His temptation did not end even with Butterfield's success. The Administration of General Taylor, apparently feeling that some compensation was due to one so earnestly recommended by the leading Whigs of the State, offered Mr. Lincoln the governorship of Oregon. This was a place more suited to him than the other, and his acceptance of it was urged by some of his most judicious friends [Footnote: Among others John T. Stuart, who is our authority for this statement.] on the ground that the new Territory would soon be a State, and that he could come back as a senator. This view of the matter commended itself favorably to Lincoln himself, who, however, gave it up on account of the natural unwillingness of his wife to remove to a country so wild and so remote.
This was all as it should be. The best place for him was Illinois, and he went about his work there until his time should come.
[Relocated Footnote: Butterfield had a great reputation for ready wit and was suspected of deep learning. Some of his jests are still repeated by old lawyers in Illinois, and show at least a well-marked humorous intention. On one occasion he appeared before Judge Pope to ask the discharge of the famous Mormon Prophet, Joe Smith, who was in custody surrounded by his church dignitaries. Bowing profoundly to the court and the ladies who thronged the hall, he said: "I appear before you under solemn and peculiar circumstances. I am to address the Pope, surrounded by angels, in the presence of the holy apostles, in behalf of the Prophet of the Lord." We once heard Lincoln say of Butterfield that he was one of the few Whigs in Illinois who approved the Mexican war. His reason, frankly given, was that he had lost an office in New York by opposing the war of 1812. "Henceforth," he said with cynical vehemence, "I am for war, pestilence, and famine." He was once defending the Shawneetown Bank and advocating the extension of its charter; an opposing lawyer contended that this would be creating a new bank. Butterfield brought a smile from the court and a laugh from the bar by asking "whether when the Lord lengthened the life of Hezekiah he made a new man, or whether it was the same old Hezekiah?">[
CHAPTER XVII
THE CIRCUIT LAWYER
In that briefest of all autobiographies, which Mr. Lincoln wrote for Jesse Fell upon three pages of note-paper, he sketched in these words the period at which we have arrived: "From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, I practiced law more assiduously than ever before … I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again." His service in Congress had made him more generally known than formerly, and had increased his practical value as a member of any law firm. He was offered a partnership on favorable terms by a lawyer in good practice in Chicago; but he declined it on the ground that his health would not endure the close confinement necessary in a city office. He went back to Springfield, and resumed at once his practice there and in the Eighth Judicial Circuit, where his occupations and his associates were the most congenial that he could anywhere find. For five years he devoted himself to his work with more energy and more success than ever before.
It was at this time that he gave a notable proof of his unusual powers of mental discipline. His wider knowledge of men and things, acquired by contact with the great world, had shown him a certain lack in himself of the power of close and sustained reasoning. To remedy this defect, he applied himself, after his return from Congress, to such works upon logic and mathematics as he fancied would be serviceable. Devoting himself with dogged energy to the task in hand, he soon learned by heart six books of the propositions of Euclid, and he retained through life a thorough knowledge of the principles they contain.
[Sidenote: I.N. Arnold in the "History of Sangamon County.">[
The outward form and fashion of every institution change rapidly in growing communities like our Western States, and the practice of the law had already assumed a very different degree of dignity and formality from that which it presented only twenty years before. The lawyers in hunting-shirts and mocassins had long since passed away; so had the judges who apologized to the criminals that they sentenced, and charged them "to let their friends on Bear Creek understand it was the law and the jury who were responsible." Even the easy familiarity of a later date would no longer be tolerated. No successor of Judge Douglas had been known to follow his example by coming down from the bench, taking a seat in the lap of a friend, throwing an arm around his neck, and in that intimate attitude discussing, coram publico, whatever interested him, David Davis—afterwards of the Supreme Court and of the Senate—was for many years the presiding judge of this circuit, and neither under him nor his predecessor, S. H. Treat, was any lapse of dignity or of propriety possible. Still there was much less of form and ceremony insisted upon than is considered proper and necessary in older communities.
The bar in great measure was composed of the same men who used to follow the circuit on horseback, over roads impassable to wheels, with their scanty wardrobes, their law-books, and their documents crowding each other in their saddle-bags. The improvement of roads which made carriages a possibility had effected a great change, and the coming of the railway had completed the sudden development of the manners and customs of the modernized community. But they could not all at once take from the bar of the Eighth Circuit its raciness and its individuality. The men who had lived in log-cabins, who had hunted their way through untrodden woods and prairies, who had thought as much about the chances of swimming over swollen fords as of their cases, who had passed their nights—a half-dozen together—on the floors of wayside hostelries, could never be precisely the same sort of practitioners as the smug barristers of a more conventional age and place. But they were not deficient in ability, in learning, or in that most valuable faculty which enables really intelligent men to get their bearings and sustain themselves in every sphere of life to which they may be called. Some of these very colleagues of Lincoln at the Springfield bar have sat in Cabinets, have held their own on the floor of the Senate, have led armies in the field, have governed States, and all with a quiet self-reliance which was as far as possible removed from either undue arrogance or undue modesty. [Footnote: A few of the lawyers who practiced with Lincoln, and have held the highest official positions, are Douglas, Shields, Logan, Stuart, Baker, Samuel H. Treat, Bledsoe, O. H. Browning, Hardin, Lyman Trumbull, and Stephen T. McClernand.]