Lincoln's Law Practice

Lincoln's Law Practice. Looking for Lincoln. Lincoln illustrator Lloyd Ostendorf imagined this scene in connection with Mt. Pulaski's "cast iron tombstone" case that Lincoln handled on appeal in the Illinois Supreme Court in Springfield (1859). Two local residents separately sued Reuben Miller for fraudulently selling them rights to an iron tombstone patent that they later decided was "frivolous and of no benefit to society." Judge David Davis rendered a verdict against Miller here in the trial court. But in Springfield, Lincoln succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to send the case back for retrial. The case dragged on for years-returning two more times to the Supreme Court. It was not finally resolved until after Lincoln became president. Miller ultimately lost.

Fire destroyed most of the court records pertaining to attorney Abraham Lincoln's Mt. Pulaski legal practice. The records perished when the recently-completed Logan County courthouse in Lincoln burned down in 1857. Most of what is known of Lincoln's legal practice in Mt. Pulaski comes from Illinois State Supreme Court records in Springfield---which usually include information about trial proceedings that transpired here in the courtroom before the cases were appealed. In two of Lincoln's more important local cases he opposed his former law partners Stephen T. Logan and John Todd Stuart. When Mt. Pulaski replaced Postville as the county seat. Postville land owners hired Logan and Stuart to recover the value of land they had donated to the county. Lincoln successfully defended the county by demonstrating that Postville men had been fairly compensated. A few years later, when the new city of Lincoln became county seat, mt. Pulaski hired Lincoln's old partners and sued the county to prevent the change. Lincoln defended the county and won again.

The "Horological Cradle" case was one of the stranger cases that lawyer Lincoln handled in Mt. Pulaski. At issue was a land swap for a patent on a mechanical cradle touted by Springfield newspapers as "a wonder of the age," that "no mother should be without." Once wound up, the cradle rocked itself freeing mothers to pursue other chores. Lincoln sued the local "inventor" on behalf of local patent purchasers who discovered that the patent covered only the cradle's ornamentation, not its mechanical design. Lincoln thoroughly enjoyed demonstrating the mechanics of the cradle to a courtroom of amused onlookers. But the contraption reportedly confused Judge David Davis, who supposedly asked how one could stop it from rocking. It's like some of the glib talkers you and I know, Judge," Lincoln explained, it won't stop until it runs down."