"His character as a lawyer was controlled and moulded by his character as a man. He understood human nature thoroughly and was an expert in the cross-examination of witnesses. If a witness told the truth without evasion Lincoln was respectful and patronising to him, but he would score a perjured witness unmercifully. He took no notes but remembered everything quite as well as those who did so. I remember once we all, Court and lawyers, except Lincoln, insisted that a witness had sworn so-and-so, but it turned out that Lincoln was correct and that he recollected better than the united bench and bar. But with all his candour, there was a method and shrewdness which Leonard Swett well understood and which he has thus forcibly expressed: 'As the trial progressed, where most lawyers object, he would say he "reckoned" it would be fair to admit this in, or that; and sometimes when his adversary could not quite prove what Lincoln knew to be the truth, he would say he "reckoned" it would be fair to admit the truth to be so-and-so. When he did object to the Court, when he heard his objections answered, he would often say, "Well, I reckon I must be wrong."'
"He was wise as a serpent in the trial of a case, but I have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove. When the whole thing is unravelled the adversary begins to see that what he was so blandly giving away was simply what he couldn't get and keep. By giving away six points and carrying the seventh he carried his case, and, the whole case hanging on the seventh, he traded everything which would give him the least aid in carrying that. Any one who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up on his back, in a ditch."
Lincoln's Simplicity
There are two kinds of simplicity—one is without reason or discrimination, that believes all that is seen and heard if presented under the guise of honesty; the other is the kind that penetrates beneath manner, dress, verbiage, and meets all subterfuge, artifice, and sophistry with statements and facts at once logical and irrefutable. Lincoln was the most simple man in dress, in speech, in manners, in looks, that ever stood before the world in so great a rôle, but his intellect was anything but simple. He was never deceived by cunning devices and cunning manœuvres. Bacon has an essay showing the difference between cunning and wisdom, and it may be said that Lincoln's knowledge took the form of wisdom as distinguished from cunning. His management of a law case was that of a seer. The points he made were not made for personal gratification but for love of truth and justice. Not only he did not want to risk being deceived, he took every precaution to insure against deception. Here is where his welding of reason and logic produced in his marvellous intellect a kind of clairvoyance which his friends at the bar felt but could not analyse. The combination was unheard of! The lawyers and the judges could only reason from their own experience, they could only cite examples in their own lives, and this man Lincoln was unlike all that had been and all that was.
Lincoln's simplicity seemed to the casual observer of a character so trusting and so naïf that it deceived all the members of his Cabinet during the first two years of the war. They were used to smart men, clever men, academical men. They called for the routine of respectability and official dignity. To their minds the President seemed pliable and willing, and they set about instructing him in the a, b, c of high politics and the first principles of statesmanship. The President was in no way frustrated. He understood them in advance, having weighed them in the balance of his own judgment. He had found them honest but inexperienced, sincere but saucy. He knew they were living in an atmosphere of low visibility. At the proper moment he would turn on the searchlights and give them their bearings. Some of them expected to act as the President's pilot, while others expected to be captain of the ship-of-state with the President as pilot.
It took them more than two years to find out that this pioneer of the West was captain, pilot, and master of charts on a political sea the like of which they little dreamed existed. In one sense, he wore out their obstinacy by his patience. In another, he awaited opportunities to attest their errors and show his judgment, but matters proceeded with such calm that they could not understand with what power he acted, with what prescience he divined.
What mystified them was the combination of the practical with the spiritual, the clear vision with the maxims of ordinary business affairs, the penetration of the future while working in seeming darkness.
Lincoln's Clairvoyant Wit
Lincoln was not deceived by an outward show of religion. A Southern woman begged the President to have her husband released from a Northern prison, "for," she said, "although he is a Rebel he is a very religious man." Lincoln replied: "I am glad to hear that, because any man who wants to disrupt this Union needs all the religion in sight to save him."