Part 10 (2/2)

In this emergency, Abraham Lincoln stepped into the breach and volunteered to defend the defenseless.

”I would suggest, first,” began he, ”that there be a change in the indictment so as to have it read 'The State against Mr. Whisky!'

instead of 'The State against these women.' This is the defense of these women. The man who has persisted in selling whisky has had no regard for their well-being or the welfare of their husbands and sons.

He has had no fear of G.o.d or regard for man; neither has he any regard for the laws of the statute. No jury can fix any damages or punishment for any violation of the moral law. The course pursued by this liquor dealer has been for the demoralization of society. His groggery has been a nuisance. These women, finding all moral suasion of no avail with this fellow, oblivious to all, to all tender appeal and a like regardless of their tears and prayers, in order to protect their households and promote the welfare of the community, united to suppress the nuisance. The good of society demanded its suppression!

They accomplished what otherwise could not have been done.”--(_The Lincoln Magazine_.)

AS CLEAR AS MOONs.h.i.+NE.

In 1858, Lincoln was committed to the political campaign which was a pa.s.sing 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 ch.o.r.es 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 a.s.surance 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, a.s.suring 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, p.r.o.nounced 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 s.h.i.+ne that night?” So the text. Whereupon, _Nick Bottom_, a weaver, cries out: ”A calendar! look in the almanack!

find out moons.h.i.+ne!”

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.

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