To which the lady, much mollified, replied: “It is very foolish. It is a small thing to complain of.”
And what might one have expected of a man, who was not only his “own wood-sawyer,” but his own stable-boy as well? For when at home, Mr. Lincoln usually, during that period, milked the cow, fed the horse, and looked after their several wants, in a rudely constructed little barn which stood behind the house.[iv-39] This same democratic simplicity and absence of all pretentions to elegance were observed about the untidy little offices in which he successively practiced his profession. Nor was it otherwise on circuit. The sorry nag that he sometimes bestrode and the shabby buggy in which the animal at other times pulled him from town to town looked consistent with the rest. When accommodations, moreover, at the local hotels were poor,—as they frequently appear to have been,—his easy-going temper remained unruffled. “He never complained of the food, bed, or lodgings,” said Judge Davis. “If every other fellow grumbled at the bill-of-fare, which greeted us at many of the dingy taverns, Lincoln said nothing.”[iv-40] To which Joseph Gillespie, another friend of the old circuit days, adds: “He had a realizing sense that he was generally set down by city snobs as a country Jake, and would accept, in a public-house, any place assigned to him, whether in the basement or the attic, and he seldom called at the table for anything, but helped himself to what was within reach. Indeed, he never knew what he did eat. He said to me once that he never felt his own utter unworthiness so much as when in the presence of a hotel clerk or waiter.”[iv-41]
It would be interesting to determine how much of this self-depreciation was due to the unfavorable impression that Lincoln often made upon those who saw him for the first time. By all accounts he must have been, in those days, anything but an object of beauty. His six-feet-four of homely, awkward angularity apparently owed little to the clothier’s or the haberdasher’s art. For in matters of dress as in other respects, he was still the plebeian, carrying about him, so to say, the broad-axe air which suggested, if it did not actually revive, the crudities of frontier customs. He no longer, it is true, wore, as in his youth, a coon-skin cap or birch-bark moccasins with hickory soles. His shirts were no longer of linsey-woolsey, nor his trousers of butternut jeans or untanned skins. Yet he never quite outgrew the image of himself so arrayed. What appears to have been particularly vivid in his memory, moreover, was a picture of flat-boat times on the river, when his buckskin breeches—the only pair—happened to fall into the water with their owner inside of them. Relating such an experience once, he said: “Now, if you know the nature of buckskin, when wet and dried by the sun, it will shrink, and my breeches kept shrinking until they left several inches of my legs bare, between the tops of my socks and the lower part of my breeches; and whilst I was growing taller they were becoming shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my legs that can be seen to this day.”[iv-42]
Similar tendencies, in Lincoln’s later, more modern apparel, to leave a sort of neutral zone unoccupied between trousers and shoes, recurred with atavistic persistence long after he became accustomed to better things. In fact, such misfits troubled him but slightly during the period of his career at the bar. “He probably had as little taste about dress and attire as anybody that ever was born,” writes one attorney who saw him often in those days. “He simply wore clothes because it was needful and customary. Whether they fitted or looked well was entirely above or beneath his comprehension.” The same observer says: “When I first knew him his attire and physical habits were on a plane with those of an ordinary farmer. His hat was innocent of a nap. His boots had no acquaintance with blacking. His clothes had not been introduced to the whisk-broom. His carpet-bag was well worn and dilapidated. His umbrella was substantial, but of a faded green, well worn, the knob gone, and the name ‘A. Lincoln’ cut out of white muslin and sewed in the inside. And for an outer garment, a short circular blue cloak, which he got in Washington in 1849, and kept for ten years.”[iv-43]
Another friend and colleague, James W. Somers, recalling a first photographic glimpse of Mr. Lincoln during the earlier days on circuit, said: “His dress was the most peculiar thing about him. The trousers were several inches too short and illy fitted. The coat was the old-style swallow-tail, and was also too small. His head was surmounted by an antiquated silk hat, battered and rusty, as was his entire suit of broadcloth, originally black. In his hands or under his arm he carried a faded green gingham umbrella. He wore a black silk or mohair stock around his neck, two and a half or three inches wide, buckled at the back, but with no tie or bow in front. At the fall term court he usually wore a short circular cloak, extending down to the hips, and much the worse for wear.”
Disregard of fine apparel, moreover, was not limited by any means to Lincoln’s younger days at the bar. As late as 1858, after he had achieved a prominent place at the bar, his appearance made a similar impression upon Carl Schurz, who drew this graphic thumb-nail sketch of him: “On his head he wore a somewhat battered ‘stove-pipe’ hat. His neck emerged, long and sinewy, from a white collar turned down over a thin black necktie. His lank, ungainly body was clad in a rusty black dress-coat with sleeves that should have been longer; but his arms appeared so long that the sleeves of a ‘store’ coat could hardly be expected to cover them all the way down to the wrists. His black trousers, too, permitted a very full view of his large feet. On his left arm he carried a gray woolen shawl, which evidently served him for an overcoat in chilly weather. His left hand held a cotton umbrella of the bulging kind, and also a black satchel that bore the marks of long and hard usage.”[iv-44]
Evidently the age or condition of a garment was no reason, in Lincoln’s eyes, for discarding it. On the contrary, he appears at times to have cherished an old article of dress as one would an old friend. But such attachments have their penalties. And we find him in the court-room,—yes, on one occasion, in the very presence of the court,—making hasty repairs to ward off untoward accidents. Still other inconveniences grew out of Lincoln’s inattention to dress. He had not been practicing long before his partner, Major John T. Stuart, received a retainer to defend one John W. Baddeley, against whom a suit was pending in the McLean County Circuit Court. When this case came to trial, the major, finding that he could not attend, sent the junior member of the firm, with a letter of introduction, to act as counsel in his stead. Baddeley gave one glance at the letter, and one at the ungainly, ill-dressed bearer of it. That a man who presented so unpromising an appearance should come offering to be his representative in the august precincts of the law irritated him beyond measure. He discharged a volley of abuse at the astonished Lincoln, paid his respects, in similar terms, to the absent Stuart, and straightway hired another lawyer, James A. McDougall, to defend the suit. What reply, if any, was made by the innocent object of all this wrath is not known. He endured it, we are told, however, without resentment; and later on, when these first unfavorable impressions had given place to warm appreciation, counted that very client among his stanchest admirers.[iv-45]
Nor was Baddeley the only one to be deceived by Lincoln’s unprepossessing garb. So keen an intellect as Edwin M. Stanton’s wholly misjudged him, many years thereafter, on the occasion of their first meeting at Cincinnati, in the famous McCormick versus Manny reaper case; and that, too, notwithstanding the eminent position which the Springfield lawyer had by that time attained among his professional brethren at home. For this critical associate could see no promise of forensic ability in the man, to whom he contemptuously referred as a “long, lank creature from Illinois, wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the continent.”[iv-46] Stanton’s disdainful treatment rankled in the gentle soul of Lincoln. He began, some time after the affair, to wear better clothes—better in texture if not in fit. But he never learned to take an interest in fine linen, or to spend on his person more than was necessary to satisfy the ordinary demands of society.
Thus much for the man’s simple habits. A lawyer whose immediate wants were, all in all, so moderate, certainly had no personal incentive—whatever may have been his standards of honesty—for any but upright methods in his practice. Like Manius Curius, over that historic dinner of turnips at the chimney-side, he prized honor with modest living above meretricious wealth and the luxuries it might buy.
To assume, however, that there were not numerous demands upon Lincoln for what money could procure, would be far from the fact. A kind husband and indulgent father, it distressed him to refuse his family anything. All their reasonable wants he did, in truth, cheerfully provide for, as she who knew him best bore affectionate testimony. And once, when he was contrasted in her presence with a certain well-favored rival, the little wife retorted: “Mr. Lincoln may not be as handsome a figure, but the people are perhaps not aware that his heart is as large as his arms are long.”