My Dear Father:—Your letter of the 7th was received night before last. I very cheerfully send you the twenty dollars, which sum you say is necessary to save your land from sale. It is singular that you should have forgotten a judgment against you; and it is more singular that the plaintiff should have let you forget it so long, particularly as I suppose you always had property enough to satisfy a judgment of that amount. Before you pay it, it would be well to be sure you have not paid, or at least that you cannot prove that you have paid it. Give my love to mother and all the connections.
Affectionately your son,
A. Lincoln.[iv-55]
When occasion served, moreover, the writer’s customary contributions to the family fund were supplemented by the proceeds of some near-by case. This happened in 1845, when he won a Coles County slander suit that had been tried at Charleston. His client, in lieu of fees, assigned thirty-five dollars of the judgment to Mr. Lincoln, who, instead of collecting the money, instructed the clerk of the court to turn the entire sum, when it was received, over to his father. The old gentleman, they say, came in from Goose Nest Prairie, accompanied by his stepson, to get the present. And this took place at a time when fees were far from plentiful with the donor, whose total receipts for a term of court, as one of his partners states, did not, in some instances, exceed fifty dollars.
More generous still was Lincoln’s course in the matter of two hundred dollars which, it is said, his parents were sorely in need of. Having paid over the money, he determined to make sure that at least part of the property held by them should not slip through their fingers. To this end, forty acres of the home place were deeded to him by Thomas and Sarah, with a reservation to the effect that the old folks should have “entire control of said tract ... during both and each of their natural lives.”[iv-56] This was doubtless done, in the main, for the protection of his dearly beloved stepmother. To give her money or to supply her with comforts failed, as he thought, to balance the long account of affectionate service which stood between them. He went further, and secured her this piece of property at his expense for as long as she lived: secured it, indeed, against her own fond forgetfulness of self. For no sooner had Thomas Lincoln died than Sarah’s own son, the good-natured, idle, happy-go-lucky John, tried to sell the place, and only Abraham’s firmness in maintaining his rights as the owner kept the land under the old lady’s feet. Still there was no ill-will between the brothers. When Johnston, who appears to have been perpetually impecunious, appealed for assistance on his own account, Lincoln usually responded with the desired funds. And once, when for obvious reasons the money was not forthcoming, a generous proposition accompanied the kindly refusal.[iv-57] This warm-hearted man, then, meeting the claims of the old home as well as of the new, smoothing out from year to year a coil of debts, and indulging his fancy, at the same time, for occasional little acts of benevolence, might surely have used a much larger income to advantage.
Yet apparently none of these demands upon Lincoln’s resources quickened in him, to the least degree, any tendency toward cupidity. Even certain notable ventures on the uncertain seas of politics, that brought up now and then, as we shall learn, financial straits, failed to disturb his perfect poise with regard to money matters. Nor did he attempt to better the range of his professional opportunities, and when Judge Grant Goodrich, one of the leading Chicago lawyers, offered him a partnership in a highly lucrative practice, Lincoln declined the flattering proposal. He preferred his life on the circuit, with its freedom and smaller fees, to the grind of a wealth-producing hopper in that rapidly expanding city. As a result of all this Lincoln naturally failed to attain a competency. After more than twenty years of active practice at the bar, during which his services were eagerly sought for in the Federal Courts, as well as throughout the Eighth Judicial Circuit; after a record of labors unsurpassed, if indeed it was equaled, by any of his contemporaries who attended the Illinois Supreme Court, the highest appellate tribunal in the State; after enjoying a standing that brought him important cases to be tried in distant places, and retainers to appear before the United States Supreme Court,—this powerful advocate, successful in every respect but one, closed his legal career a poor man. The circumstance once led Judge Davis to remark: “I question whether there was a lawyer in the circuit who had been at the bar as long a time whose means were not larger.”
How much Lincoln might, then, be considered actually worth, as the phrase goes, has been variously estimated. It is safe to say, however, that his estate consisted, for the most part, of his home with its contents at Springfield, a tract of land comprising one hundred and sixty acres in Crawford County, Iowa, granted by the United States Government for military service during the Black Hawk War, and a lot in the new town of Lincoln.[iv-58] If there were other similar possessions of importance, they must have escaped notice, and ready money was evidently far from plentiful. Mr. Lincoln, himself, rated his net assets, it is said, low enough. While in New York, during the month of February, 1860, he met, so the story goes, one of his former Illinois friends, who, when questioned as to how the fickle goddess had treated him, replied that she had only yielded up one hundred thousand dollars.
“Isn’t that enough?” asked Lincoln. “I should call myself a rich man if I had that much. I’ve got my house at Springfield and about three thousand dollars.”
Somewhat larger amounts figure in other versions of this interview, but at best the total sum must have been comparatively small.[iv-59] Indeed, such scattering indications as can now be collected all warrant the inference that a banker’s balance-sheet, struck in those days between Mr. Lincoln’s debits and credits, would have disclosed no very sizable net surplus.
But there is another system of accounting which results in quite a different showing. It deals not with dollars and cents, nor with real estate, nor securities; yet until this method too has been applied, no such appraisement can be deemed complete. Its values are expressed in terms of honor, its profits are to be found in the hearts of the people; and by this reckoning, Abraham Lincoln’s career at the bar was a brilliant success. He may, it is true, have had less property to show for all these years of toil than any of his colleagues; still, not one of them was so rich in the love and confidence of the entire region. The old circuit—judges, lawyers, and laymen—united to award him a prize that money cannot buy. They sent him out laden with the fine gold of a spotless reputation. They introduced him to the nation as their ideal of a true man, at a time when the true man was sorely needed; at a time when any but a true man placed where he was placed must have gone down in defeat with perhaps as great a cause as has ever been committed to a single champion; and to this day, his name remains a synonym throughout the land for honest dealing.