Feb 25, 2018 3 min read

This week in 1837, a young Abraham Lincoln was formally admitted as an attorney licensed to practice law in the state courts of Illinois. Subsequently he began taking on “every kind of business that could come before a prairie lawyer” – which he was. Every spring and fall, he rode his horse, Old Tom, along the prairieland of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, where Lincoln mostly handled civil cases on behalf of banks, insurance companies, and manufacturers that usually involved collecting past due debts. However, his biggest clients were the railroads, in particular the Illinois Central Railroad.

He did handle a few criminal cases, the most famous being his defense of a man charged with murder. After an opposing witness testified that the moonlight was bright enough for him to see the accused commit the crime, Lincoln produced a Farmer’s Almanac showing that the moon at that time was at a low angle, making visibility too difficult for a positive identification. Lincoln’s client was acquitted.

As for his legal methodology, since his education, including his study of the law, had been rudimentary, Lincoln was not so much concerned with legal niceties or even legal precedents as he was with arguments based on reason. A fellow lawyer said of him, “His method was always to persuade by fact and logic accessible to the common juror … Whatever could not stand the test of sound reasoning, he rejected.” A judge who often presided over Lincoln’s cases added, “He seized the strong points of a case and presented them with clearness and great compactness. Generalities and platitudes had no charm for him.”

As Lincoln saw it, by focusing on simple facts and logic, presented clearly and concisely – leaving out “generalities and platitudes” – he better connected with juries of ordinary citizens who themselves had no understanding of legal niceties or precedents, and therefore preferred simple logic, based on actual facts, presented clearly. Lincoln also cleverly would make opposing counsel overconfident by repeatedly conceding legal points that turned out to be peripheral to the case, while quickly seizing on the critical points.

Interestingly, in one important case, Lincoln saved the Illinois Central Railroad from bankruptcy, for which he was due a fee of $5,000. But when he went to collect it, the railroad’s superintendent refused to pay, in effect telling Lincoln he wasn’t a prominent enough lawyer to deserve $5,000. Lincoln subsequently sued and won his fee.

The superintendent who rejected Lincoln’s fee was named George B. McClellan. His contempt for Lincoln remained unabated throughout the coming Civil War, in which President Lincoln twice relieved General McClellan of command of the Union Army, due to Lincoln’s equally low opinion of McClellan’s generalship.