Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01 eBook

This was all as it should be.  The best place for him was Illinois, and he went about his work there until his time should come.

[Relocated Footnote:  Butterfield had a great reputation for ready wit and was suspected of deep learning.  Some of his jests are still repeated by old lawyers in Illinois, and show at least a well-marked humorous intention.  On one occasion he appeared before Judge Pope to ask the discharge of the famous Mormon Prophet, Joe Smith, who was in custody surrounded by his church dignitaries.  Bowing profoundly to the court and the ladies who thronged the hall, he said:  “I appear before you under solemn and peculiar circumstances.  I am to address the Pope, surrounded by angels, in the presence of the holy apostles, in behalf of the Prophet of the Lord.”  We once heard Lincoln say of Butterfield that he was one of the few Whigs in Illinois who approved the Mexican war.  His reason, frankly given, was that he had lost an office in New York by opposing the war of 1812.  “Henceforth,” he said with cynical vehemence, “I am for war, pestilence, and famine.”  He was once defending the Shawneetown Bank and advocating the extension of its charter; an opposing lawyer contended that this would be creating a new bank.  Butterfield brought a smile from the court and a laugh from the bar by asking “whether when the Lord lengthened the life of Hezekiah he made a new man, or whether it was the same old Hezekiah?”]

CHAPTER XVII

THE CIRCUIT LAWYER

In that briefest of all autobiographies, which Mr. Lincoln wrote for Jesse Fell upon three pages of note-paper, he sketched in these words the period at which we have arrived:  “From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, I practiced law more assiduously than ever before ...  I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.”  His service in Congress had made him more generally known than formerly, and had increased his practical value as a member of any law firm.  He was offered a partnership on favorable terms by a lawyer in good practice in Chicago; but he declined it on the ground that his health would not endure the close confinement necessary in a city office.  He went back to Springfield, and resumed at once his practice there and in the Eighth Judicial Circuit, where his occupations and his associates were the most congenial that he could anywhere find.  For five years he devoted himself to his work with more energy and more success than ever before.

It was at this time that he gave a notable proof of his unusual powers of mental discipline.  His wider knowledge of men and things, acquired by contact with the great world, had shown him a certain lack in himself of the power of close and sustained reasoning.  To remedy this defect, he applied himself, after his return from Congress, to such works upon logic and mathematics as he fancied would be serviceable.  Devoting himself with dogged energy to the task in hand, he soon learned by heart six books of the propositions of Euclid, and he retained through life a thorough knowledge of the principles they contain.