[iv-20] Henry Rickel, in Cedar Rapids Gazette, February 6, 1909, p. 1.
[iv-21] Ward, 242-46; Jennings, 93-98.
[iv-22] Father Chiniquy reproduces in his book an engraved facsimile of the due-bill, dated May 23, 1856. It is undeniably in Lincoln’s handwriting, but no explanation has been offered to reconcile the date with the priest’s statement that the paper was written in October, at the time of the second trial. The author based his narrative of this affair upon Chiniquy, 566, 620-67; Whitney, 53-55, 136-37; and a brief of the Circuit Court records at Urbana, Illinois, made for the writer by Judge Joseph O. Cunningham.
[iv-23] George P. Floyd, in McClure’s Magazine, January, 1908, p. 303.
[iv-24] Lamon’s Recollections, 17-19; see, also, Browne’s Lincoln and Men, i, 348-51. There are a few other examples, in legal history, of high-minded lawyers rejecting what they regarded as excessive fees. One notable English instance is thus related by Lord Brougham concerning Topping:—
“A general retainer of a thousand guineas was brought to him to cover the Baltic cases then in progress. His answer was, that this indicated either a doubt of his doing his duty on the ordinary terms known in the profession (one guinea particular, and five guineas general retainer)—or an expectation that he should, on being thus retained, do something beyond the line of his duty; and therefore he must decline it. His clerk then accepted of the usual sum of five guineas, and he led on those important cases, for the defendants.”
So also Charles O’Conor, leader for many years of the New York bar, subordinated money-making to a sense of professional propriety. His friend, William H. Winters, Librarian of the Law Institute, relates that a client once urged the famous pleader, with some insistence, to accept a very much larger fee than the lawyer had charged. O’Conor, becoming indignant, manifested in his own forcible way how this annoyed him. He denied the right of any one to dictate what his pay for legal services should be, and dismissed the presumptuous client without ceremony.
[iv-25] There is a companion tale current among English lawyers concerning another member of the bar, at an earlier period, who was accused by his fellow barristers of having degraded their order by accepting payment for services in copper. Upon being arraigned for this offense at their Common Hall he defended himself,—so the tradition runs,—with the following plea in confession and avoidance: “I fully admit that I took a fee from him in copper, and not one but several, and not only fees in copper but fees in silver. But I pledge my honor, as a Sergeant, that I never took a single fee from him in silver until I had got all his gold, and that I never took a fee from him in copper until I had got all his silver,—and you don’t call that a degradation of our order.”
[iv-26] Whitney, 81.
[iv-27] Works, xi, 98-99.