On the circuit,his story-telling was an institution.Two other men,long since forgotten,vied with him as rival artists in humorous narrative.These three used to hold veritable tournaments.Herndon has seen "the little country tavern where these three were wont to meet after an adjournment of court,crowded almost to suffocation,with an audience of men who had gathered to witness the contest among the members of the strange triumvirate.The physicians of the town,all the lawyers,and not infrequently a preacher,could be found in the crowd that filled the doors and windows.The yarns they spun and the stories they told would not bear repetition here,but many of them had morals which,while exposing the weakness of mankind,stung like a whiplash.Some were,no doubt,a thousand years old,with just enough of verbal varnish and alterations of names and date to make them new and crisp.By virtue of the last named application,Lincoln was enabled to draw from Balzac a 'droll story'and locating it 'in Egypt'[Southern Illinois]or in Indiana,pass it off for a purely original conception...I have seen Judge Treat,who was the very impersonation of gravity itself,sit up till the last and laugh until,as he often expressed it,'he almost shook his ribs loose.'The next day he would ascend the bench and listen to Lincoln in a murder trial with all the seeming severity of an English judge in wig and gown."[5]
Lincoln enjoyed the life on the circuit.It was not that he was always in a gale of spirits;a great deal of the time he brooded.His Homeric nonsense alternated with fits of gloom.
In spite of his late hours,whether of study or of story-telling,he was an early riser."He would sit by the fire having uncovered the coals,and muse and ponder and soliloquize."[6]Besides his favorite Shakespeare,he had a fondness for poetry of a very different sort--Byron,for example.And he never tired of a set of stanzas in the minor key beginning:"Oh,why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"[7]
The hilarity of the circuit was not by any means the whole of its charm for him.Part of that charm must have been the contrast with his recent failure at Washington.This world he could master.Here his humor increased his influence;and his influence grew rapidly.He was a favorite of judges,jury and the bar.Then,too,it was a man's world.Though Lincoln had a profound respect for women,he seems generally to have been ill at ease in their company.In what his friends would have called "general society"he did not shine.He was too awkward,too downright,too lacking in the niceties.At home,though he now owned a house and was making what seemed to him plenty of money,he was undoubtedly a trial to Mrs.Lincoln's sense of propriety.He could not rise with his wife,socially.He was still what he had become so long before,the favorite of all the men--good old Abe Lincoln that you could tie to though it rained cats and dogs.But as to the ladies!Fashionable people calling on Mrs.Lincoln,had been received by her husband in his shirt-sleeves,and he totally unabashed,as oblivious of discrepancy as if he were a nobleman and not a nobody.[8]The dreadful tradition persists that he had been known at table to put his own knife into the butter.
How safe to assume that many things were said commiserating poor Mrs.Lincoln who had a bear for a husband.And some people noticed that Lincoln did not come home at week-ends during term-time as often as he might.Perhaps it meant something;perhaps it did not.But there could be no doubt that the jovial itinerant life of the circuit was the life for him--at least in the early 'fifties.That it was,and also that he was becoming known as a lawyer,is evinced by his refusal of a flattering invitation to enter a prosperous firm in Chicago.
Out of all this came a deepening of his power to reach and impress men through words.The tournament of the story-tellers was a lawyers'tournament.The central figure was reading,studying,thinking,as never in his life before.Though his fables remained as broad as ever,the merely boisterous character ceased to predominate.The ethical bent of his mind came to the surface.His friends were agreed that what they remembered chiefly of his stories was not the broad part of them,but the moral that was in them.[9]And they had no squeamishness as critics of the art of fable-making.
His ethical sense of things,his companionableness,the utterly non-censorious cast of his mind,his power to evolve yarns into parables--all these made him irresistible with a jury.It was a saying of his:"If I can divest this case of technicalities and swing it to the jury,I'll win it."[10]
But there was not a trace in him of that unscrupulousness usually attributed to the "jury lawyer."Few things show more plainly the central unmovableness of his character than his immunity to the lures of jury speaking.To use his power over an audience for his own enjoyment,for an interested purpose,for any purpose except to afford pleasure,or to see justice done,was for him constitutionally impossible.Such a performance was beyond the reach of his will.In a way,his nature,mysterious as it was,was also the last word for simplicity,a terrible simplicity.The exercise of his singular powers was irrevocably conditioned on his own faith in the moral justification of what he was doing.He had no patience with any conception of the lawyer's function that did not make him the devoted instrument of justice.For the law as a game,for legal strategy,he felt contempt.Never under any conditions would he attempt to get for a client more than he was convinced the client in justice ought to have.The first step in securing his services was always to persuade him that one's cause was just He sometimes threw up a case in open court because the course of it had revealed deception on the part of the client.At times he expressed his disdain of the law's mere commercialism in a stinging irony.
