In 1858, Lincoln was committed to the political campaign which was a
passing victory, superficial, to his opponent, Senator Douglas, to
eventuate in his accession to the Presidency. So he had let legal
strife fall into abeyance, during two years. He was, therefore, vexed
to have an applicant for his renewing that line of business, but at
once welcomed the suitor on learning her name. It was Hannah Armstrong.
He was eager to see her. She was the wife of the bully of Clary's
Grove, the locally noted wrestler, Jack Armstrong. After they had
become friends, Lincoln had been harbored in their cottage, in the days
when poverty held him down so he scarcely could get his head above
water. The good soul had repaid his doing chores about her house, such
as minding the baby, getting in the firewood, and keeping the highway
cows out of her cabbage-patch, after her husband died, by darning his
socks, filling up a bowl with corn-mush, at the period when it was a
feast to have "cheese, bologna, and crackers," in the garret where he
pored over law-books. Her news was painful. The baby, whose cradle
Lincoln had rocked, was a man now, and was in what the vernacular
phrased "pretty considerable of a tight fix."
It looked as though Mr. Lincoln would have difficulty in loosening the
fix, far more to remove it.
At a camp-meeting, the young men had been riotous. Armstrong and a
companion had been entangled in a fight for all comers, in which one
man was seriously injured by some weapon. The companion, Norris, was
tried and convicted for manslaughter of Metzgar, receiving the sentence
of eight years' imprisonment. But Armstrong was to be indicted for
murder, as the injuries were indicated as inflicted with a blunt
instrument, and a witness affirmed that they were done by a slung-shot
in Armstrong's hands. It was little excuse that he, like the rest
implicated, was drunk at the time. Nevertheless, dissolute as was the
young man of two-and-twenty, Lincoln did not need the woman's assurance
that her son was incapable of murder so deliberate. Armstrong averred
that any blow he struck was done with the naked fist. Furthermore, it
was said that Metzgar was not left insensible on the field of battle,
but was going home beside a yoke of oxen when the yoke-end cracked his
skull; it was this, and no slung-shot, that caused his death the
following day.
Recognizing that the complication forebode a strenuous task, Lincoln
none the less accepted it and, assuring his old "Aunt Hannah" that he
would not suffer her to talk of remuneration, he resumed the toga to
contest the effort to take away Armstrong's life and release Norris, as
convicted under error.
He closeted himself with the prisoner to hear his account, and upon
that concluded he was guiltless. It has been said that Lincoln would
never undertake a defense of a man he believed guilty. This held good
in the present instance.
As the statement about the slung-shot blow was made by a man who
disputed the ox-yoke accident, and that the fatal hurts were received
in the free fight at the camp-meeting, it was necessary that he should
be explicit. He had seen the blow and distinguished the weapon by the
light of the moon.
Lincoln was accustomed from early life to relieve his brain when
toiling or distressed, by the turning to a vein utterly opposed to
those moods. His chief diversion from Blackstone and the statutes was
his favorite author, Shakespeare. Hackett, the _Falstaff_ delighted in
by our grandfathers, pronounced the President a better student of that
dramatist than he expected to meet.
As the ancients drew fates, as it is called, from Virgil, and the
medievals from the Bible, so the lawyer drew hints from his author. The
process is to open at a page and read as a forecast the first line
meeting the eye. The play-book opened at "Midsummer Night's Dream." To
refresh himself after his speeches in rehearsal, Lincoln had been
enjoying the humor of the amateur-actor clowns. So the line "leaping
into sight" was on parallel lines with his thought.
"Does the moon shine that night?" So the text. Whereupon, _Nick
Bottom_, a weaver, cries out: "A calendar! look in the almanack! find
out moonshine!"
The pleader had his cue!
It was not necessary to postpone the trial on the ground that the
debate upon the new charge prevented a fair jury in the district.
Besides, the widow would grow mad in the long suspense, even if the
prisoner bore it manfully, though sorrowing for her and his misspent
life. The trial was indeed the event of the year at the courthouse. The
witnesses for the prosecution repeated about Armstrong much the same
story as had convicted Norris: Armstrong had led a reprehensible
career, and the deliberate onslaught with a weapon after the fight
could hardly have been made by an intoxicated man. It was
vindictiveness from being worsted by the unhappy Metzgar in a fair
fight. In vain was it cited that he and Metzgar had been friends and
that the accuser was a personal enemy of the former.
The case looked so formidable--unanswerable, in short--that the State
proctor's plea for condemnation might all but be taken for granted.
However highly the prisoner had been elated by his father's friend, his
own, having promised to deliver him before sundown, he must have lost
the lift-up. For he wore the abandoned expression of one forsaken by
his own hopes as by his friends. Norris, in his cell, could have not
been more veritably the picture of despair.
Lincoln rose for the final, without eliciting any emotion from him. He
dilated on the evidence, which he asserted boldly was proof of a plot
against an innocent youth. He called the principal witness back to the
stand, and caused him definitely to repeat that he had _seen_ Armstrong
strike the fatal stroke, with a slung-shot undoubtedly, and by "the
light of the moon." The proof that his accusation was false was in the
advocate's hand--the almanac, which the usher handed into the jury,
while the judge consulted one on his desk.
The whole story was a fabrication to avenge a personal enmity, and the
rock of the prosecution was blasted by the defense's fiery eloquence.
The arbiters went out for half an hour, but the audience, waiting in
breathless impatience, discounted the result. The twelve filed in to
utter the alleviating "Not guilty!" and the liberator was able to
fulfil his pledge.
It was not sunset, and the prisoner was free to comfort his mother.
In vain did she talk of paying a fee, and the man supported the desire
by alleging his intention to work the debt out. Lincoln said in the old
familiar tongue:
"Aunt Hannah, I sha'n't charge you a _red_--I said 'without money or
price!' And anything I can do for you and yours shall not cost you a
cent."
Soon after, as she wrote to him of an attempt to deprive her of her
land, he bade her force a case into the court; if adverse there, appeal
to the Supreme Court, where his law firm would act, and he would fight
it out.
(Regarding the rescued man, he enlisted in the war at the first call.
He was still in the ranks two years later, when his mother, in her
loneliness, begged for him of the President-commander-in-chief, for his
release to come home. His leave was immediately written out by
Lincoln's own hand, and the soldier went home from Kentucky. He
remained a valuable citizen. It was Lincoln's speech and the moonbeam
of inspiration that saved him.)
* * * * *
"NICE CLOTHES MAY MAKE A HANDSOME MAN--EVEN OF YOU!"
In 1832, Lincoln, elected to the Illinois legislative chamber, found
himself in one of those anguishing embarrassments besetting him in all
the early stages of his unflagging ascent from the social slough of
despond. Unlike eels, he never got used to skinning. For the new
station, however well provided mentally, he had no means to procure
dress fit for the august halls of debate.
He was yet standing behind the counter in Offutt's general shop at New
Salem, when an utter stranger strolled in, asked his name, though his
exceptional stature and unrivaled mien revealed his identity, and
announced his own name. Each had heard of the other. The newcomer was
not an Adonis, perhaps, but he was one compared with the awkward,
leaning Tower of Pisa "cornstalk," who carried the jack-knife as "the
homeliest man in the section." Lincoln was doubly the _plainest_
speaker there and thereabouts.
"Mr. Smoot," began the clerk, "I am disappointed in you, sir! I
expected to see a scaly specimen of humanity!"
"Mr. Lincoln, I am sorely disappointed in you, in whom I expected to
see a _good-looking_ man!"
After this jocular exchange of greeting, the joke cemented friendship
between them. The proof of the friendship is in the usefulness of it.
Lincoln turned to this acquaintance in his dilemma.
This future President may have divined the saying of the similarly
martyred McKinley--about "the cheap clothes making a cheap man." He
summed up his situation:
"I must certainly have decent clothes to go there among the
celebrities."
No doubt, the State capital had other fashions than those prevailing at
Sangamon town, where even the shopkeeper's present attire, in which he
had solicited suffrages, was scoffed at as below the mark. It was
composed of "flax and tow-linen pantaloons (one Ellis, storekeeper,
describes from eye-witnessing), I thought, about five inches too short
in the legs, exposing blue-yarn socks (the original of the Farmers'
_Sox_ of our mailorder magazines); no vest or coat; and but one
suspender. He wore a calico shirt, as he had in the Black Hawk War;
coarse brogans, tan color."
"As you voted for me," went on the ambitious man about to exchange the
counter for the rostrum, "you must want me to make a decent appearance
in the state-house?"
"Certainly," was the reply, as anticipated, Lincoln was so sure of his
wheedling ways by this time.
And the friend in need supplied him with two hundred dollars currency,
which, according to the budding legislator's promise, he returned out
of his first pay as representative.
* * * * *