“I know Mr. Kingsbury,” said Lincoln, “and he is not the man to have cheated you out of a cent; I can’t take the case, and I advise you to drop the subject.”[ii-19]
In the same conscientious spirit more important opportunities for employment, holding forth prospects of generous fees, were turned away from Lincoln’s door. His associates at the bar have recorded a few instances. One of these is related by Judge Samuel C. Parks. He recalls that in a matter entitled “Harris and Jones versus Buckles,” the plaintiffs, having employed him and Ward Hill Lamon as their attorneys, desired them to secure Lincoln’s services also. His reply was characteristic: “Tell Harris it’s no use to waste money on me in that case; he’ll get beat.”[ii-20]
Among the retainers so declined, most notable, perhaps, was that of Governor Joel A. Matteson, who, after his retirement from office, stood accused of having defrauded the State of Illinois by reissuing redeemed canal scrip and applying the proceeds to his own use. The alleged thefts amounted, in the end, with interest, to about a quarter of a million dollars. Matteson’s fortune, as well as his good repute, and perhaps his very liberty, were at stake. He sought to gather around him a formidable array of counsel. Having engaged the eminent lawyers Benjamin S. Edwards and Major John T. Stuart for his defense, he tried likewise to retain Abraham Lincoln and another of that gentleman’s former partners, Judge Stephen T. Logan. Both these last-mentioned attorneys, however, after carefully considering the facts submitted to them, reached the conclusion that the distinguished defendant was guilty. They conceded his right to such protection as one reputable advocate might properly afford him, but neither of them was willing to join a powerful combination of legal experts that should have for its object the culprit’s escape from punishment. So, without conferring on the subject, indeed without each other’s knowledge, they respectively declined to be concerned in the matter. Their course, it should be added, was justified before many months had elapsed by Matteson’s virtual confession and by a heavy judgment rendered against him in the Circuit Court.[ii-21]
But Lincoln’s refusals to engage his services in actions of which he did not approve went still further. A cause to enlist his interest had to be intrinsically right as well as technically so. He ran no subtlety shop. What has been termed “law honesty” fell far short, now and then, in his opinion, of being genuine honesty. Indeed, it may be doubted whether any leading practitioner of the Illinois bar felt more keenly than he, at times, that “strictest law is oft the highest wrong.”
How far, on such occasions, the man in him got the better of the lawyer was illustrated by the closing words of an interview overheard one morning in his office. Mr. Lincoln, seated at the baize-covered table near the center of the room, had been listening attentively, for some time, to a person who addressed him earnestly and in a low tone of voice. Suddenly the attorney interrupted the speaker with these words that rang out through the place:—
“Yes, we can doubtless gain your case for you. We can set a whole neighborhood at loggerheads. We can distress a widowed mother and her six fatherless children, and thereby get for you six hundred dollars to which you seem to have a legal claim; but which rightfully belongs, it appears to me, as much to the woman and her children as it does to you. You must remember that some things legally right are not morally right. We shall not take your case, but will give you a little advice for which we will charge you nothing. You seem to be a sprightly, energetic man; we would advise you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in some other way.”[ii-22]
On another occasion, as a student in the office recalls, Lincoln sat gazing at the ceiling while a client unfolded the shabby details of a proposed suit. When the narrative was finished, the listener swung around in his chair and exclaimed:—
“Well, you have a pretty good case in technical law, but a pretty bad one in equity and justice. You’ll have to get some other fellow to win this case for you. I couldn’t do it. All the time while standing talking to that jury, I’d be thinking, ‘Lincoln, you’re a liar’; and I believe I should forget myself and say it out loud.”[ii-23]
This last avowal discloses a striking justification—if justification is needed—of “Honest Abe’s” course in rejecting clients whom he believed to be in the wrong. Whatever claims they may, on general principles, have had to his services were probably not pressed after such an acknowledgment. Even our legal casuists, piling high the reasons why it is an attorney’s duty to appear on either side of a cause, right or wrong,—and some of the arguments are convincing enough,—would doubtless hesitate to enforce their rule in the case of a lawyer who thus frankly admits that, when his pleadings happen to be at variance with his conscience, he finds himself unable to control his powers. The greater those powers, the greater would seem the danger to the side that had engaged them, if they should balk. For Pegasus unwillingly in the traces might well be expected to make more trouble than a whole team of refractory plough-horses. And Lincoln, keenly alive to his peculiar limitations, realized that unless he himself believed in the justice of a contention, his advocacy thereof—half-hearted, perhaps fatally ingenuous—would do the case more harm than good.
In short, he was too “perversely honest,” as one old acquaintance phrased it, to be of any use to a client who was not honest. The man’s whole make-up harbored no trace of that mercenary, free-lance spirit which can fight for hire under one banner, as valiantly as under another—in a base cause as well as in a righteous one. Nor did pride of intellect, exulting in uncommon forensic dexterity, betray him into that habit of mind which derives its keenest gratification from making “the worse appear the better reason.” And all his skill would have failed him here had he tried to be otherwise. For if there was one quality more than another that Abraham Lincoln lacked, it must have been the kind of versatility of which Cardinal Duperron boasted, when he said, in response to a compliment by King Henry III, on the convincing eloquence with which the prelate had proved the existence of the Deity: “Sire, I can now turn about, if it pleases Your Majesty, and prove to you, with arguments equally irrefutable, that there is no God.”