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P.Griffith
Lincoln the lawyer
Lincoln the lawyer
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The testimony concerning Abraham Lincoln is voluminous, the exhibits are almost numberless; but one important point in the vast record has been slighted by the mighty array of able and eminent advocates who have presented it to the world, for no one has heretofore attempted a summing up of the great President’s legal career.
The explanation of this neglect is simple. Lincoln’s achievements as a statesman are so transcendentally important that they have demanded and justly received exhaustive and well nigh exclusive consideration. Compared with his historic guidance of the nation, his experience at the bar has appealed to his biographers as being merely episodic.
But if it be true that the statesman’s legal training qualified him for his great task; if it be probable that without training he could not have accomplished his stupendous results; if it be possible that he would never have been called to his high station unless he had been admitted to the bar, then surely the story of his professional life deserves more than a passing comment, a paragraph, or even a chapter.
It is certainly strange that the literature inspired by Lincoln’s record, though vast in quantity and rich in quality, should include no special study of his legal aptitudes. One autobiographical volume of life on the Illinois circuit is coupled with his name; but most of the notable histories dispose of his twenty-three years’ practice as an attorney in less than two chapters, and the minor works bury it altogether under a mass of unauthentic anecdote and trivial reminiscence.
The explanation of this neglect is simple. Lincoln’s achievements as a statesman are so transcendentally important that they have demanded and justly received exhaustive and well nigh exclusive consideration. Compared with his historic guidance of the nation, his experience at the bar has appealed to his biographers as being merely episodic.
But if it be true that the statesman’s legal training qualified him for his great task; if it be probable that without training he could not have accomplished his stupendous results; if it be possible that he would never have been called to his high station unless he had been admitted to the bar, then surely the story of his professional life deserves more than a passing comment, a paragraph, or even a chapter.
It is certainly strange that the literature inspired by Lincoln’s record, though vast in quantity and rich in quality, should include no special study of his legal aptitudes. One autobiographical volume of life on the Illinois circuit is coupled with his name; but most of the notable histories dispose of his twenty-three years’ practice as an attorney in less than two chapters, and the minor works bury it altogether under a mass of unauthentic anecdote and trivial reminiscence.
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