As a jury lawyer, also, his arts were those of the successful trial lawyer of the period. So far as the author has been able to find, there was no unworthy chapter in all this long history. The story, for instance, that in the trial of Armstrong Lincoln used an almanac of another year and won his case by fraud, has, as the author is convinced, no foundation whatever in fact. On the contrary, Lincoln was at a serious disadvantage in any case in whose justice he did not fully believe.
But there came a time when Lincoln was more than a shrewd and honest politician; more than a successful jury lawyer. In the brief autobiographical sketch which he prepared for Mr. Fell, he speaks of his work at the end of his term in Congress, and says:
"In 1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress. Was not a candidate for re-election. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before. Always a Whig in politics, and generally on the Whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses, I was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since is pretty well known."
He expanded this brief statement somewhat in the sketch which he furnished a little later to Scripps as a basis of his campaign biography:
"Upon his return from Congress, he went to the practice of the law with greater earnestness than ever before.... In 1854 his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him as he had never been before."
The full effect of this unprecedented arousing was manifest in his speech at Springfield on June 16, 1858, the "House-Divided-Against-Itself" speech.
Lincoln himself is our authority for the statement that the moral aspects of the slavery issue called him back into politics and roused him as he never before had been aroused. Politically, at least, Abraham Lincoln had been born again. Nor had it been a period of spiritual inaction or retrogression, as we have seen and shall see yet further.
In addition to all this he had known the discipline of sorrow, and had had occasion to test religion on the practical side of its availability for comfort in time of bereavement. He had now been chosen to a position of responsibility such as no man in all the history of his nation had ever been called upon to occupy.