Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/295

 266

LEGAL REMINISCENCES. L. E. Chittenden. VII. LINCOLN AS A LAWYER. GREAT success is not to be attained by all men. It is not quite true that "lives of great men all remind us, we may make our lives sublime "; and yet there are some lives which the lawyer cannot study attentively without becoming a better man and a much better lawyer. Abraham Lincoln had the ability to attach other men to him more quickly and more firmly than any American who has ever lived. He could also give ex pression to an idea or a principle in fewer and more forcible words than any author with whose writings I am acquainted. The love of the common people for his memory has an intensity, a devotion, which has been manifested towards no other man since the advent of our Saviour. His sec retary Salmon P. Chase was gifted by nature with a powerful intellect which had been trained in the best schools. No man in writing or conversation had a better com mand of our mother-tongue or could fashion it into sentences of more exquisite beauty. No man more ardently desired the favor of the people or made greater efforts to secure it. His mind was scholarly and eminently judicial. Closer application to his profes sion would have made him a lawyer as learned as Story — as a writer of English he might have taken rank in advance of any American or English author. But after all his efforts he never could attach the people to him, while Lincoln almost without an effort, had a temple built for him in every patriotic American heart. Mr. Chase was a student and a most pains taking writer. Possibly the finest sentence he ever wrote was the appeal to Almighty

God which was added to the proclamation of emancipation. But he never wrote any thing comparable to the Gettysburg speech, the substance of which was pencilled by Mr. Lincoln on the back of a letter, while in the railroad car on his way to the battle field. If Mr. Lincoln was born great — if his ability as a writer and his power to secure the love of the common people were his special gifts, there would be little profit to us in giving them much consideration. But if nature was no more partial to him than she is to the average of men — if he won his fame by hard, honest work, and a strict observance of the golden rule, then is his example a beacon light to the lawyer or the public man, who will find it profit able to study his character as intensely as he pursued the study of the subjects which first brought him into notice and then made him great. It is rather difficult to separate the study of Mr. Lincoln as a lawyer from his career as a politician. As a lawyer his practice was that of the jury advocate rather than that of counsel in the appellate courts. The fame of the jury advocate is usually ephem eral. His arguments were not reported in cxteuso, and there were no means of pre serving them. Still enough has been saved from the wreck of time to show us that Mr. Lincoln gained high rank in his profession by means and processes open to every lawyer in the land. Mr. Lincoln, until his election to the pres idency, never appears to have had any wealthy or influential friends. His tem perament was not by nature genial. The