Obscure Lincoln law filings destroy ‘hick’ myth : Researchers combing courthouses in Illinois find 70,000 of his papers. They reveal a fine legal mind.

Rooting through brittle records squirreled away in hidden corners of rural Illinois courthouses, historical scholars have been painstakingly unearthing a treasure trove of law filings by Abraham Lincoln--documents that demolish the myth that Lincoln was a backwoods lawyer with only a rudimentary practice.

Researchers with the Lincoln Legal Papers Project have found more than 70,000 documents dating from Lincoln’s 24-year legal career, including 140 briefs and legal writings penned in the future President’s distinctive cramped handwriting.

The discoveries made over the last five years range from one-sentence entries in court dockets to a 43-page reply to a legal complaint scribbled on blue parchment, the longest preserved artifact written by Lincoln. In the last month alone, according to Lincoln Project assistant director Martha Benner, staff sleuths found 15 Lincoln papers in a courthouse in Woodford and another 20 in Champaign.

“What we’ve found has reshaped our portrait of Lincoln as a lawyer,” said Cullum Davis, director of the state-funded project. “The common perception was that he was a country lawyer who spun stories to juries and only took cases he believed in. What we’ve found is that he was an accomplished attorney who probably had the biggest appellate practice in the state at that time.”

Lincoln’s mastery of the law, honed in an exhaustive practice that took him to more than 71 Illinois counties, may ultimately help historians better understand how he shepherded the United States through its bloody Civil War years.

“The predominant image of Lincoln running a seat-of-his-pants presidency could well be revised if it becomes clear his law career showed him to be a shrewd and effective analyzer of situations,” said Douglas Wilson, a Knox College professor of English who has studied Lincoln’s early years. “His success with a hostile Congress and a Cabinet full of prima donnas may be less astonishing in light of what he accomplished at the bar.”

Those accomplishments are unfolding in thousands of routine files retrieved from musty attics, sealed vaults and forgotten file cabinets in courthouses throughout the state. With permission from court clerks, project researchers have spent tedious months humidifying and flattening rolled sheaths of documents, then poring over them in search of Lincoln’s familiar scrawl.

Many long-sought Lincoln papers are gone forever, having been purloined years ago by treasure hunters. In other cases, researchers have found Lincoln-penned papers completely intact except for razored slits where his signature had been removed.

Lincoln artifacts are the most prized by collectors of presidential memorabilia. Last summer, a letter written by Thomas Jefferson sold at auction for $200,000; in contrast, two one-page Lincoln letters sold for $1.1 million and $1.3 million.

“You could get dizzy trying to imagine how much that 43-page legal answer would sell for,” said Susan Krause, one of the Lincoln Project’s 12 researchers.

It was Krause who found the 43-page Lincoln treasure two years ago in Carlinville, the county seat of Macoupin County, half an hour northeast of St. Louis. Armed with a list of 20 old cases, she was digging through file cabinets filled with papers when she noticed a roll of stiff blue paper. Eyeing the scrawl jotted down with an old steel-nib pen, she immediately recognized Lincoln’s hand.

“I was afraid I’d tear it, it was so old,” she said. In the end, her elation was tempered with disappointment. The signature had been clipped out.

Many Lincoln documents have been left untouched, said project editor Bill Beard, because Lincoln wrote the entries himself but signed them with another lawyer’s name. Lincoln often did favors for other lawyers and, benefiting from the informal nature of the justice system at the time, sometimes sat as a judge to spell a friend, 8th Judicial Circuit Judge David Davis.

“When we realize that Lincoln had no secretary, no law clerk and he was writing all this down by hand, you realize how incredibly prolific he was,” said David Herbert Donald, a Harvard University historian who is completing a biography of Lincoln and recently perused the project’s discoveries. “This was no hick lawyer.”

Although the Lincoln Project is still culling documents, its researchers now have a tentative schedule for publishing its results in book form. At least five volumes are expected, the first to appear in 1996.

“We consider this the last uncharted phase of Lincoln’s life,” Beard said. “It’s not something you can just rush into print.”