Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America

by Brian McGinty

  Early on, it was clear that newspapers friendly to the steamboat interests had begun a print campaign against the Rock Island Bridge. The St. Louis press, of course, was opposed to the structure because it imperiled the economic interests of their city (two thirds of the produce once carried to St. Louis from eastern Iowa by steamboats was already being shipped to Chicago by rail).42 But other journals (chiefly pro-Democratic papers) in other cities soon joined the chorus. After the Chicago Board of Trade met with the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, the St. Louis Missouri Republican (despite its name, a pro-Democratic newspaper) published a long editorial on the bridge question. The Republican claimed that it had “no objection to a bridge across the river at the point in question,” provided the bridge was built so as to “occasion no detriment to any other interest.” It claimed that the Rock Island site presented “superior advantages for the erection of requisite towers for a suspension bridge” and asserted that, if such a bridge was built high enough above the river, “there would be no conflict” between the railroad and the river interests. The Republican denied reports circulating in Chicago that St. Louis interests were financing Jacob Hurd’s suit against the Railroad Bridge Company, but it left no doubt that those interests sympathized with the suit. “Beyond a doubt, the Effie Afton should be paid for by the railroad company,” the Republican said. “We have no reason to apprehend that the courts will not decide that it shall be paid for. As little do we doubt that they will command the removal of the Rock Island bridge as a nuisance.”43

  The Illinois State Register, the pro-Democratic newspaper in Springfield, reported in March that the Rock Island Bridge was “very seriously obstructing the navigation of the river, and by every principle of law and equity should be made to pay for all damage done in consequence of the obstructions.” The Rock Island Argus (despite its proximity to the new railroad bridge still firmly supportive of the steamboats) printed several stories about boats and rafts that had had trouble passing under the bridge. Some had merely been delayed, the Argus said, while others had scraped up against the long pier. Apparently none had suffered damage comparable to that of the Effie Afton.44 The Galena Courier reported in April that almost every steamboat on the upper Mississippi was displaying in its grand saloon the map that Josiah Bissell had drawn showing the long pier of the Rock Island Bridge smack in the center of the main channel of the river. It was a warning of the peril that faced all who contemplated passing that spot, and a not so subtle reminder to the traveling public of the solidarity of the steamboat interests in opposing it. The Courier reported that millions of dollars of losses were being caused by the bridge every year, and it assured its readers that “the thing” would be “condemned as a nuisance, and ordered to be taken down.”45

  The St. Louis Chamber’s denials that it had anything to do with Jacob Hurd’s suit against the Railroad Bridge suffered a setback when the St. Louis Democrat reported on a meeting held in the Merchants’ Exchange on April 16. A committee that the chamber had appointed “to have the Rock Island bridge removed” reported that $16,000 would be needed to prosecute the lawsuit and that assurances had been received from Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Memphis, and cities and towns along the Upper Mississippi that the sum “would be very easily made up.” A resolution was adopted instructing the committee to bring an additional suit in the U.S. District Court in Illinois against the Bridge Company and, if necessary, to take an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The committee was further authorized “to do all things which in their opinion may be necessary, legally, to effect the object contemplated by this chamber.”46

  On June 17, the Argus published a long editorial under the heading of “Railroads vs. Navigation,” boldly asserting that “the whole country is rife with alarm concerning the gigantic monopoly of the railroad interest.” The western rivers generated an annual commerce worth some $400,000,000, the Argus said, which, combined with the commerce of the Great Lakes amounted to a grand total of $700,000,000. But “the iron rail” was seeking to divert it all “into new and unnatural channels” by obstructing the rivers with “bridges at every objectionable point.” “Shall the river interest then longer submit to be taxed for the maintenance of this towering nuisance?” the Argus asked. “To pay tribute to this overshadowing monopoly? To be stricken down upon the door steps of its own dwelling? To lower its flag to this insolent stranger, and to humiliate itself to this usurper of its inalienable and constitutional rights? No! is the deep, strong, indignant response, which comes up from the ten thousand craft, which, crippled and insulted, swarm from end to end and from side to side of the great basin of the Mississippi.”47

  The Argus’s questions were excited and clearly exaggerated. But they were proof, if any was needed, that the Rock Island Bridge had inflamed passions, that the trial that was soon to determine its fate would be a bitter one, and that the decision it rendered would be consequential.

  SEVEN

  Preparing the Ground

  While the steamboat interests in St. Louis were marshaling their forces against the bridge, the bridge owners were preparing their defense. From the start, their lead attorney was Norman B. Judd of Chicago. Judd was the logical man to resist the Effie Afton suit, for he had been one of the incorporators of the Railroad Bridge Company in 1853 and was now its secretary; he had been a director of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad Company at least since 1854; and he had led the successful defense of the bridge against the efforts of Jefferson Davis, Thomas Hoyne, and Caleb Cushing to persuade Judge McLean to order it torn down in 1855.1 A short, stout man, with a full beard and a rosy complexion topped by a thin layer of silky hair, Judd had come to Chicago in 1836 from his native New York and quickly launched himself on a busy political and legal career. He drafted Chicago’s first city charter in 1837 and served as its first city attorney in 1838. He was the attorney for Cook County in 1839 and a city alderman in 1842. From 1844 on, he was a member of the Illinois State Senate.2 Because he was a Democrat, Judd had little political contact with Lincoln before 1856, though the men did legal business with each other as early as the 1840s.3

  Judd was joined on the defense team by Joseph Knox of Rock Island. Born in Massachusetts in 1805, Knox had come to Rock Island in 1837 and built a reputation as a skillful lawyer and civic leader. He had been one of the principal speakers at the ceremonies celebrating the laying of the cornerstone for the bridge on September 1, 1854, and he had been part of Judd’s defense of the bridge against Davis, Cushing, and Hoyne in 1855.4

  Lincoln did not join the defense team until more than a year after the Effie Afton’s collision and more than six months after Hurd and his partners began their lawsuit. During that time, scores of witnesses had been interviewed and more than a thousand pages of written depositions had been taken.5 Lincoln was in Chicago in early July 1857 for the July term of the U.S. Circuit Court, and on Tuesday, July 7, he was asked to become a part of the bridge’s defense team, presumably by Norman Judd. By his own statement, Judd had the chief burden of preparing the case for trial and thus was in a good position to know when he needed help.6

  Years later, it was claimed that Judd asked Lincoln to join the bridge defense team because Joseph Knox had told him that it would take “a strong, popular man to handle the case.” Judd is supposed to have told Knox and Henry Farnam, while they were enjoying after-dinner cigars in Chicago’s Tremont House hotel, that “there is only one man in this country who can take this case and win it, and that is Abraham Lincoln.” “And who is Abraham Lincoln?” Farnam asked. “A young lawyer from Sangamon County,” replied Judd, “one of the best men to state a case forcibly and convincingly that I ever heard, and his personality will appeal to any judge or jury hereabouts. I heard him first at the waterways convention here in Chicago back in 1847, when we were after President Polk’s scalp for vetoing as unconstitutional the bill which Congress had passed for the improvement of rivers and the construction of harbors in our Lake Michigan.” Farnam is then supposed to have said, “Let
’s get him up here tomorrow and discuss the matter.”7

  Aside from the undeniable facts that Judd knew Lincoln and admired his courtroom ability, and that they had both participated in the Chicago waterways convention of 1847, there is little reason to believe there was any such conversation between Judd, Knox, and Farnam. The first account of the conversation did not see print until the 1920s, when it was published without any attribution.8 Further, details of the alleged conversation raise tantalizing questions as to the reliability of the story. Why would Judd describe Lincoln as “a young lawyer” when Lincoln was actually six years older than Judd? (Lincoln was then forty-eight and Judd forty-two.) And why would Henry Farnam in 1857 have asked Judd who Abraham Lincoln was? Lincoln had served in Congress from Illinois from 1847 to 1849; he had come within a whisker of being elected U.S. senator from Illinois in 1855; he had handled an important and high-profile tax case for the Illinois Central Railroad between 1853 and 1856; and he had received 110 votes for the vice presidential nomination of the Republican Party in Philadelphia in 1856. When Judd tapped him to join the bridge defense team, Lincoln had a reputation that extended beyond Illinois. (When the pro-steamboat Rock Island Argus first told its readers that Lincoln had joined the defense team for the bridge, it described him as “Hon. A. Lincoln—This distinguished lawyer.”)9 And Judd certainly did not believe that Lincoln was indispensable to victory in the upcoming trial, for he himself was a skillful courtroom advocate and had every intention of exercising principal control over the case, as the trial itself would soon demonstrate. Judd was no doubt glad to have Lincoln join him and Knox, but as part of a team, not as the “only man in this country who can take this case and win it.”

  More important, perhaps, in Judd’s decision to ask Lincoln to join him in the Effie Afton trial was the personal trust the two men had already established between them. That trust is evidenced by a transaction they entered into on the eve of the trial. Around the middle of August, Lincoln received his large fee of $4,800 for representing the Illinois Central in the McLean County tax case.10 After giving Billy Herndon his half, Lincoln combined the remaining $2,400 with another $100 and lent $2,500 to Judd. Judd wanted to invest in land in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he believed the projected transcontinental railroad (long talked about but not yet approved) would begin its history-making route to the Pacific Coast. He needed cash to invest. Lincoln had no interest in speculative schemes, but he did like to lend money out on interest. On or about September 1, 1857, he lent Judd $2,500 in return for a promissory note bearing interest of 10 percent per annum, principal and interest all payable September 1, 1859.11 Of course, the loan had no direct relationship to the Effie Afton trial, though it did indicate that the two men were not strangers, either personally or financially.

  The trial of Hurd et al. v. The Railroad Bridge Company was to be held in the Chicago courtroom of the U.S. Circuit Court. Both of Chicago’s federal courts (circuit and district) met in 1857 in a large, three-story frame structure that stood at the southeast corner of Lake and Clark Streets and bore the curious name of the Saloon Building. Built in 1836, it had served a variety of official and unofficial functions in its twenty-plus years of civic life. In January 1837, it was the site of a meeting called to plan preliminary action for procuring a Chicago city charter. In 1839, it was the building in which Stephen Douglas made his first speech in Chicago; in the same year, it was the site of a debate between Douglas and Lincoln’s first law partner, John Todd Stuart, when they campaigned against each other for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.12 It also served for several years as the first Chicago city hall and, for much of that time, housed the U.S. Post Office. John Wentworth, a prominent lawyer, newspaper editor, and politician who served both as a congressman and as a two-term mayor of Chicago, said that when the Saloon Building was first opened it “was the largest and most beautiful hall this side of Buffalo.”13 Judging from pictures, it is hard to imagine why Wentworth considered the Saloon Building so beautiful. Yes, it was large, it was tall, it had a certain symmetry, and it occupied a prominent site in Chicago, but in later years neighboring buildings towered over it, and its wooden walls and floors fell into a very unattractive disrepair. That it was regarded in the late 1830s as an ornament to Chicago may tell us something about the great distance (cultural as well as geographic) that separated the frontier city at the edge of Lake Michigan from the older and more cultivated cities east of the Appalachians.

  In 1857, the ground floor of the Saloon Building was occupied by stores and the second floor by offices, while the spacious third floor was home to the courts.14 The courtroom itself was about forty feet square, with a high ceiling. Half the space was set aside for the judges, clerks, and attorneys; the other half was occupied by long benches for the accommodation of the public. A large stove stood near the door.15 The author of a history of Chicago published a half century after the Saloon Building was opened admitted that the building’s name “would, to the casual reader, appear to connect it with a house of no very good repute,” but he insisted that “such an impression would be erroneous. The word ‘saloon’ as applied to this edifice had a very different meaning from what it now has. Its use was synonymous with the French salon, which means literally a grand and spacious hall.”16

  When Lincoln was in Chicago, he customarily stayed at the Tremont House, an imposing, five-story hostelry that stood just a block east of the Saloon Building and provided convenient access to the courts for lawyers who were doing business there.

  Lincoln’s first appearance in the case of Hurd et al. v. The Railroad Bridge Company was made in the Saloon Building on July 9. It was the beginning of the U.S. Circuit Court’s July term, and District Judge Thomas Drummond and Circuit Judge John McLean were both on the bench (federal statutes then permitted the district and circuit judges to preside alone or together in circuit court cases). When the case was called up for trial, Lincoln requested that the judges continue it until the following term, set to begin in December. He read an affidavit signed by Judd asserting that the defendants were not then prepared to go to trial and that the suit was “one of vast importance, involving in the particular case, between $150,000 and $200,000.” Beyond that, the parties had treated the case in their preparations “very much with reference to the future maintenance of the bridge . . . over and across the Mississippi at Rock Island.” Judd had devoted almost the whole of his time from the previous March to the preparation of the defense. He and his co-attorneys had received about 1,100 pages of depositions, and nearly 600 of those had not been opened before the first day of the current term.17 Judd had not had sufficient time or opportunity to examine and digest “this mass of testimony” and could not do so without the “aid of assistant counsel.” The testimony of several witnesses who were not then ready to appear was necessary to the trial. Lincoln then read another affidavit, this signed by himself, in which he said that he had been engaged as an attorney in the case only two days earlier. Since that time, he, Judd, and another Chicago-based attorney named John M. Douglass had devoted most of their time to “the examination of said case.” As it then stood, the case was not ready for trial.18

  Hezekiah Wead then argued against the requested continuance. His side was ready to proceed, he said, and had been since the previous December. It was important to try the case now, for water in the river was low and many of the river men who would be called as witnesses could then come to court. During the rest of the year (except in the winter when the rivers were blocked by ice) they were too busy on the rivers to take time away from their work. Wead understood that the defendants did not want Judge Drummond to preside over the trial; they were “anxious,” he said, to try the case before Judge McLean. Wead denied that anything was involved in the case but whether his clients were entitled to damages for the loss of their boat and its cargo. Judd’s assertion that the case was also about “the future maintenance of the bridge” was “doubtless a very honest opinion,” but Wead did not share it. �
��It has never entered into my mind,” he said, that the suit was to “determine the existence of that bridge. I repeat, we have nothing to do with that.”19

  Lincoln then made an argument for continuance. “This case for the size of it is not a very old one,” he said. “It is very rare that a case of the consequence of this is tried in a year from the time it is brought.” He denied that his side wanted the case to be tried before Judge McLean and not Judge Drummond. “I am quite willing to try the case before Judge Drummond or before Judge Drummond and Judge McLean, as before either or both.” (The law then permitted the judges themselves to determine which of them would preside, alone or together.)20 Wead’s contention that river men could not conveniently come to trial at another time of the year did not ring quite true with Lincoln. “I would suggest,” he said, “while it is in my mind, that October is really less of a navigable month than July—that in all probability there is more steamboat navigation now than in October. I should at least think so from the little recollection I have on this subject, since I was on a flat boat many years ago. I should think that as a rule the rivers are lower in October than in July and will probably be lower in the coming October than in this coming month. This, however, I say I don’t know much about.”21