day laborer and who had risen without help of any kind other than such as he won for himself. His early associations had almost faded out of sight, only the brightest of them, his noble-hearted stepmother, remaining at the close of the year 1850. When informed, in the Autumn of that year, that his father's health was failing, there were sufficient reasons why Mr. Lincoln could not pay an immediate visit to Coles County. Year after year he had contributed with prudent liberality to the support of a man who could not win a support for himself from the best of Illinois land, and he now wrote to his stepbrother, John Johnston, a letter which has been preserved. He said in it :

“I sincerely hope father may yet recover his health; but at all events tell him to remember to call upon and confide in our great and good and merciful Maker, who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of the sparrow and numbers the hairs of our heads; and he will not forget the dying man who puts his trust in Him. Say to him that, if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyful meeting with loved ones gone before, and where the rest of us, through the mercy of God, hope erelong to join them."

There was no recovery, and Thomas Lincoln passed away. After his death, Mrs. Lincoln's old age was made continually comfortable by the loving care of her stepson. He visited her more than once, and she was able to say, at the end of his career-for she survived him—that she could not ask for a son more dutiful than he had been.

The surpassing eminence attained by Abraham Lincoln as a politician and statesman has even

served to belittle in the minds of many whatever reputation he won in the ways open to other men. There are even now those who speak of him as a country lawyer" up to the time when his second series of political successes began to come to him.

The first series, beginning with his election to the Legislature and ending with his Presidential-elector nominations and his career in Congress, was sufficiently remarkable, but it would not have provided him with a solid foundation of name and character to sustain him in his further and greater undertakings, if to mere party leadership he had not added eminence in his profession. What was his rank at the bar and how he was regarded by other lawyers, as well as by the general public who knew him, cannot better be expressed than in the written testimonies of the very judges before whom he argued and fairly won his cases, or fairly lost them, year after year.

Hon. David Davis, afterward of the United States Supreme Court, presided over the Eighth Judicial District during all the years of Lincoln's later practice. He wrote after the death of his friend :

"In all the elements that constitute the great lawyer, he [Mr. Lincoln] had few equals. He was great both at nisi prius and before an appellate tribunal. He seized the strong points of a case and presented them with clearness and great compactness. His mind was logical and direct, and he did not indulge in extraneous discussion. Generalities and platitudes had no charms for him. An unfailing vein of humor never deserted him, and he was able to claim the attention of court and jury, when the cause was the most uninteresting, by the appropriateness of his anecdotes.

"His power of comparison was large, and he rarely failed, in a legal discussion, to employ that mode of reasoning. The framework of his mental and moral being was honesty, and a wrong cause was poorly defended by him. The ability which some eminent lawyers possess, of explaining away the bad points of a cause, by ingenious sophistry, was denied him. In order to bring into full activity his great powers, it was necessary that he should be convinced of the right and justice of the matter which he advocated. When so convinced, whether the cause was great or small, he was usually successful. He read law books but little, except when the cause in hand made it necessary; yet he was usually selfreliant, depending on his own resources, and rarely consulting his brother lawyers, either on the management of his case or on the legal questions involved.

"Mr. Lincoln was the fairest and most accommodating of practitioners, granting all favors which were consistent with his duty to his client, and rarely availing himself of an unwary oversight of his adversary.

"He hated wrong and oppression, everywhere, and many a man whose fraudulent conduct was undergoing review in a court of justice has writhed under his terrific indignation and rebukes."

Judge Drummond, United States District Judge for Illinois, has given his thoughtful estimate as follows:

"With a probity of character known to all, with an intuitive insight into the human heart, with a clearness of statement which was in itself an argument, with uncommon power and felicity of illustration-often, it is true, of a plain and homely kind-and with that sincerity and earnestness of manner which carried conviction, he was, perhaps, one of the most successful jury lawyers we ever had in the State. He always tried a case fairly and honestly. He never intentionally misrepresented the evidence of a witness nor the argument of an opponent. He met both squarely, and if he could not explain the one or answer the other, substantially admitted it. He never misstated the law, according to his own intelligent view of it. Such was the transparent candor and integrity of his nature, that he could not well or strongly argue a

side or cause that he thought wrong.

He could hardly

be called very learned in his profession, and yet he rarely tried a cause without fully understanding the law applicable to it; and I have no hesitation in saying he was one of the ablest lawyers I have ever known."

Equally emphatic is the remainder of their testimony and that of other able jurists. With one accord they delineate a lawyer who was so born as well as so made, and explain the mental peculiarities which enabled a barefooted, log-cabin boy to become so deeply interested in reading the Revised Statutes of Indiana.

It is recorded of Mr. Lincoln, as one of the noteworthy characteristics of this period of busy practice, that the abolitionists could at any time apply to him for legal help in cases arising out of the Fugitive Slave Law, or otherwise affecting the rights of colored people. Other eminent lawyers declined a kind of practice so full of peril to their political ambitions. Lincoln did not yet know that he was himself an abolitionist, but he could not shut his heart to the appeal of an oppressed human being, black or white.

CHAPTER XIV.

The Compromises of 1850-The Breakdown of the Wig Party-Lizitia and Politics-The Pierce Administration—Ealigy on Henry Clay-The Kansas-Nebraskas BAX

WHEN Abraham Lincoln's Congressional term ended, March 3d. 1849, it looked as if he had turned away from politics. He even said so himself, and there was certainly no apparent prospect for political honors in IMinois for a Whig who was more than suspected of holding heretical opinions upon the subject of slavery. He was personally as popular as ever, but it seemed manifest to all men that his future career lay among courts and law cases.

The great field of national politics was undergoing a process of transformation and of preparation, and over it hung a deepening cloud which contained a greater storm than most men were willing to believe. The year 1850 witnessed the death of President Taylor, the accession of President Fillmore, and the nominal accord of the Whig and Democratic parties upon the compromise measures which seemed to give the slave power so much, but which really gave it nothing. Hardly were these adopted before the more acute Southern leaders discovered that, while they had lost all the newly acquired territory except Texas, the best part of