Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865)

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Source

Lawyer and president of the united states

Rails and the West. Before Abraham Lincoln decided to enter electoral politics, a decision that ultimately led to his election as the sixteenth president of the United States in 1860 and his assassination in Ford’s Theater in 1865, he rose to prominence as a Western lawyer. During that phase of his life he recognized that railroads were the principle engine of internal development and improvement in the West, a notion that was on the mark. Between 1830 and 1860 railroads provided the most dependable, efficient, and least expensive means of transporting agricultural products, commercial goods, information, and people. Their routes determined whether towns flourished or died. Chicago, Illinois, provided the prime example of the former. As late as 1850 the city had practically no rail lines. Within five years the construction of more than two thousand miles of rail transformed the city into a vital center of transportation, industry, agriculture, and commercial development.

Lucrative Practice. Railroad development placed growing demands on legal institutions. Before routes could be constructed, many legal problems demanded solutions: issues of land and resource rights, franchises and charters, taxation, rights of passengers, finance, consolidation, and incorporation. In Illinois, Lincoln’s practice benefited greatly in the mid to late 1850s. All of his political life Lincoln belonged to parties—the Whigs and then the Republicans—that championed national development with federal and state support of internal improvements. Demand for his services, sympathetic political ideology, great legal skill, and personal ambition placed Lincoln among the most important attorneys in the West.

First Railroad Case. Lincoln’s first important case for the railroads occurred in 1851, when the Alton and Sangamon Railroad sued James A. Barrett, a landowner and one of the railroad’s original stockholders. The company’s original plan would have carried the rail line close to Barrett’s property, driving up the value of his four thousand acres significantly. A new plan was designed to shorten the route by twelve miles, moving it far away from Barrett’s land. To protest this change Barrett refused to pay money owed on the thirty original shares that he purchased. Alton and Sangamon sued for payment and hired Lincoln to represent the company in court. Lincoln was convinced that this railroad was crucial to development in the West, a vital part “in the great chain of railroad communication” uniting the Atlantic coast “with the Mississippi.” He argued that a decision for the defendant “might encourage others to stop payments” on their stock subscriptions, stunting the growth of economic development. The Illinois Supreme Court decided in the company’s favor. Following the logic of Lincoln’s case, Chief Justice Samuel Treat declared that “a few obstinate stockholders should not be permitted to deprive the public and the company of the advantages that will result from a superior and less expensive route.” This case established a legal precedent cited in twenty-five subsequent cases throughout the United States.

Illinois Central Cases. In 1852, following his success with the Alton and Sangamon case, Lincoln began taking cases for the Illinois Central Railroad, a company that hoped to lay tracks that would give Chicago quick and reliable transportation to the Gulf of Mexico. The state of Illinois granted the railroad an exemption for all state taxes on the condition that it pay an annual “charter tax.” Representatives of McLean County, protested that the state had no right to exempt a company from paying county taxes. The Illinois Central declared that payment of both county taxes and the charter tax would force it into bankruptcy. Lincoln, working for the railroad in the case of Illinois Central Railroad v. the County of McLean, argued that the exemption was constitutional and should be upheld. The court decided in favor of the Illinois Central in January 1856.

Lincoln Sues the Railroad. Lincoln charged the company $2,000 for his services in this case, a substantial fee at the time. The Illinois Central balked at paying this extraordinary sum to a man it considered to be an obscure frontier lawyer. “This is as much as Daniel Webster himself would have charged,” they declared. Lincoln reconsidered his position, then increased his fee to $5,000. When the railroad still refused to fulfill its obligation, he sued. In court Lincoln defended the amount he charged, arguing that the Illinois Central would have paid nearly one hundred times his fees had McLean County won the case. The court decided in Lincoln’s favor. Lincoln continued to represent the Illinois Central Railroad over the years that followed.

Land of Rivers. Although working for the railroad companies was lucrative, Lincoln provided services for steamship companies as well. In 1851 he argued a case in which a riverboat sunk after colliding with a bridge on the Illinois River. The defendant, the company that built the bridge, denied responsibility because construction had been authorized by the state of Illinois. Lincoln turned his argument against the state, denying that it had the right “to authorize a total obstruction of a navigable stream” vital to commerce. While the court agreed with Lincoln that the Illinois River should “remain free, clear and uninterrupted,” the trial ended in a hung jury. The case was finally settled out of court. In an 1857 case in which another riverboat, the Effie Afton, struck a bridge pier and burned, Lincoln tried to reconcile competing interests of the railroad and waterway transportation industries. Working then for the railroad, Lincoln determined that the accident resulted from a malfunction in one of the steamship’s paddle wheels, not because the bridge presented a significant obstruction. While giving the railroads credit for the “astonishing growth of Illinois,” Lincoln maintained the importance of the waterways. The jury deadlocked over the decision, and the case was eventually thrown out of court.

Conclusions. Lincoln’s biographer David Herbert Donald has stated that Lincoln had “no consistent legal philosophy,” nor did he “leave behind him a record of cases that made a major contribution to the development of American legal thought.” Quoting Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, Donald concluded that Lincoln was “purely and entirely a case lawyer.” Lincoln’s willingness to work for whoever requested his services and contemporary opinion lends substance to this observation. However, the significance of Lincoln’s career as a lawyer in service to railroad companies is best understood within the context of national development. In that arena Lincoln’s application of legal principles made him a representative agent of Western expansion.

Source

David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).