• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1700 0

politicians, argued that blacks held to long-term indentures were free, and fought their cases in court without charge. In the 1850s, Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon represented fugitive slaves pro bono. The state’s most prominent antislavery lawyer was Lyman Trumbull, a native of Connecticut who taught in Georgia in the 1830s before moving to Illinois, where he established a law practice and entered Democratic party politics. In the 1840s, Trumbull represented numerous blacks held to servitude under indentures. Like Lincoln, Trumbull lived in a part of the state settled by migrants from Kentucky and Tennessee. His battle against the remnants of slavery in Illinois required political courage, but his experience also demonstrated that it was possible to be identified as a friend of the slave and still win elections. Trumbull ran successfully for the state supreme court in 1848 and won reelection with virtually no opposition in 1852.28

After 1842, when he decided not to run for reelection and his legislative career ended, Lincoln’s livelihood derived from his law practice. Any lawyer in states bordering the Ohio River could, if he wished, devote part of his practice to cases involving fugitive slaves. Lincoln was not among those who in the 1840s and 1850s sought out cases involving blacks, or who volunteered to aid the antislavery cause. During his legal career, he handled more than 5,000 cases, mostly minor disputes about debts, land titles, and marital difficulties. Only 34 of these cases involved black persons in any way. Most were routine matters—a divorce, debt collections, issues relating to contracts, and several property transactions involving William Florville, a Springfield barber Lincoln befriended and whose tax matters he sometimes handled.29

Two of Lincoln’s cases reflected how “whiteness” possessed concrete legal significance in Illinois. Thus, white persons accused of having intimate relations with a black person, or of being black, took action to defend their reputations and legal status. In 1844, Lincoln represented Ambrose Edwards and his wife, who sued another couple for slander for saying that Mrs. Edwards had “raised a family of children by a negro.” A jury concluded that this accusation did indeed constitute slander and ruled in the Edwardses’ favor. When the other couple appealed, the Edwardses hired Lincoln to represent them. Lincoln urged the Illinois Supreme Court to consider the accusation of engaging in interracial sex in the context of the almost universal disapproval of miscegenation in the state. But the court rejected his argument and reversed the judgment, arguing that the words themselves did not necessarily accuse Mrs. Edwards of fornication across racial lines or adultery, both of which would have subjected her to criminal penalties.

In a similar 1855 case, Lincoln represented William Dungey, a dark-complexioned man who sued his brother-in-law for slander on the grounds that he had referred to Dungey as “Black Bill,” a “negro.” Lincoln challenged the veracity of depositions presented to the court claiming that Dungey was known to be of mixed racial ancestry. Dungey was actually Portuguese, Lincoln told the jury. “My client is not a Negro,” he added, “tho it is no crime to be a Negro—no crime to be born with black skin.” Lincoln won an award of $600 plus legal costs. Had he lost the case, Dungey would have been stripped of the right to vote and been subject to penalties under the Illinois Black Laws, since he had married a white woman. Illinois law did make it a crime, under certain circumstances, to be “born with black skin.”30

Many of Lincoln’s cases left only a fragmentary historical record. He seems to have represented a few individuals indicted for harboring fugitive slaves; in one such case, in 1845, a jury acquitted the accused and Lincoln and Herndon received a fee of five dollars.31 On two well-documented occasions, Lincoln became involved in the contentious issue of whether residence in Illinois automatically made a slave free.

The first such case, Bailey v. Cromwell