By luck and by educated guesswork, scholars of Abraham Lincoln have discovered a cache of 34 legal documents in Lincoln's familiar clear and open handwriting in the basement of the Tazewell County Courthouse in Pekin, Ill. The documents had been overlooked but well-preserved in files for nearly a century and a half.
Historians say the new documents are significant because they show the wide range of Lincoln's early practice in every kind of case, civil and criminal, for clients large and small, who wanted a lawyer with a reputation as a courtroom advocate who could sway juries, cut losses through settlements and invoke legal technicalities to delay or gain an advantage in a difficult case.Cullom Davis, the director of the Lincoln Legal Papers, a project in Springfield that is documenting Lincoln's law practice from 1836 to 1861, said the legal documents were preserved primarily because they were not signed by Lincoln.
"For many years, amateurs cut his signature off the bottom of legal documents" to sell, Davis said. "Fortunately, they didn't know the cases and couldn't recognize a document that Lincoln wrote but didn't bear his name."
The documents in the Tazewell County Courthouse were found by Michael Duncan, Susan Krause and Erin Bishop, members of the Lincoln Legal Papers project. "They're all veteran sleuths with an uncanny ability to spot Lincoln's handwriting, even when he signed someone else's name," said William Beard, assistant editor of Lincoln Legal Papers, who helped to verify the authenticity of the documents.
Lincoln, riding north by horseback for 60 miles from his home in Springfield, made the Tazewell County Courthouse (then situated in the village of Tremont) his first stop on the old Eighth Judicial Circuit. The courthouse, and the documents, were moved to Pekin in the mid-1850s.
Beard said that Lincoln, while serving as counsel for defendants in criminal matters in 1851, signed the name of the state's attorney four times on bills of indictment but, strangely, neither his own name nor signature are on the documents.