"The jury retired, and the court adjourned for the day. Half an hour had not elapsed when a messenger announced that the jury had returned to their seats. All repaired immediately to the court-house, and while the prisoner was being brought from the jail, the court-room was filled to overflowing with citizens of the town. When the prisoner and his mother entered, silence reigned as completely as though the house were empty. The foreman of the jury, in answer to the usual inquiry from the court, delivered the verdict of 'Not guilty.'
"The widow dropped into the arms of her son, who lifted her up, and told her to look upon him as before, free and innocent. Then with the words, 'Where is Mr. Lincoln?' he rushed across the room, and grasped the hand of his deliverer, while his heart was too full for utterance. Lincoln turned his eyes toward the west, where the sun still lingered in view, and then, turning to the youth, said, 'It is not yet sundown, and you are free.' An eye-witness says: 'I confess that my cheeks were not wholly unwet by tears as I turned from the affecting scene. As I cast a glance behind, I saw Abraham Lincoln obeying the divine injunction, by comforting the widowed and the fatherless.'"
A story has been reported that the introduction of an almanac in the Armstrong trial was a piece of trickery on Lincoln's part; that an almanac of 1853 was used with all the figure 3's changed to 7's. This was not necessary, for the almanac of 1857 answered the purpose, and, besides, Mr. Lincoln was not a dishonest lawyer.
Others have claimed that no almanac was used at all in the trial. George Cary Eggleston, a noted author, is reported as putting a discount on it, and intimates that the story arose from an incident connected with a trial in the early 'fifties at Vevay, Indiana, witnessed by himself and his brother Edward, the author of the "Hoosier Schoolmaster," and other popular novels. He says his brother, in writing the novel, entitled "The Graysons," exercised the novelist's privilege, and attributed this clever trick to Abraham Lincoln in the days of his obscurity.
Part First of Honorable J. H. Barrett's "Life of Lincoln" was prepared for the press in June, 1860, just after Mr. Lincoln's nomination for the presidency, and only two years after the Armstrong trial, and there the trial is mentioned in full, with the almanac incident. How does the George Cary Eggleston account jibe with these facts? His brother Edward simply stated an historical fact in attributing the almanac incident to Lincoln, and it was not the exercise of a novelist's fancy.