Alonzo Rothschild

“ Yet how far does that duty require him to go after he has lost confidence in the rectitude of his cause? Some barristers—and the number includes men of distinction—have frankly set no limits to their obligations. They hold that a lawyer, once he has accepted a client’s retainer, is pledged to stand by him through thick and thin. The blacker the evidence develops against him, in a criminal action, or the less palpable become the merits of his case in a civil one, the more firmly they consider his counsel bound in honor to battle for a verdict. ”

“ No counselor of old, who took on himself a knightly obligation to plead the cause of the defenseless, could have acquitted himself, all in all, more nobly. Faithful to his ideals through many temptations, yet free from self-complacency; chivalrous to his adversaries, yet striking hard blows for the cause in which he was enlisted; afraid to make a false plea, yet not afraid of a false judge,—homely, unassuming Abraham Lincoln rode over the circuit in much the same spirit as quickened the knight errant on his ancient journeyings. ”

“ During the twenty-three years that he devoted to the study and interpretation of Abraham Lincoln, he lived with him in spirit as the great novelists have lived with the children of their fancies. Lincoln’s sorrows and triumphs and defeats were as real to him as those of his own life. It is small wonder, therefore, that when men who had known Lincoln read Lincoln, Master of Men, they frequently mistook its author for an intimate contemporary of the great President. ”

“ He could look himself in the face with a certain detached candor not often found among ambitious politicians. What is more, he could stand erect against other men and check off his own shortcomings. Conceit in any form—need we add?—cannot thrive under such clarity of vision. At the same time, if this faculty for seeing things squarely as they are had failed Lincoln, an abiding simplicity of character—to say nothing about an ever-ready sense of humor—would doubtless have saved him from any exaggerated opinion of his own importance. ”

“ Stanton’s disdainful treatment rankled in the gentle soul of Lincoln. He began, some time after the affair, to wear better clothes—better in texture if not in fit. But he never learned to take an interest in fine linen, or to spend on his person more than was necessary to satisfy the ordinary demands of society.
Thus much for the man’s simple habits. A lawyer whose immediate wants were, all in all, so moderate, certainly had no personal incentive—whatever may have been his standards of honesty—for any but upright methods in his practice. ”

“ Lincoln never gave his assent, so far as my knowledge goes, to any plan or project for getting votes that would not have borne the full light of day.” [v-44] He never, it is safe to add, so far as anybody’s knowledge goes, allowed his passion for a triumph at the polls to blur an uncommonly clear vision of what was right and what was wrong. Virtue, they say, wears the garb of no party. Yet a Lincoln could evidently be loyal to his organization,—loyal, if you will, to the machine itself,—without losing sight of what he owed, in the last event, to his own ideals and to the national well-being. ”

“ When methods so coercive are pursued by a powerfully intrenched majority, place-hunters in great numbers throng to its standard. Their huzzas may be heard above the voices of the faithful, and patronage, rather than political creed, directs—if indeed it does not control—the devious operations of partisan machinery. Such was the scene that presented itself to the young Lincoln’s anxious eyes, as he looked over this new, this untried field for a point of vantage from which a beginner might try his wings. ”

“ Was he, in other words, under the absolute sway of the master passion, as so many eager souls have been, or did an alert conscience at crucial points apply the controlling brake? Conclusive answers to these queries can, we are aware, be given only after a survey of the man’s entire career; yet back there, almost at the beginning of things, on the threshold, so to say, of his public life, one group of circumstances dimly prefigured, in a way, the whole story.
When Lincoln essayed this first short flight into politics, Democratic men and measures were supreme on well-nigh every hand. ”

“ This appears to have been one of the great advocate’s last important victories at the bar. It forms, in certain respects, a fitting climax to his legal career. For the admirable honesty of word and act with which he started out would hardly have carried him far, had they not been reinforced betimes by the wisdom that comes to the sincere truth-seeker alone, and by the courage that is born of truth’s fairest offspring—an abiding love of justice. ”

“ That same rectitude, in fact, which debarred him from taking a shabby case at law when cases were not too plentiful, kept his politics unsoiled. The man’s ambition was keen, keener by far than even his need of fees; yet the closest scrutiny reveals no personal let-down anywhere in his code while following either pursuit. Lincoln failed to conceive, despite certain commonly accepted tenets to the contrary, among public men the world over, why there should be one kind of conscience for the private citizen, and another, of a wholly different variety, for the politician. ”

“ For, slow as Lincoln generally was to doubt another’s probity, so quick was he to detect false values when that probity fell under suspicion. And cunningly woven, indeed, must have been the web of perjury which his logical mind—once it set about the task—could not unravel. He had a disconcerting way of stripping unsound testimony, with one searching question after another, until the futile cheat lay exposed in all its nakedness. Then his contempt for the discredited witness knew no bounds. Kindness gave way to severity. Words that scorched came hot and fast. ”

“ Lincoln to enter the political field. They had known him, it is true, less than nine months, but may not that brief period have teemed with as many experiences as ordinarily fill the corresponding number of years in more conservative communities? For time seems measured by heartbeats, so to say, rather than by hours, when it is quickened with the stress and strain of life on a Western frontier. Under the primitive conditions that prevail there, elemental qualities push to the front, men stand revealed for what they really are, and true leadership comes speedily into its own. ”

“ To assume, however, that there were not numerous{183} demands upon Lincoln for what money could procure, would be far from the fact. A kind husband and indulgent father, it distressed him to refuse his family anything. All their reasonable wants he did, in truth, cheerfully provide for, as she who knew him best bore affectionate testimony. And once, when he was contrasted in her presence with a certain well-favored rival, the little wife retorted: “Mr. Lincoln may not be as handsome a figure, but the people are perhaps not aware that his heart is as large as his arms are long.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ Some colleagues—and they should have known better—gave way to jealousy. Those who sit in the shadow of the prophet’s mantle do not always see the prophet. A few opponents were even known to question Lincoln’s sincerity. His candor was in their eyes a cloak for trickery, his unconventional manner a means of springing surprises on the unwary, and his apparent fair dealing a bait for luring unsuspecting adversaries to defeat. That an attorney smarting under a sense of failure might now and then have felt this way is not surprising. ”

“ For when it came to the weighing of these opposing candidates—cleric against skeptic, saint against sinner—by almost any voter’s own work-a-day standards, the rectitude of Lincoln’s life at the bar, no less than the notable honesty of his politics, dressed the balance between the two champions, so far as practical ethics went, to a nicety. This left the revulsion from bigotry that touched broad-minded men in both parties, together with the normal preponderance of the Whigs and the superior campaigning tactics{281} of their leader, to tip the scales finally in his favor. ”

“ Lincoln, the third counsel, whose services in Chiniquy’s estimation were more than again as valuable, the poor priest asked for a bill with some trepidation. To his bewilderment, as he relates, the lawyer replied: “You owe me nothing; for I suppose you are quite ruined. The expenses of such a suit, I know, must be enormous. Your enemies want to ruin you. Will I help them to finish your ruin, when I hope I have the right to be put among the most sincere and devoted of your friends?”
But Father Chiniquy would not let the matter rest there. ”

“ Benjamin and Abraham had not many traits in common: they were the products of vastly different systems; yet a striking resemblance runs through their fine sense of personal honor, their prolonged struggles with debt, their disregard for money, and their contempt of those engaged in politics to serve corrupt private ends. Venality among office-holders early aroused Lincoln’s indignation. He could sympathize with nearly any human weakness but dishonesty, and the dishonesty of trusted public servants seemed to him doubly reprehensible. ”

“ Lincoln’s very entrance into public life had been made, it must be confessed, through the drab doors of debt. After his first election to the Legislature, while still at New Salem, he was confronted by a perplexing question. How could a countryman, wholly without means, acquire presentable clothes, travel all the way down to the seat of government at Vandalia, and maintain himself there until pay-day in a manner befitting the dignity of a lawmaker? ”

“ It was his plan at first to write a set of monographs on Lincoln and his Cabinet, but an investigation of the material revealed possibilities for more ambitious work, and gradually the great scheme matured of which Lincoln, Master of Men, and this book are merely parts, the whole to have been a cycle of books treating Lincoln’s character from all angles. Having set himself this monumental task of reconstructing a personality, my father decided to find a quiet spot where he might settle down to work and where his family could grow up. ”

“ But as Abraham reached manhood, a greater statesman—greater in not a few requisites of leadership—had attracted his favor; and he found himself, ere long, at one with those who were enlisted under the banner of Henry Clay.
That eminent campaigner’s personality captivated the younger man’s imagination. It presented a magnet to which the true metal in Lincoln’s nature could not but respond. ”

“ And yet how could any true champion—inspired saint or just plain lawyer—have kept his hands off that defendant! Nothing but a flaying appears to meet the needs of the occasion. Even your gentle, courteous, sympathetic soul like Lincoln’s, alert to the conflict between right and wrong, is stirred by{127} such meanness to its very depths. Love of justice then flames into hatred of injustice. ”

“ For Lincoln’s conduct as a politician—that is to say his conduct regarded from the personal rather than the parliamentary point of view—was above reproach. Indeed, he bore himself where his own interests were concerned with an attention to the niceties of honor that evoked admiring comments. How far these encomiums went may be inferred from a typical one by Judge Samuel C. Parks, who wrote: “I have often said that for a man who was for the quarter of a century both a lawyer and a politician, he was the most honest man I ever knew.” ”

“ They should have known that an experienced lawyer, whose adherence to the highest ideals of his profession had by this time passed into a by-word, would hardly have jeopardized a cherished reputation, to say nothing of his standing as a public man, by stooping to any device at once so dishonorable and so futile. For it is not to be credited that an exhibit of such importance could pass through the hands of shrewd opponents, as well as those of judge and jurymen, without the closest scrutiny. ”