The frankest piece of questionable literature from Lincoln's pen in mature years, so far as I am aware, is in a private collection, and its owner does not permit it to be copied. Not many people are permitted to see it. It is probably the least attractive scrap of Lincoln's writing extant that dates from his mature years. It is undated, but belongs to the period of his life on the circuit. It is a piece of extravagant nonsense, written in about twenty lines on a quarter sheet of legal cap, and is probably the effort to recall and record something that he had heard and which amused him. Its whole point is in the transposition of the initial letters of compound words, or words in juxtaposition in a sentence, such as a speaker sometimes makes in a moment of mental confusion. Thus a cotton-patch is a "potten-catch" and a fence-corner is a "cence-forner." Every clause contains one or more of these absurdities, until a sense of boisterous mirth is awakened at the possibility that there should be so many of them. Most of them are harmless as the two above quoted, but there are two or three that are not in good taste. They are not vile nor obscene, but not very pretty. Lincoln wasted ten minutes of spare time in writing out this rather ingenious bit of nonsense, and it is not worth more than that length of discussion. It is probably the worst bit of extant writing of Lincoln's mature years, written in the period of his circuit-riding, and it has little to commend it and not a great deal to condemn.
Lincoln's religious life in Springfield has been and is the subject of violent controversy. Much that has been written on both sides bears the marks of prejudice and exhibits internal evidence of having been consciously or unconsciously distorted. In a later chapter it will come before us for review and analysis. Of it we may now remind ourselves that in this period covering nearly a quarter of a century Lincoln was developing in many ways. He emerged from grinding poverty into a condition in which he owned a home and had a modest sum of money in the bank. From an ill-trained fledgling lawyer, compelled by his poverty to share a bed in a friend's room above the store, he had come to be a leader at the Illinois bar. From an obscure figure in State politics he had come to be the recognized leader of a political party that was destined to achieve national success and to determine the policies of the nation with little interruption for more than half a century. Out of a condition of great mental uncertainty in all matters relating to domestic relations he had come into a settled condition as the husband of a brilliant and ambitious woman and the father of a family of sons to whom he was devotedly attached. For the first time in his life he lived in a community where there were buildings wholly dedicated to the purposes of public worship; and after a considerable period of non-church attendance, and perhaps another of infrequent or irregular attendance, he had become a regular attendant and supporter of a church whose minister was his personal friend and whom he greatly admired.
During his years in Springfield, Mr. Lincoln's political ideals had undergone marked change. His experience in the Illinois Legislature is not discreditable; neither does it manifest any notably high ideals. Nor was he brilliantly successful in his one term in Congress. Lincoln was an honest politician, in the sense that he kept his promises and stood by his announced convictions. But it is impossible to read into his legislative history any such lofty purpose as later possessed him. He and the other members of the "Long Nine" log-rolled in orthodox political fashion, and won from Governor Ford the title "spared monuments of popular wrath."[21]
As a jury lawyer, also, his arts were those of the successful trial lawyer of the period. So far as the author has been able to find, there was no unworthy chapter in all this long history. The story, for instance, that in the trial of Armstrong Lincoln used an almanac of another year and won his case by fraud, has, as the author is convinced, no foundation whatever in fact. On the contrary, Lincoln was at a serious disadvantage in any case in whose justice he did not fully believe.
But there came a time when Lincoln was more than a shrewd and honest politician; more than a successful jury lawyer. In the brief autobiographical sketch which he prepared for Mr. Fell, he speaks of his work at the end of his term in Congress, and says:
"In 1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress. Was not a candidate for re-election. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before. Always a Whig in politics, and generally on the Whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses, I was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since is pretty well known."
He expanded this brief statement somewhat in the sketch which he furnished a little later to Scripps as a basis of his campaign biography:
"Upon his return from Congress, he went to the practice of the law with greater earnestness than ever before.... In 1854 his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him as he had never been before."