On the day before Lincoln left Springfield on his way to assume the presidency of a nation on the brink of civil war, he walked for the last time down the stairs from his office, paused on the boardwalk, and looked up at the battered shingle that advertised his law firm: LINCOLN & HERNDON. “Let it hang there undisturbed,” he said to his partner, William L. Herndon. “Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln and Herndon. If I live I’m coming back sometime, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing ever happened.”
This touching anecdote, retailed by Shelby Foote in his monumental history of the Civil War, has all the truth and simplicity of a time before we were overwhelmed by lagoons of laws, rafts of regulations, and the unremitting attentions of lawyers who make a comfortable living from monitoring the ethical behavior of those who go into public service. As a result, what used to be regarded as a praiseworthy contribution to one’s country has increasingly become a burden to be avoided.
Assets and tax returns, board memberships and anything bad those corporations did, activities at college and school, not excluding pro bono work, articles and books, friends, associates, and enemies, marital history and any stumbles on that path, including divorce records, employees, and whether all taxes and withholdings have been paid, intelligence records of phone calls made—in short, every detail of the public servants’ lives is pawed over with all the diligence of burglars ransacking a house.
Everyone gets into the game: political opponents, enemies, rivals, those whose interests might be affected by their activities, and above all the media, in whose heads the fame of the heroes of Watergate dances like sugar-plum fairies.
And what would they have made of Lincoln? The man whose education “did not amount to one year,” and who had not set foot inside a college until he gained his law license; who had, in those innocent days, shared a bed with Joshua Speed for some time; whose own relative, Dennis Hanks, said that, whatever Lincoln’s familiarity with the Bible, he didn’t think he believed it; whose political career in Washington amounted to one term in the House of Representatives; who may or may not have split the rail prominently displayed by Hanks in his eulogy of “the rail-splitter” (Lincoln modestly declined to lay claim to that particular rail, but affirmed that “he had mauled many and many better ones since he had grown to manhood”), but who had certainly represented some of the most important railroad and banking interests in Illinois.
What would they have thought of a president-elect who, according to his partner Herndon, read nothing thoroughly? Whose partner subscribed to the view that “His reading was more desultory and less profound than that of any man of his own time, or if not, indeed, of any time”?
Even more ominous, what would the critics have made of his seeming obliviousness to the conflict of interest involved in the continuance of Lincoln and Herndon? Would domestic interests seek to ingratiate themselves with the president-elect by making their way up that wooden staircase, into that medium-sized room, “at the rear end of a dark hall on the second floor” with its “two unwashed windows” looking out at the litter in the yard below? Was Lincoln simply unaware of the economic interests involved in the Civil War that seemed to be imminent? Could there be any interests as important in a war as railroads and banks?
But here was Lincoln not merely refusing to divest himself of his interest in Lincoln and Herndon, but urging its continuance, urging Herndon even to emphasize to clients that the president, if he lived, would return to the firm “as if nothing ever happened”?
It is enough to leave any conscientious ethics lawyer shaking in his socks. It is not an example even to mention to cabinet appointees scrabbling desperately through decades of business records and tax returns, or to senators palpitating pleasurably at the prospect of delaying still further the formation of a cabinet to govern the country. It should simply be expunged from the historical record.
John Chettle is a Washington lawyer who has contributed to the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the National Interest, and other newspapers and magazines.
