be done, as a general rule and puts the artist—scientist & philosopher on his guard & sets him a thinking on the right line.”85
Scientific advance was more than merely a passing interest of Lincoln’s. Six times in the late 1850s he gave an expanding lecture, in two successive parts, on discoveries and inventions in which he argued that humans were fundamentally different from other animals, because they had the capacity to improve their condition. Lincoln’s advocacy of the Whig Party’s agenda of internal improvements (what we would call infrastructure) and technological advance is well known. What has not been pointed out is that Lincoln traced this agenda to its primitive origins.
“All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner,” he announced in his April 1858 “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions.” “The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptabilities, are the infinitely various ‘leads’ from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny.”86 Especially significant here are phrases “all creation” and “whole earth.” Lincoln extended his vision backward in time, returning to the earliest reaches of history. What he found was a key difference between the human and nonhuman world. In his words, “Fishes, birds, beasts, and creeping things, are not miners, but feeders and lodgers, merely.” For example, beavers build houses, and ants and bees provide food for the winter, exactly the way they did five thousand years ago. Humans are different. “Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.”
Human history, Lincoln points out, has been a succession of discoveries: first came clothing, then spinning and weaving, followed by iron tools, the wheel, wagons and boats, and aids to agriculture such as farm animals and the plow. In the second part of his lecture on discoveries and inventions, which he gave the next year, he went on to discuss history’s other important advances, including speaking, writing, printing, steam power, the railroad, and the telegraph.87
As an Illinois state politician and later as president he promoted Henry Clay’s American system of federally funded internal improvements. But, for him, improvements were not just a political program; they were a defining feature of humankind. Unlike other animals, he maintained, humans are able to reflect upon their physical environment and perform experiments which, over time, can lead to remarkable improvements in communication, transportation, and food production. Lincoln traced an archaeology of discoveries because he wanted to tie human inventions directly to the natural world.
Lincoln continued his informal program of intellectual enrichment on the law circuit. During off hours, when he wasn’t telling stories or enjoying local musical or theatrical performances, he usually went somewhere alone and read. John T. Stuart recalled Lincoln “Carrying around with him on the Circuit—to the various Courts, books such as Shakespear[e]—Euclid . . . He loved Burns.”88 Stuart also remembered that Lincoln loved a particular poem by Fitz-Greene Halleck—probably, as Douglas L. Wilson notes, Halleck’s moving eulogy to Burns.89 Lincoln later wrote that he had not recently “met with anything more admirable than Halleck’s beautiful lines on Burns,” and one can understand why.90
Not only does Halleck present Burns as the quintessential democratic poet, with “A love of right, a scorn of wrong, / Of coward, and of slave,” but he used language that seems to have stayed with Lincoln. Regarding Burns’s grave, Halleck writes of “the mute homage that we pay / To consecrated ground,” emphasizing: “And consecrated ground it is, / The last, the hallowed home of one / Who lives upon all memories, / Though with the buried gone.” Halleck’s word choice struck home with Lincoln, who in one of his poems said that memories “will hallow all” and “Seem hallowed, pure, and bright, / Like scenes in some enchanted isle, / All bathed in liquid light.”91 When commemorating the dead at Gettysburg, he declared, “we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground,” because soldiers, living and dead, “have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”92
If Halleck stimulated Lincoln’s thoughts about hallowing and consecrating burial grounds, Euclid, another author he read on the circuit, anticipated the opening words at Gettysburg about the nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln had been studying Euclidian geometry since his early Illinois years, and he continued to do so on the circuit, where he mastered the propositions—all 173 of them—contained in the first six books of Euclid’s Elements. As Lincoln later explained, he had often encountered the word “demonstrate” in his law reading, but he wondered how it differed from “reason” or “prove.”93 Euclid taught him what demonstration was. Lincoln declared that “Euclid, well studied, would free the world of half its calamities, by banishing half the nonsense which now dilutes and curses it.” If published and distributed by the Tract Society, he insisted, “it would be a means of grace.”
Why was geometry sacred? We can glean the answer from David Davis’s comment that on the circuit Lincoln “studied Euclid—the exact sciences—his mind struggled to arrive at moral & physical—mathematical demonstration.”94 Davis’s juxtaposition of the moral, the physical, and the mathematical is telling. Lincoln’s search for exactness, both physical and moral, was also noted by Henry Clay Whitney, who observed that at farmhouses on the circuit Lincoln would closely examine some farm implement—turn it over, stoop down, stand off, shake it, and find “every quality and utility which inhered in it”—and that he was equally inquisitive about moral matters: “He would bore to the center of any moral proposition, and carefully analyse and dissect every layer and every atom of which it was composed, nor would he give over the search till completely satisfied that there was nothing more to know, or be learned about it.”95
In his studies, Lincoln tried to connect the certainty of Euclidian geometry with morals and politics. Euclid had especially powerful meaning for him, because, time and again, his geometric propositions gave irrefutable evidence of equality. Euclid’s propositions about triangles, quadrilaterals, parallelism, and other geometric shapes or lines are full of rules about equal angles, equal sides, equal degrees, and so on. It was understandable that Lincoln would have sought Euclidian support for the “proposition” that “all men are created equal.”96 On this point he shared the view of the black reformer William Hamilton, for whom Euclid was a potent teacher of abolitionism, because, in Hamilton’s words, any American who refused to accept human equality “does not agree with axioms in geometry, that deny that things can be equal, and at the same time unequal to one another.”97
Lincoln’s rationalist impulse also explains his interest in Poe, another of his law circuit favorites. He appears to have been fascinated by the genre Poe virtually invented, the detective tale. According to a campaign biographer, William Dean Howells, Lincoln’s “mathematical and metaphysical” mind was “pleased with the absolute and logical method of Poe’s tales and sketches, in which the problem of mystery is given, and wrought out into everyday facts by the process of cunning analysis.” Howells added, “It is said that he suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this author.”98 Stuart said that Lincoln “Carried Poe around the Circuit—read and loved the Raven—repeated it over & over.”99 Another companion testified that Lincoln would habitually rise earlier in the morning than the other lawyers, sit by a fireplace, stir up the coals, and muse, “inspired, no doubt, by that strange psychological influence which is so poetically described by Poe in ‘The Raven.’
But Poe also saw the limitations of reason. On this point, Poe trumped Euclid. In one of his signature detective stories, “The Purloined Letter,” Poe includes a digression on the shortcomings of mathematical reasoning. “Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth,” says Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who points out that they do not apply, for example, to morals, to chemistry, or to motive.101
Lincoln on some level agreed with Poe, for during his law circuit years he wrote a poem, “My Childhood Home I See Again,” that plunged into the irrational and suggested that there was no reasonable explanation for it. Penned in 1844 when Lincoln was visiting Indiana while campaigning for the presidential candidate Henry Clay, the poem, which was published three years later in an Illinois newspaper, begins as a typically Lincolnesque meditation on mortality—many of the people and homes of his youth are now gone—and then becomes a Poe-like effort to limn the irrational. Halfway through the poem, Lincoln describes an Indiana neighbor, Matthew Gentry, who had tried to kill his parents and himself. As Lincoln explained in a letter, Gentry “is an insane man, rather a bright lad and the son of the rich man of our very poor neighborhood,” who at nineteen “unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled into harmless insanity.” In the poem Lincoln writes of “Poor Matthew! Once of genius bright— / A fortune-favored child— / Now locked for aye, mental night, / A haggard mad-man wild.” Lincoln vividly recounts how this “howling crazy man” had assaulted his family, wounded himself, and writhed and shrieked “with maniac laughter” when he was chained.102
In his other major poem of this period, “The Bear Hunt,” Lincoln uses another childhood memory—in this case, his father’s hunt for a bear who had killed one of his swine—to put the human-animal association to sharply satirical use. At the start of the poem the bear hunt is an episode of “glorious glee” for a “merry corps” of hunters, but by the end the hunters prove to be cruel and blindly self-interested.103 Lincoln wins our sympathy for the animals—both the chased bear and his canine pursuers. Lincoln adopts the perspective of the bear, who runs furiously, then tires and slows down, and finding himself surrounded by dogs who bite him, fights desperately but then is riddled with bullets. Blood flows from the bear as it dies. Lincoln then makes his satirical point. Custom dictates that a bear’s skin is awarded to the one who drew first blood in the hunt. A bitter argument over the award breaks out among the hunters. Lincoln writes:
But who did this, and how to trace
What’s true from what’s a lie,
Like lawyers, in a murder case
They stoutly argufy.
However, the one who deserves the prize, we learn, is not human. Up to the fallen bear runs the dog that had first sunk its teeth into the bear during the chase. The dog now bites into the animal again, growling and shaking, and he “swears, as plain as dog can swear, / That he has won the skin.” And so, Lincoln suggests, if justice were true, the dog would be recognized as the winner. But, naturally, the men snicker at the dog. In the final verse, Lincoln drives home the point about the insensitivity of “two-legged dogs,” who say,
Conceited whelp! we laugh at thee—
Nor mind, that now a few
Of pompous, two-legged dogs there be,
Conceited quite as you.
EXPANDING WITH THE LAW
Lincoln’s pursuit of the law led him to consider rationally a remarkable variety of topics. The expansiveness of his vision was influenced by the sheer variety of his legal practice. His 5,173 law cases covered a tremendous range, from sexual aberration to white-collar crime.104 The practice of law broadened him in several ways: it exposed him to the full gamut of idioms in American popular culture; it saw him team up with lawyers in some cases and oppose them in others; and it forced him to argue both sides of the same issue in different cases. Taken together, these factors freed him of narrow views and fostered good judgment and compassion.
Unlike the typical lawyer today, who has a specialty—family law, or criminal law, or bankruptcy law, or personal injury law, etc.—attorneys on the Illinois law circuit dealt with virtually every kind of legal situation. More than half of Lincoln’s cases related to debt litigation, another fifth to inheritance matters or mortgage foreclosures, about 15 percent to cases involving crimes, divorce, or slander, 5 percent to railroads, about 1 percent to medicine, and 8 percent to miscellaneous matters.
These cases ranged from the trifling to the momentous. Lincoln carefully considered each case on its own, no matter how trivial. As Whitney noted:
It is strange to contemplate that . . . Mr. Lincoln’s whole attention should have been engrossed in petty controversies or acrimonious disputes between neighbors about trifles; that he should have puzzled his great mind in attempting to decipher who was the owner of a litter of pigs, or which party was to blame for the loss of a flock of sheep, by foot rot; or whether some irascible spirit was justified in avowing that his enemy had committed perjury; yet I have known him to give as earnest attention to such matters, as, later, he gave to affairs of State.105
There was no theme or idiom of American culture that Lincoln’s law experience did not encompass, from the sensational to the sentimental, from the crudest vernacular to the most sophisticated technical language.
On the sensational side, he handled topics that in the hands of popular writers gave rise to lurid works aimed at titillating a wide readership. Herndon, who gave up the law in his later years, looked back on his experiences with Lincoln: “If you love the stories of murder—rapes—fraud &c. a law office is a good place—but good Lord let me forget all about a law office.”106 Elsewhere, Herndon called the law office the place to learn “stories of fraud, deceit, cruelty, broken promises, blasted homes.”107 Although only a small percentage of Lincoln’s and Herndon’s cases related to homicide, assault, spousal abuse, divorce, or sexual misconduct, we can understand why such cases lingered in Herndon’s memory. Some of the cases went well beyond the scandals treated in the penny newspapers or pulp fiction of the day.
In an era avid for what a conservative critic called “public poison”—racy fiction about crime or illicit sex—Lincoln dealt with such topics judiciously in court. He handled situations that were even more shocking than those portrayed by sensationalists such as Poe, George Lippard, or George Thompson.108 There is nothing in the period’s popular literature, for example, as bizarre as the bestiality cases Lincoln handled. In 1847, he and Herndon represented William Torrence, who claimed that Newton Galloway had slandered him by accusing him of impregnating a pig. Galloway claimed that Torrence “caught my old sow and he fucked her as long as he could,” and now the pig was “bellying down and will soon have some young bills” (a reference to Torrence’s first name). Lincoln argued that this “false, scandalous, malicious” charge severely damaged Torrence’s reputation.109 In another case, a client of Lincoln’s was charged with copulating with a neighbor’s dog and, in two others, with cows.110
Other forms of illicit sex, such as adultery and extramarital fornication, were also then a crime. Lincoln defended Nancy M. Martin, who claimed that Achilles M. Underwood slandered her by saying publicly that he had copulated with her and that she “has been fucked more times than I’ve got fingers and toes for damned if it aint so big I can almost poke my fist in[.]”111 Lincoln won $237 for Martin. Emily Cantrall hired Lincoln and Herndon to represent her in a slander suit against John Primm, who reportedly said that “William King screwed Charles Cantrall’s wife twice while he was gone, and before that he crawled in bed with her and her husband and screwed her.”112 James Mitchell hired Lincoln to defend him in a slander suit after he allegedly called Missouri Mitchell, the wife of Elijah Mitchell, “a base whore” and “a nasty stinking strumpet” and said he could “prove it by the Nances. They have rode her in the corner of the fence many a time.”113
The language used in these and other of Lincoln’s sex cases was more explicit than what can be found in the American-made pornography that has survived from that era. By the same token, the murders Lincoln handled resembled episodes in the period’s violent pulp fiction.
The canard that Lincoln was an ineffective criminal attorney has been convincingly challenged in recent times. He handled seventeen homicide cases, fifteen as a defense attorney and two as a prosecutor. Ten of the trials went to jury verdict, of which Lincoln was, by a conservative estimate, on the winning side five times. Counting the cases that were settled by plea bargain, one could say that he won or satisfactorily resolved 70 percent of his homicide cases.114 Granted, his performances were not always the result of brilliant legal arguments. In an effort to save a client found guilty of murder, he once filed a request for arrest of judgment so nitpicking as to be called spurious.115 Another time, he was preparing to defend a woman accused of murdering her husband when she slipped out of the state and was never caught—possibly a deliberate lapse of attention on his part, giving rise to the legend that he joked in court, “She wanted to know where she could get a good drink of water, and I told her there was mighty good water in Tennessee.”116
The biographical and cultural meanings of his criminal work have been overlooked. As we’ve seen, Lincoln emerged from violent cultures: the frontier, with its rough-and-tumble fighting; the riverboat culture of “half-horse, half-alligator” men; the gangs of New Salem, where the Clary’s Grove Boys reigned supreme; and contentious Illinois politics, which saw Lincoln clashing with opponents and nearly having a duel to the death. He was also alarmed by nationwide mobocracy—group vigilantism—and the fierce, denunciatory language of reformers, which he wanted to be replaced by milder, more logical forms of persuasion.
His murder cases gave him the opportunity to revisit all these cultural arenas. He reexperienced frontier violence when he defended William Fraim, a volatile riverboat man who stabbed to death the ferryman William Neathammer in a Frederick, Illinois, saloon on February 17, 1838, after a fight erupted when the latter blew tobacco smoke in the former’s face.117 A later case, People v. William Duff Armstrong (the celebrated “Almanac Trial”), came directly out of Lincoln’s fighting past.118 The accused murderer, Duff Armstrong, was the son of the late Jack Armstrong, the champion wrestler of Clary’s Grove whom Lincoln had fought to a draw and who came to respect Lincoln so much that the two became fast friends. Duff had allegedly crushed the skull of James Preston Metzker during a brawl in a “whiskey camp” on the outskirts of a religious revival. In defending Duff without charge for Jack’s widow, Hannah, Lincoln gave one of his best courtroom performances, winning a not-guilty verdict.
Another murder case, People v. Truett, grew out of the turbulent Illinois political culture that had put Lincoln in potentially deadly situations.119 A politician who had threatened violence against him, William L. D. Ewing, was involved in the case, as were several other of Lincoln’s opponents
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