Part 11 (1/2)
The case looked so formidable--unanswerable, in short--that the State proctor's plea for condemnation might all but be taken for granted.
However highly the prisoner had been elated by his father's friend, his own, having promised to deliver him before sundown, he must have lost the lift-up. For he wore the abandoned expression of one forsaken by his own hopes as by his friends. Norris, in his cell, could have not been more veritably the picture of despair.
Lincoln rose for the final, without eliciting any emotion from him. He dilated on the evidence, which he a.s.serted boldly was proof of a plot against an innocent youth. He called the princ.i.p.al witness back to the stand, and caused him definitely to repeat that he had _seen_ Armstrong strike the fatal stroke, with a slung-shot undoubtedly, and by ”the light of the moon.” The proof that his accusation was false was in the advocate's hand--the almanac, which the usher handed into the jury, while the judge consulted one on his desk.
The whole story was a fabrication to avenge a personal enmity, and the rock of the prosecution was blasted by the defense's fiery eloquence.
The arbiters went out for half an hour, but the audience, waiting in breathless impatience, discounted the result. The twelve filed in to utter the alleviating ”Not guilty!” and the liberator was able to fulfil his pledge.
It was not sunset, and the prisoner was free to comfort his mother.
In vain did she talk of paying a fee, and the man supported the desire by alleging his intention to work the debt out. Lincoln said in the old familiar tongue:
”Aunt Hannah, I sha'n't charge you a _red_--I said 'without money or price!' And anything I can do for you and yours shall not cost you a cent.”
Soon after, as she wrote to him of an attempt to deprive her of her land, he bade her force a case into the court; if adverse there, appeal to the Supreme Court, where his law firm would act, and he would fight it out.
(Regarding the rescued man, he enlisted in the war at the first call.
He was still in the ranks two years later, when his mother, in her loneliness, begged for him of the President-commander-in-chief, for his release to come home. His leave was immediately written out by Lincoln's own hand, and the soldier went home from Kentucky. He remained a valuable citizen. It was Lincoln's speech and the moonbeam of inspiration that saved him.)
”NICE CLOTHES MAY MAKE A HANDSOME MAN--EVEN OF YOU!”
In 1832, Lincoln, elected to the Illinois legislative chamber, found himself in one of those anguis.h.i.+ng embarra.s.sments besetting him in all the early stages of his unflagging ascent from the social slough of despond. Unlike eels, he never got used to skinning. For the new station, however well provided mentally, he had no means to procure dress fit for the august halls of debate.
He was yet standing behind the counter in Offutt's general shop at New Salem, when an utter stranger strolled in, asked his name, though his exceptional stature and unrivaled mien revealed his ident.i.ty, and announced his own name. Each had heard of the other. The newcomer was not an Adonis, perhaps, but he was one compared with the awkward, leaning Tower of Pisa ”cornstalk,” who carried the jack-knife as ”the homeliest man in the section.” Lincoln was doubly the _plainest_ speaker there and thereabouts.
”Mr. Smoot,” began the clerk, ”I am disappointed in you, sir! I expected to see a scaly specimen of humanity!”
”Mr. Lincoln, I am sorely disappointed in you, in whom I expected to see a _good-looking_ man!”
After this jocular exchange of greeting, the joke cemented friends.h.i.+p between them. The proof of the friends.h.i.+p is in the usefulness of it.
Lincoln turned to this acquaintance in his dilemma.
This future President may have divined the saying of the similarly martyred McKinley--about ”the cheap clothes making a cheap man.”
He summed up his situation:
”I must certainly have decent clothes to go there among the celebrities.”
No doubt, the State capital had other fas.h.i.+ons than those prevailing at Sangamon town, where even the shopkeeper's present attire, in which he had solicited suffrages, was scoffed at as below the mark. It was composed of ”flax and tow-linen pantaloons (one Ellis, storekeeper, describes from eye-witnessing), I thought, about five inches too short in the legs, exposing blue-yarn socks (the original of the Farmers'
_Sox_ of our mailorder magazines); no vest or coat; and but one suspender. He wore a calico s.h.i.+rt, as he had in the Black Hawk War; coa.r.s.e brogans, tan color.”