ГЛАВА III
[iii-1] Было бы неправильно, однако, утверждать, как это иногда делается, будто Линкольн выигрывал каждое дело, которое он должен был выиграть. Адвокаты-современники свидетельствуют об обратном.
[iii-2] Herndon, ii, 3; Whitney, 251.
[iii-3] Hill, 225-26.
[iii-4] Whitney, 259; Whitney’s Life, i, 177.
[iii-5] Энтони Торнтон, в газете Chicago Tribune, 12 февраля 1900 г., стр. 14.
[iii-6] Illinois Reports, xxxvii, 15.
[iii-7] Whitney, 262-63; Whitney’s Life, i, 196. Эти дань уважения честным методам Линкольна вновь напоминают о принципах, которые в немалой степени способствовали выдающемуся положению Хораса Бинни. В обзоре своей карьеры он писал: «Я во все времена презирал практику любых уловок, трюков или хитростей с целью получения преимущества над моим противником; и если только я не считал его нечестным, я обычно был готов к тому, чтобы он видел все мои карты, пока я их разыгрываю. Я могу с полным правом сказать, что не осознаю за собой потери чего-либо из-за этой откровенности; но, напротив, неоднократно выигрывал благодаря ей. Если мой клиент в какой-то момент вызывал подозрения, у меня не было оснований думать, что я сам вызываю их у Суда или коллегии адвокатов; и излишне говорить, скольким балансирующим делам за тридцать пять лет практики поспособствовала такого рода репутация». (Binney, 443.)
[iii-8] Herndon, i, 326-28; Atlantic Monthly, апрель 1867 г., стр. 412. Каковой бы ни была практика в спрингфилдской адвокатуре, возражение Линкольна против создания фиктивных возражений по иску, разумеется, не было придирчивостью. Сам председатель Верховного суда Холт говорил: «Адвокат, если он выдвигает ложное возражение с целью затягивания правосудия, нарушает присягу и может быть оштрафован за обман Суда». (Pierce vs. Blake, Salkeld’s Reports, ii, 515. See, also, Johnson vs. Alston, Campbell’s Reports, i, 176.)
[iii-9] Whitney, 263-64; Herndon, ii, 17-18. Следует отметить, что 24 апреля 1856 года приходилось на четверг, а не на субботу. Является ли цифра 4 опечаткой вместо 6, или же эта сессия суда продлилась до субботы, 24 мая, или же ошибка кроется в чем-то другом, сейчас установить невозможно.
[iii-10] Browne’s Lincoln and Men, i, 360-62.
[iii-11] Линкольн — Трамбуллу, 18 декабря 1857 г., в журнале Century Magazine, февраль 1909 г., стр. 620.
[iii-12] Судья Дэвид Дэвис с кафедры федерального окружного суда в Индианаполисе, 19 мая 1865 г.
[iii-13] Holland, 130; Lamon’s Recollections, 19-20; Stowe, 22; Browne, 162.
[iii-14] Koerner, ii, 110.
[iii-15] Воспоминания полковника Ричарда Дж. Хинтона в газете Chicago Times-Herald, 17 ноября 1895 г.
[iii-16] Holland, 80. См. также: Nicolay and Hay, i, 307; Ward, 205, 270; Browne, 238.
[iii-17] Миссис Норман Б. Джадд, в книге: Oldroyd, 523; а также: Tarbell, i, 277-78. Довольно полный, хотя далеко не исчерпывающий отчет об аргументации Линкольна был перепечатан из газеты Chicago Daily Press в изданиях: Works, ii, 340-54, and Tarbell, ii, 324-30.
[iii-18] Известно, что признания, казавшиеся носящими более пагубный характер, чем те, что были сделаны в этом деле, порой помогали выиграть вердикт, а не мешали этому. То, насколько далеко адвокат может зайти в подобных вопросах, иллюстрируется практикой Дэниела Уэбстера. Будучи более блестящим, хотя и менее скрупулезным адвокатом, чем Линкольн, он шел до конца. Однажды в Бостоне, защищая человека, обвиненного в подлоге, его первым действием — в самом начале процесса, еще до того, как был вызван хоть один свидетель, — было встать и сказать: «Да пребудет милость Суда, мы признаем подлог, так что доказательства по этому пункту будут излишними. Мы отрицаем, что вексель был пущен в обращение в этом округе». Удивление присутствующих сменилось пониманием, когда стало очевидно, что обвинение могло легко состряпать дело о подлоге против подсудимого; но оно не могло столь же легко доказать то, что имело равное значение, — выпуск поддельного документа на территории округа Саффолк. Из-за нехватки достаточных доказательств именно по этому пункту подсудимый был оправдан. Его участь могла оказаться иной, если бы перед присяжными были поставлены оба вопроса — и о подлоге, и о пуске в обращение. Весьма вероятно, что если бы они выслушали доказательства самого преступления, эти факты настолько затмили бы другие соображения в их сознании, что привели бы к обвинительному приговору. Заявление Уэбстера предотвратило это и спасло его недостойного клиента.
[iii-19] Herndon, ii, 3; Whitney, 251.
[iii-20] Lincoln to Linder, February 20, 1848, Works , ii, 3.
[iii-21] Herndon, ii, 7.
[iii-22] Arnold, 84. See, also, Whitney’s Life , i, 173; Oldroyd, 37; Nicolay and Hay, i, 307.
[iii-23] Herndon, ii, 7.
[iii-24] Gibson W. Harris, quoted in Browne, 220.
[iii-25] Letter of Justice David J. Brewer to the author; and an article by him in the Atlantic Monthly , November, 1906, p. 591.
[iii-26] Caton, 13; Illinois Reports, xxxvii, 13.
[iii-27] A statement made by Judge David Davis.
[iii-28] Hill, 211-12.
[iii-29] Letter of Hon. Shelby M. Cullom to the author; Bateman, 13-15. See, also, Hill, 236-37; and T. W. S. Kidd, the crier of the court, in Tarbell, i, 273-75.
[iii-30] Judge Lawrence Weldon, quoted in Hill, 212-15.
[iii-31] A letter said to have been written by Lincoln to Mrs. Armstrong, offering her his services, is published in Selby (254), and Hobson (41-42); yet neither of these writers, responding to inquiries by the author, has been able to throw any light on the question of its authenticity. According to other biographers, a communication of such a nature was received by Mrs. Armstrong, who stated, as they allege, that it had been lost. On the other hand, “Duff” himself, in his detailed narrative, makes no reference to a letter from Mr. Lincoln; and John, his younger brother, in an equally full account of the affair, taken down for the author by Thomas D. Masters of Springfield, Illinois, expresses the opinion that no written message on the subject was ever received. The Masters notes concerning this topic read:— “Mr. Armstrong has no recollection of hearing of any letter being written by Mr. Lincoln to his mother, at the time his brother got into the trouble in question; and he requests me to say to you that he is quite sure that had such a letter been written he would have known of it. He points out to me that his mother was unable to read, and in that early day, had she received a letter from a man such as Lincoln then was,—a much-talked-about lawyer in Springfield,—that by reason of the exigencies of the occasion, and the interest such a letter would have excited in the household, he certainly would have known of it. His recollection is that his mother, probably after the cause was venued to Cass County, made a trip to Springfield, of course, knowing Mr. Lincoln, and feeling friendly to him, and having confidence in him, for the purpose of employing him to assist in the defense of her son at Beardstown.”
[iii-32] A singular parallel presents itself in ancient Athenian history, where Alcibiades and his friends were charged, as Plutarch relates, with mutilating the images of Mercury, on a certain night. When one of the informers was asked how he managed to recognize the features of the accused in the darkness, he answered,—“I saw them by the light of the moon,”—a palpable misstatement, as the affair happened at the time of a new moon which gave practically no light. This anecdote, however, could hardly have prompted Lincoln to consult an almanac in the Armstrong case, because he had not read Plutarch’s Lives at the time of that trial, and only did so two years later.
[iii-33] Judge Abram Bergen, quoted by James L. King, in the North American Review , February, 1898, pp. 193-94. Bergen’s testimony should be supplemented by a statement which “Duff” Armstrong himself made, in his respectable old age, to J. McCan Davis. It was published in the New York Sun of June 7, 1896. According to this report Armstrong then declared: “The almanac used by Lincoln was one which my cousin, Jake Jones, furnished him. On the morning of the trial I was taken outside the court-room to talk to Lincoln. Jake Jones was with us. Lincoln said he wanted an almanac for 1857. Jake went right off and got one, and brought it to ‘Uncle Abe.’ It was an almanac for the proper year, and there was no fraud about it.”
[iii-34] Ram, 269-70, note, 505. It is interesting to note that a somewhat similar tale is frequently met with among the anecdotes of the English bar. A barrister at the “Old Bailey,” according to this version, secured the acquittal of a client charged with highway robbery by introducing an almanac to prove that there was darkness on a certain night, instead of the bright moonlight, in which the prosecuting witness claimed to have distinguished the prisoner’s features. The almanac, however, as afterwards transpired, had been fraudulently so printed for that occasion.
[iii-35] Those who wish to collate what has been published about the Armstrong affair may find these references of service: Gridley’s Defense , 3-23; Hill, 229-34; Hobson, 40-50; Tarbell, i, 270-73; Lamon, 327-31; Arnold, 87-89; Onstot, 98-100; Irelan, xvi, 142-44; Oldroyd, 213-15; Herndon, ii, 26-28; Barrett, 63-66; Barrett (New), i, 152-54; Holland, 128-29; Browne, 224-27; Brockett, 82-85; Selby, 94-97, 254; Phillips’s Men Who Knew , 62-63; Stoddard, 157-60; Raymond, 29-31; Brooks, 127-29; French, 75-76; Whipple, 261-65; Bartlett, 111-15; Curtis’s Lincoln , 75; Coffin, 162-63; Stowe, 23-25; Morgan, 102-03; Nicolay’s Boy’s Life , 94-97; Hanaford, 44-48; Pratt, 78-82; Thayer, 285-93; McClure’s Stories , 97-99; Williams, 68-73; Lincolnics , 64-66; Jones, 15; Master, 20-22; New York Sun , June 7, 1896; North American Review , February, 1898, pp. 191-95; Kankakee (Ill.) Republican , February 12, 1909, Bloomington (Ill.) Pantagraph , January 20, 1912; also Eggleston’s The Graysons , in which the trial and the almanac incident are used by the novelist with good effect.
[iii-36] Tarbell, i, 265; Emerson, 5.
[iii-37] From an unpublished manuscript entitled “Lincoln on the Stump and at the Bar,” by Judge Scott, quoted in Tarbell, i, 253-54.
[iii-38] Judge William M. Dickson, in Harper’s Magazine , June, 1884, p. 63; Barrett (New), i, 121-22. See, also, Alban J. Conant, in Liber Scriptorum , 175-76, and in McClure’s Magazine , March, 1909, p. 516; Chauncey M. Depew, in Rice, 432; Browne, 229-30; Curtis’s Lincoln , 85; McClure’s Yarns , 457; McClure’s Stories , 92; Pratt, 59-60.
[iii-39] Collated from accounts by George W. Minier, in Oldroyd, 187-89, and in Herndon, ii, 327-28; also: Arnold, 85-87; Brooks, 122-24; Coffin, 108; Pratt, 68-69.
[iii-40] Binney, 444.
[iii-41] Lincoln would doubtless have approved of David Hoffman’s rule on this subject. It read: “I will never plead or otherwise avail of the bar of infancy against an honest demand. If my client possesses the ability to pay, and has no other legal or moral defense than that it was contracted by him when under the age of twenty-one years, he must seek for other counsel to sustain him in such a defense. And although in this, as well as in that of limitation, the law has given the defense, and contemplates in the one case to induce claimants to a timely prosecution of their rights, and in the other designs to protect a class of persons who by reason of tender age are peculiarly liable to be imposed on, yet in both cases I shall claim to be the sole judge (the pleas not being compulsory) of the occasions proper for their use.”
[iii-42] Remarks of Justice David Davis in the Federal Circuit Court at Indianapolis, May 19, 1865.
[iii-43] It may be of interest to note that these same revolutionary properties, and the same stage-setting of frozen ground flecked with the blood of patriots’ unshod feet, had served Patrick Henry, many years before, in the defense of John Venable, Commissary of the Continental Army, sued by John Hook, a Tory, for the value of some steers seized to feed the hungry troops. But Henry’s eloquence had not prevailed as fully as Lincoln’s did; for the jury found a verdict, though in a nominal sum, against the great Virginian’s client.
[iii-44] Herndon, ii, 9-11; see, also, Holland, 127. For brief accounts and comments based on Herndon’s and on Holland’s narratives the reader is referred to: Hapgood, 108; Browne, 162-63; Hill, 215-16; Coffin, 104-05; Tarbell, i, 250; Pratt, 74-76; Selby, 97-98; McClure’s Stories , 101.
[iii-45] Herndon, i, 328-30. A brief and less picturesque account of the incident was furnished to the author, about half a century after the event, by the Honorable Shelby M. Cullom, one of the counsel for the defense. He wrote: “During the trial, a question was raised as to the admissibility of certain testimony, which was very important to the defense. The Judge took an hour to come to a conclusion as to what he ought to do; and when he began to decide the question, he seemed to be leaning against the admissibility of the testimony. Lincoln saw that he was inclined that way, and sprang upon his feet, and manifested such intense earnestness that it appeared to change the Judge’s disposition, and he decided in favor of the admissibility of the testimony.” Still, Herndon probably did not overstate the case. For the official crier, Captain Thomas W. S. Kidd, referring to that same episode, said: “Mr. Lincoln made a display of anger, the like of which I never saw exhibited by him before or after. He roared in the excess of his denunciation of the action of the Court.” (Rochester Herald , January 17, 1904. See Kidd, also, in Tarbell, i, 251-52.)
ГЛАВА IV
[iv-1] Though under very different circumstances, Lincoln’s elation seems not unlike that of another famous man whose later life touched his at several points. The first dollar earned by Frederick Douglass, on free soil, in New Bedford, was paid to him, as he tells us, for stowing away a pile of coal for Mrs. Ephraim Peabody, the wife of a Unitarian minister. “I was not long in accomplishing the job,” runs his story, “when the dear lady put into my hand two silver half-dollars. To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me,—that it was mine,—that my hands were my own, and could earn more of the precious coin,—one must have been in some sense himself a slave.” (Douglass, 210.)
[iv-2] Lamon, pointing out some inconsistencies in the details of this anecdote as it is generally quoted, expresses doubts concerning its authenticity. He evidently did not know how often Lincoln had told the story to different persons. Their versions, as might be expected, vary somewhat, but they agree in the essential facts. See: Carpenter, 96-98; William D. Kelley, in Rice, 279-80; Leonard Swett, in Rice, 457-58; Holland, 33-34; Brooks, 38; Pratt, 16-18; Morgan, 27-28; Lamon, 72; McClure’s Stories , 17-18; Hanaford, 156-58; Boyden, 83-84; Irelan, xvi, 62-64; Tarbell, i, 38-39; Browne, 72-73; Banks, 14-16; Ward, 277-78; Thayer, 169-71; Ludlow, 66-68; Curtis’s Lincoln , 24-25; Whipple, 62-63; Selby, 52-53; Raymond, 754; Onstot, 51-52; Egbert L. Viele, in Scribner’s Magazine , October, 1878, p. 817; Alban J. Conant, in McClure’s Magazine , March, 1909, p. 514; interview with Governor Frank Fuller, in the New York Times , October 1, 1911, p. 10.
[iv-3] Browne’s Lincoln and Men , i, 259-61, 356; ii, 90-91.
[iv-4] Holland, 93.
[iv-5] See Lincoln to Speed, June 19, 1841, in Works , i, 168-75, and in Lamon, 318-19; also, Gibson W. Harris, in Columbia (Ky.) Spectator , January 27, 1905.
[iv-6] Oldroyd, 394-95.
[iv-7] Onstot, 41-44.
[iv-8] Lincoln to Whitney, December 18, 1857, in Works , xi, 103.
[iv-9] Brockett, 702-03; McClure’s Yarns , 341-42; Barrett (New), i, 154-55; interview with Mrs. Rose Linder Wilkinson, in Chicago Times-Herald , September 11, 1895.
[iv-10] The nature of these kindnesses may be inferred from the following despatch:—
Executive Mansion , December 26, 1863.
Hon. U. F. Linder , Chicago, Ill.:
Your son Dan has just left me, with my order to the Secretary of War, to administer to him the oath of allegiance, discharge him, and send him to you.
A. Lincoln.
( Works , ix, 275; see, also, ibid. , 272.)
[iv-11] Boston Advertiser , February 12, 1909, p. 7.
[iv-12] Stowe, 21; Carpenter, 245; Browne, 229; French, 80; McClure’s Stories , 89-91; Thayer, 284-85; Gallaher, 39-40.
[iv-13] Gibson W. Harris, in Browne, 220.
[iv-14] Koerner, ii, 112.
[iv-15] Caroline H. Dall, in Atlantic Monthly , April, 1867, p. 413.
[iv-16] Tarbell, i, 267-68; Curtis’s Lincoln , 74-75; Thomas Lewis, in Leslie’s Weekly , February 16, 1899.
[iv-17] Browne, 224.
[iv-18] G. W. Nance, in Oldroyd, 557.
[iv-19] Charles W. Moores, in American Law Review , January-February, 1911, p. 92.
[iv-20] Henry Rickel, in Cedar Rapids Gazette , February 6, 1909, p. 1.
[iv-21] Ward, 242-46; Jennings, 93-98.
[iv-22] Father Chiniquy reproduces in his book an engraved facsimile of the due-bill, dated May 23, 1856. It is undeniably in Lincoln’s handwriting, but no explanation has been offered to reconcile the date with the priest’s statement that the paper was written in October, at the time of the second trial. The author based his narrative of this affair upon Chiniquy, 566, 620-67; Whitney, 53-55, 136-37; and a brief of the Circuit Court records at Urbana, Illinois, made for the writer by Judge Joseph O. Cunningham.
[iv-23] George P. Floyd, in McClure’s Magazine , January, 1908, p. 303.
[iv-24] Lamon’s Recollections , 17-19; see, also, Browne’s Lincoln and Men , i, 348-51. There are a few other examples, in legal history, of high-minded lawyers rejecting what they regarded as excessive fees. One notable English instance is thus related by Lord Brougham concerning Topping:— “A general retainer of a thousand guineas was brought to him to cover the Baltic cases then in progress. His answer was, that this indicated either a doubt of his doing his duty on the ordinary terms known in the profession (one guinea particular, and five guineas general retainer)—or an expectation that he should, on being thus retained, do something beyond the line of his duty; and therefore he must decline it. His clerk then accepted of the usual sum of five guineas, and he led on those important cases, for the defendants.”