Lincoln’s Eloquent Legalese on CD-ROM

Call it The Best of Lincoln, Volume I.

Before he became president, Abraham Lincoln was a prolific lawyer who rode from town to town representing clients, writing briefs and occasionally filling in for a judge.

The hundreds of legal documents he produced, some scrawled in quill or pencil, will soon be available on CD-ROM in a 20-disk box set for the introductory price of $2,000.

That price may make the set too costly for all but serious scholars, but a pared-down, one-disk set is being considered that could give people a glimpse into the mind that would one day create the Gettysburg Address.

“A careful reading of his great public pronouncements indicates that he developed his arguments over slavery, secession and other constitutional issues in a very methodical, lawyerly way,” said Cullom Davis, director of the Lincoln Legal Papers research project.

“They reveal a lawyer’s mind operating,” Davis said.

About 250,000 pages of documents from 6,000 cases have been collected, ranging from mundane court dockets to briefs Lincoln wrote himself. Papers were found in courthouses all over the state and the Illinois Supreme Court.

The project was begun in 1985 to fully and accurately document the quarter of a century that Lincoln practiced law in Illinois. While many Lincoln cases were known at the time, some were only recently discovered.

The Lincoln Legal Papers research project plans to publish the Complete Documentary Edition in CD-ROM early next year.

Martha Benner, assistant director of the project and editor of the CD-ROM edition, said what was most surprising was the sheer volume of Lincoln’s work.

In Sangamon County, where Lincoln lived, researchers knew of about 1,625 Lincoln cases when the project began. That number eventually doubled during a page-by-page examination of courthouse records, she said.

“He was able to write a complicated argument in one draft only,” Davis said. “What it shows is he had a terrific command of syntax that served him well not only as a lawyer, but as a public speaker and a writer.”