[iii-34] Ram, 269-70, note, 505. It is interesting to note that a somewhat similar tale is frequently met with among the anecdotes of the English bar. A barrister at the “Old Bailey,” according to this version, secured the acquittal of a client charged with highway robbery by introducing an almanac to prove that there was darkness on a certain night, instead of the bright moonlight, in which the prosecuting witness claimed to have distinguished the prisoner’s features. The almanac, however, as afterwards transpired, had been fraudulently so printed for that occasion.
[iii-35] Those who wish to collate what has been published about the Armstrong affair may find these references of service: Gridley’s Defense, 3-23; Hill, 229-34; Hobson, 40-50; Tarbell, i, 270-73; Lamon, 327-31; Arnold, 87-89; Onstot, 98-100; Irelan, xvi, 142-44; Oldroyd, 213-15; Herndon, ii, 26-28; Barrett, 63-66; Barrett (New), i, 152-54; Holland, 128-29; Browne, 224-27; Brockett, 82-85; Selby, 94-97, 254; Phillips’s Men Who Knew, 62-63; Stoddard, 157-60; Raymond, 29-31; Brooks, 127-29; French, 75-76; Whipple, 261-65; Bartlett, 111-15; Curtis’s Lincoln, 75; Coffin, 162-63; Stowe, 23-25; Morgan, 102-03; Nicolay’s Boy’s Life, 94-97; Hanaford, 44-48; Pratt, 78-82; Thayer, 285-93; McClure’s Stories, 97-99; Williams, 68-73; Lincolnics, 64-66; Jones, 15; Master, 20-22; New York Sun, June 7, 1896; North American Review, February, 1898, pp. 191-95; Kankakee (Ill.) Republican, February 12, 1909, Bloomington (Ill.) Pantagraph, January 20, 1912; also Eggleston’s The Graysons, in which the trial and the almanac incident are used by the novelist with good effect.
[iii-36] Tarbell, i, 265; Emerson, 5.
[iii-37] From an unpublished manuscript entitled “Lincoln on the Stump and at the Bar,” by Judge Scott, quoted in Tarbell, i, 253-54.
[iii-38] Judge William M. Dickson, in Harper’s Magazine, June, 1884, p. 63; Barrett (New), i, 121-22. See, also, Alban J. Conant, in Liber Scriptorum, 175-76, and in McClure’s Magazine, March, 1909, p. 516; Chauncey M. Depew, in Rice, 432; Browne, 229-30; Curtis’s Lincoln, 85; McClure’s Yarns, 457; McClure’s Stories, 92; Pratt, 59-60.
[iii-39] Collated from accounts by George W. Minier, in Oldroyd, 187-89, and in Herndon, ii, 327-28; also: Arnold, 85-87; Brooks, 122-24; Coffin, 108; Pratt, 68-69.
[iii-40] Binney, 444.
[iii-41] Lincoln would doubtless have approved of David Hoffman’s rule on this subject. It read: “I will never plead or otherwise avail of the bar of infancy against an honest demand. If my client possesses the ability to pay, and has no other legal or moral defense than that it was contracted by him when under the age of twenty-one years, he must seek for other counsel to sustain him in such a defense. And although in this, as well as in that of limitation, the law has given the defense, and contemplates in the one case to induce claimants to a timely prosecution of their rights, and in the other designs to protect a class of persons who by reason of tender age are peculiarly liable to be imposed on, yet in both cases I shall claim to be the sole judge (the pleas not being compulsory) of the occasions proper for their use.”
[iii-42] Remarks of Justice David Davis in the Federal Circuit Court at Indianapolis, May 19, 1865.
[iii-43] It may be of interest to note that these same revolutionary properties, and the same stage-setting of frozen ground flecked with the blood of patriots’ unshod feet, had served Patrick Henry, many years before, in the defense of John Venable, Commissary of the Continental Army, sued by John Hook, a Tory, for the value of some steers seized to feed the hungry troops. But Henry’s eloquence had not prevailed as fully as Lincoln’s did; for the jury found a verdict, though in a nominal sum, against the great Virginian’s client.