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177 
States. In Congress he at first opposed, then supported the 
tariff laws, and New England sold her ships and went to 
manufacturing. He supported the Compromise of 1850. He 
ought to have been appointed to the Supreme Court. That 
would have been an appropriate way for him to round out 
his career, and he was the one man in the United States who 
was the appropriate successor to John Marshall, but a democ- 
racy has yet to learn how to choose its greatest men for 
positions of leadership. 
Lincoln (1809-1865). 103 Abraham Lincoln is universally 
ranked as one of our few greatest orators, statesmen, and 
presidents. He is also entitled to be ranked among our great- 
est lawyers. This, not so much for the big cases in which he 
appeared, altho he appeared in some big cases, or for the 
extent of his practice, altho he had an extensive practice 
(since neither gave him a national reputation), as for the 
uniqueness of his legal career, and for his legal and constitu- 
tional arguments in his debates with Douglas, his Cooper 
Union speech, and his inaugural addresses. The uniqueness 
of his legal career appears first in his preparation of him- 
self for the practice of the law by self-instruction in both 
general education and legal education, an example which 
has been an inspiration for all poor but ambitious young men 
since his time ; second, in the moral and intellectual standards 
which he maintained in the conduct of cases, which have had 
no small influence in raising the moral and intellectual stand- 
ards of the entire legal profession in the United States; and, 
third, in his demonstration that the principles of Christianity 
have more relation to the administration of justice and the 
other problems of organized social life than they do to the 
complicated statements of Christian doctrine which char- 
acterize the articles of belief and confessions of faith of the 
churches. He was born in Kentucky; lived in young man- 
hood in southern Indiana and for the rest of his life in central 
Illinois except when in Washington; was storekeeper, post- 
master, deputy surveyor, captain in the Black Hawk War, 
member of the Illinois legislature, congressman, leading- 
practitioner in Illinois, and sixteenth president of the United 
States; and was the author of the Gettysburg Address, the 
Emancipation Proclamation, and other orations and immortal 
103 23 Green Bag 325 ; 50 Am. L. Rev. 781 ; Nicolai and Hay’s Life of Lincoln, etc. 
12—36004 
