Lincoln and Herndon

David Grunschel
South Middle School, Arlington Heights

In 1832 a broke and unemployed Abraham Lincoln thought of trying to study law but doubted he was educated enough to succeed. Two years later, he was encouraged to begin the study of law by a fellow Whig party candidate named John Todd Stuart. Stuart loaned him several law books, and Lincoln quietly taught himself. In a time where there was only one law school west of the Appalachian Mountains and state bar exams did not exist, Lincoln was given a license to practice law on September 9, 1836, without any official law education. Lincoln became a junior partner with John Todd Stuart and later with Stephen Trigg Logan, learning by practice and example.

In 1844 Lincoln had enough of being a junior partner; he wanted to be in charge of his own firm. He and Logan called it quits by mutual agreement. When the time came to choose a partner, Lincoln astounded everyone by choosing the young, inexperienced, unaccomplished William "Billy" Henry Herndon as a junior associate for his firm. Herndon himself wondered why Lincoln chose him. However, Herndon and Lincoln had grown close since the time Herndon had become a clerk in Joshua Speed's store in Springfield in 1837, and he and Lincoln both slept on the second floor of the store. Lincoln lacked organizational skills, and he thought Herndon "had a system and would keep things in order," keeping good records that would make him a trustworthy office lawyer.

Herndon was nine years younger than Lincoln and had studied law with Logan and Lincoln before receiving his license. He was well suited for law work because of his continuous chatter, vast vocabulary, and ability to find an answer to anything. He also owned an impressive library from which he acquired much of his information. Together, he and Lincoln made an ideal combination. Despite what anyone else might have expected in the beginning, the Lincoln-Herndon law firm became one of the greatest firms in Illinois at the time. The firm took on more than a hundred cases a year, and in 1853 they handled 34 percent of the cases heard in the Sangamon County Circuit Court in Springfield.

Lincoln and Herndon set up their law practice in this building on the southeast corner of the square in downtown Springfield.

Although they did very well and seemed organized, it could not be told by looking at their office. After moving in and out of several offices, they eventually settled in one positioned on the second floor of a brick building across from the public square in Springfield. It was a small two-room office which they left unswept and largely cluttered. To say the office was not very clean would be an understatement. The "office was the dingiest and most untidy law office in the United States, without exception," wrote lawyer Henry C. Whitney. Herndon did most of the office work, which included case studies and hours and hours of hard research; Lincoln handled the more glamorous courtroom procedures.

When Lincoln started Herndon as a junior partner, Herndon was only twenty-five years old and had a lot to learn. He primarily did small tasks for Lincoln and tagged along to watch him defend a client in court. It did not take long, though, for Herndon to catch up to Lincoln. When Lincoln was away, Herndon was hired by clients to defend them in court. He became a skillful and emotional lawyer and used his emotion as one of his strategies to win cases.

While Herndon was reading his books and sitting in an office back in Springfield, Lincoln traveled the Eighth Judicial Circuit. Although he took

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This notice announcing the partnership between Lincoln and Herndon ran in a Springfield newspaper.

part in more than two hundred Illinois Supreme Court cases, most of the cases in which Lincoln was involved were held in the rural courthouses of the state's Eighth Judicial Circuit. He spent half of each year traveling by horse from town to town defending small-town clients. The lodgings he stayed in were crude and crowded, but Lincoln did not mind. It gave him time to meet new people, but also time to enjoy the remoteness of the silent prairie. When he was traveling the circuit he was "as happy as he could be and happy no other place," a friend of his once said. Herndon never went with Lincoln, but handled most of the local cases. It was an equal partnership, however, because both men spoke in court, their fees were split in half, and they split the work evenly.

Lincoln and Herndon were law partners for sixteen years and developed a close relationship. Herndon was probably Lincoln's best law partner, and he was also one of his closest friends and best biographers. He had a great amount of respect for the man, admiring him as he had no one else and always addressing him as "Mr. Lincoln." When the firm dissolved in 1860 because of Lincoln's election to the presidency, the two men remained friends. Herndon knew just how important and influential a man Lincoln was and just how lucky he was to know him. Two years before Lincoln was killed Herndon was quoted as saying, "Lincoln will be, in the not distant future, the ideal man of America if not of all the English speaking peoples, and every incident of his life will be sought for, read with pleasure, and treasured up in the memory of men."—[Russell Freedman, Lincoln; William H. Herndon, Life of Lincoln; Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., Lincoln; Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia; Stephen B. Oates, With Malice toward None.]

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