuart, and Herndon performed such tasks under Logan and Lincoln and then as Lincoln’s junior partner. But the atmosphere of the Lincoln and Herndon South Fifth Street office, located above a store on the west side of the public square, was anything but Bartleby-like. Herndon’s relaxed attitude gave Lincoln plenty of opportunity to behave in an unlawyerly way. Lincoln typically showed up at around nine at the modest office, which was usually a mess. Plants sprouted from the dirty floor because of seeds that leaked from envelopes sent by farmers Lincoln represented. The windowsill was filthy, and the door panels were broken. A colleague of Lincoln’s said, “No lawyer’s office could have been more unkempt, untidy, and uninviting.”24 Lincoln often stretched out on the small couch, with one of his long legs on the sofa and the other extended to the table or a chair, spending an hour musing over a book or newspaper, often reading aloud. He meditated for a time, then broke out with a joke or story. Sometimes one story led to another, the result being, as Herndon recalled, “Nothing was done that morning. Declarations—pleas—briefs & demurrers were flung to the winds. It was useless to attempt to read anymore that morning.”25
When Lincoln’s sons Willie and Tad visited the office, they romped about and created a chaos of papers, overturned inkstands, and scattered pens and coal ashes. “Lincoln would say nothing,” Herndon noted, “so abstracted was he and so blinded to his children’s faults. Had they s—t in Lincoln’s hat and rubbed it on his boots, he would have laughed and thought it smart.” Even his approach to the law was casual. Herndon testified, “Lincoln knew no such thing as order or method in his law practice.”26 He scribbled notes and stored them, along with letters from clients, in his hat, sometimes losing them.
Lincoln’s tendency to be distracted by reading, storytelling, or his boys interfered with his law work. He never became a deep student of the law. Herndon noted that although Lincoln studied closely on a case-by-case basis, he “was a second rate lawyer,” adding rhetorically, “What—make a great lawyer of a man who never read [law books] much!”27 Lincoln knew his own shortcomings as an attorney. A colleague confirmed that he was “aware of his inferiority as a lawyer” and would admit it “with a smile or a good natured remark.”28 In notes he wrote toward a lecture on the law, he wrote, “I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.”29
But if he failed, he can be said to have lapsed in the positive sense of Thoreau, who said that his aim was to “fail” in business, or Melville, who wanted to write novels that were said to “fail” commercially.30 Although Lincoln was an ambitious lawyer whose annual income reached $4,500 in the 1850s, he had little interest in pursuing money for its own sake.31 Sometimes he could earn a lot for a single case—he once sued a railroad company to collect a fee of $5,000—but he was known, and sometimes ridiculed, for keeping his fees low. The money he earned while working with Herndon was divided equally, even if, as was often the case, Lincoln worked more than his partner on a certain case. In general, personal fulfillment was his main objective, and in that sense he succeeded. Far from allowing himself to become a walking corpse like Bartleby or a “safe” lawyer like Bartleby’s employer, he allowed his lawyer’s life to contribute to his cultural and social development. Spending part of the day reading Byron or Burns and telling stories or jokes strengthened his connections with all levels of culture.
LESSONS OF THE LAW CIRCUIT
He greatly improved these connections when he traveled on the law circuit. Twice a year, for several weeks in the spring and several more in the fall, he trekked by horseback or buggy—then, from the mid-1850s, by railroad—from courthouse to courthouse in counties included in the Eighth Judicial Circuit. The towns on the circuit had few lawyers and thus depended on itinerants to handle disputes or crimes. At its peak, between 1843 and 1853, the Eighth Circuit included fourteen counties covering ten thousand square miles—about twice the size of Connecticut. Lincoln usually traveled with other lawyers and judges, who stayed in inns together, socialized with one another, and joined or challenged one another in court.
Among his traveling companions, at various times, were men who would become active in his political life. The brilliant Bloomington attorney Leonard Swett became a leading Republican operative in Illinois who backed Lincoln in his 1860 presidential run. Henry Clay Whitney of Urbana also campaigned for Lincoln and wrote a book about the law circuit as well as a two-volume biography of the president. Kirby Benedict, a Decatur lawyer, traveled sixteen years on the circuit with Lincoln, who liked him so much that as president he refused to replace the alcoholic Benedict as chief justice of New Mexico. The Springfield judge Samuel Hubbel Treat, who served as a judge on the Eighth Judicial Circuit from 1839 to 1848, presided over at least nine hundred circuit cases in which Lincoln was involved. Lincoln received from Treat a 1739 joke book, Joe Miller’s Jests, and, in Treat’s words, “evidently learned its entire contents, for he found Lincoln narrating the stories contained therein around the circuit, but very much embellished and changed, evidently by Lincoln himself.”32 In 1862, Lincoln thanked Treat for a “very patriotic and judicious letter” containing information about the Mississippi River.33
The two law circuit companions who became closest to Lincoln were David Davis and Ward Hill Lamon. Like William Herndon (and Lincoln himself), both were Southern-born men who came to adopt antislavery views. Davis, destined to become Lincoln’s campaign manager in 1860 and, in 1862, Lincoln’s first appointee to the Supreme Court, was a Maryland-born graduate of Kenyon College and Yale Law School who moved to Illinois in 1835 and served in politics and the law before being appointed as a judge on the Eighth Circuit in 1848. An imposing man, Davis weighed around three hundred pounds and cloaked his heft with natty suits. Intent on establishing himself as a prominent Illinoisan, he bought so much real estate that he eventually became the largest landholder in the state. His approach to the law was almost as unconventional as Abe’s. He had little interest in legal precedents or technicalities. Henry Whitney noted that Davis “did not know, or care for, the philosophy of the law, but he was the incarnation of common-sense and sterling judgment.”34 Leonard Swett recalled that “he never relied on his knowledge of authorities and never allowed his legal lore to smother his common sense.”35
Ward Hill Lamon, known as “Hill,” was a tough, whiskey-swigging lawyer who became one of Lincoln’s most trusted associates. Born in Virginia and trained in law at the University of Louisville, Lamon was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1851 and practiced law in Danville and, later, in Bloomington. He traveled with Lincoln on the circuit in the 1850s. Despite his Southern background, he hated slavery, though he also loathed abolitionism of the Garrisonian variety, which he saw as divisive. Gifted with a fine voice, Lamon entertained the other lawyers by singing popular songs and playing the banjo. He loved telling off-color stories. Tall and powerful, he was wont to get into fights, sometimes with unexpected results. He once tore the seat of his pants while wrestling outside a courthouse. When he entered the court, a fellow lawyer jokingly passed around a sheet requesting contributions to buy him new trousers. The paper at last reached Lincoln, who said dryly, “I can contribute nothing to the end in view.
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