Another experience has still greater significance as to the professional character of Lincoln. He was engaged as counsel in a reaper patent case. It was to be tried at Cincinnati. The opposing counsel was an eminent lawyer from the East. Lincoln’s friends were eager for him to win this case, as it would give him great renown and prestige.
His client had four hundred thousand dollars at stake, an enormous sum at that time, and the capitalist became frightened at the great talent arrayed against Lincoln. He called in the services of a correspondingly great Eastern lawyer, Edwin M. Stanton. This eminent man was shocked at the sight of his colleague, Lincoln. He took entire control of the case and not only ignored Lincoln, but openly insulted him. Lincoln, through an open door in the hotel, heard Stanton scornfully exclaim to the client who had employed Lincoln, “Where did that long-armed creature come from and what can he expect to do in this case?”
At another time Stanton spoke of Lincoln 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.”
Lincoln, completely discouraged and thrown out of any possible council with a man thus against him, quit the case and sorrowfully returned to Illinois.
And yet, only a few years later, in the great crisis of approaching disunion, Lincoln became President of the United States and he made Stanton his Secretary of War. Very soon Stanton learned to prize “the long-armed creature” as one of the noblest and greatest men in the world. No one of Lincoln’s colleagues ever questioned his superior leadership as the supreme chief in a struggle profoundly affecting all civilization and human government.
When we consider how Lincoln worked his way up, through such destitution of knowledge and means, in twenty-five years, from a five-dollar suit before a justice of the peace to a five-thousand-dollar fee before the Supreme Court of the United States, we know that such progress does not come about by accident nor political fortunes, but by sheer interest and work.
V. THE MAN WHO COULD NOT LIVE FOR SELF ALONE
Henry Cabot Lodge says, “Lincoln could have said with absolute truth, as Seneca’s Pilot says, in Montaigne’s paraphrase, ‘Oh, Neptune, thou mayest save me if thou wilt; thou mayest sink me if thou wilt; but whatever may befall I shall hold my tiller true.’”
The moral process of his life, in which the recorded incidents are only way-marks, is the only worthwhile interest for the American youth or for the newcomer to our shores.
Lincoln’s life-creed may be taken from a statement he has made of his personal duty. “I am not bound to win,” he said, “but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right. I must stand with him while he is right, and I must part with him when he is wrong.”