“That money,” said he, “comes out of the pocket of a poor, demented girl, and I would rather starve than swindle her in this manner.”[iv-24]
The matter was not allowed, however, to rest there. In the evening of that same day, Lincoln found himself arraigned for his offense before the “orgmathorial court.” This was a sort of mock-tribunal maintained by Davis, on circuit, to try lawyers who might be charged with breaches of decorum. No member of the jocund company, it is safe to say, had ever before been placed in the dock for the heinous crime of undervaluing his services. Yet complaints against this particular respondent, as the judge implied, had been frequent enough. Lamon was not the only attorney who had suffered, in mind and pocket, because of his Quixotic acts. Partner Herndon, himself a kindly man, is said to have expostulated repeatedly without effect; and so far as the bar at large was concerned, some of its pillars doubtless felt the jolt at times of Lincoln’s absurdly low standards. He had, moreover, been caught red-handed in the Scott case, so that the plea of a certain famous British barrister, similarly on trial before the circuit mess for disgracing his profession by accepting too small a fee, would hardly have answered. This earlier offender, Sergeant William Davy, is said to have made the since oft-quoted defense: “I took silver because I could not get gold. But I took every farthing the fellow had in the world, and I hope you don’t call that disgracing the profession.”[iv-25]
Davy was nevertheless found guilty and fined. So was Lincoln. His fellow anglers in the turbid waters of the law had no sympathy with the rare sportsmanship which had prompted him to throw back half his catch. He proved to be a true sport, however, in more ways than one. The fine was paid, we are told, with great good humor; and then the culprit told stories that kept the court in an uproar of laughter until after midnight.
There is another—a serious—side to this question. It was succinctly stated by Mr. Hoffman in this passage from one of his resolutions: “As a general rule I will carefully avoid what is called the ‘taking of half fees.’ And though no one can be so competent as myself to judge what may be a just compensation for my services, yet when the quiddam honorarium has been established by usage or law, I shall regard as eminently dishonorable all underbidding of my professional brethren.”
But Lincoln could not see it so. Strong as was his sympathy with these colleagues at the bar, they were forgotten when he sat down to write a bill. His own modest estimate of himself, his compassion for clients in distress, and above all his ever-present fear of taking a dishonest advantage, proved to be the controlling factors. Influenced by such habits of mind, to the very end, he declared, as Lamon states, that their firm should never, with his consent, deserve the reputation enjoyed by those shining lights of the profession—“Catchem and Cheatem.”
To infer from all these things that Lincoln was wholly shiftless in monetary matters, or that he did not, at times, gladly receive the fees which had, according to his own rigid standards, been fairly earned, would be wide of the mark. He welcomed, for the most part, in fact, the gleanings of ordinary practice from clients who could afford to pay. Such small sums as the circuit yielded, and they usually were small, meant much to him; how much, may be seen in the little side-light thrown on the subject by another one of his local partners. Henry C. Whitney, recalling the end of a session, in the summer of 1856, at Urbana, says: “He had collected twenty-five or thirty dollars for that term’s business thus far, and one of our clients owed him ten dollars, which he felt disappointed at not being able to collect. So I gave him a check for that amount, and went with him to the bank to collect it. The cashier, T. S. Hubbard, who paid it, is still living in Urbana, and will probably remember it. I do not remember to have seen him happier than when he had got his little earnings together, being less than forty dollars, as I now recollect it, and had his carpet-bag packed, ready to start home.”[iv-26]
There is something almost pathetic in this scene, when one stops to think that the central figure was at the time a leader of the Illinois bar, and the very man whose persistent tenderness of his clients’ purses had made him an object of censure from the bench. Lincoln himself still further illuminates the topic. Early in his practice, while associated with the thriftiest of his Springfield partners, he wrote to one James S. Irwin: “Judge Logan and myself are willing to attend to any business in the Supreme Court you may send us. As to fees, it is impossible to establish a rule that will apply in all, or even a great many cases. We believe we are never accused of being unreasonable in this particular, and we would always be easily satisfied, provided we could see the money; but whatever fees we earn at a distance, if not paid before, we have noticed, we never hear of after the work is done. We, therefore, are growing a little sensitive on that point.”[iv-27]
Under this same head, one of the younger lawyers has recollected a piece of “fatherly” advice given to him by Lincoln, while they were engaged in court. Addressing the fledgling as the jury went out, and referring to his client, a shifty fellow who sat near by, the older lawyer whispered: “You had better try and get your money now. If the jury comes in with a verdict for him, you won’t get anything.”[iv-28]
So much for what the speaker once termed a “mere question of bread and butter.” As to the rest, when clients did not pay, Lincoln was averse to suing them. His high ideals of professional ethics, no less than a certain personal fealty toward those who had honored him with their confidence, stood in the way of such prosecutions. And when any associates did, on rare occasions, carry the collection of unpaid bills for legal services into court, it was done contrary to his wishes.
An instance of what would then be likely to happen has been related by Mr. Herndon. “I remember,” says he, “once a man who had been indicted for forgery or fraud employed us to defend him. The illness of the prosecuting attorney caused some delay in the case, and our client, becoming dissatisfied at our conduct of the case, hired some one else, who superseded us most effectually. The defendant declining to pay us the fee demanded, on the ground that we had not represented him at the trial of the cause, I brought suit against him in Lincoln’s absence, and obtained judgment for our fee. After Lincoln’s return from the circuit, the fellow hunted him up and, by means of a carefully constructed tale, prevailed on him to release the judgment without receiving a cent of pay. The man’s unkind treatment of us deserved no such mark of generosity from Lincoln, and yet he could not resist the appeal of any one in poverty and want.”[iv-29]