Lincoln Part 9

II

Running a household required money, and Lincoln set about earning it with greater energy than he had ever before demonstrated. A few years later, in notes he prepared for a lecture on the legal profession, he began, "The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man, of every calling, is diligence." He was speaking from experience. He worked incessantly, handling virtually every kind of business that could come before a prairie lawyer.

In the early months of his partnership with Stephen T. Logan, he spent much of his time in appearances before the United States District Court under the Bankruptcy Act, which went into effect on February 1, 1842. Designed to allow businessmen to escape some of the losses brought about by the unrelenting depression, the act permitted federal judges to declare pet.i.tioners bankrupt if their debts were greater than their a.s.sets. Of the 1,742 applicants in Illinois, nearly all employed lawyers. Before the law was repealed in 1843, Logan & Lincoln handled 77 of these cases-a number exceeded by only three other firms in the entire state. In most of these cases, which generally were uncontested, they earned fees of $10.

Though bankruptcy cases provided a welcome source of income during the first year of Lincoln's marriage, most of his earnings came from office work, like drafting wills and pet.i.tions, from petty suits before the justices of the peace or county commissioners, and especially from actions before the Sangamon County Circuit Court. On a single day at fall term of that court in November 1842, for instance, Logan & Lincoln had seventeen cases. They represented Thomas W. Sparks in his suit against Henry and Thomas Bird, who, he claimed, unlawfully withheld the possession of 106 acres of land; they appeared in behalf of John R. Herndon, administrator of the estate of John Wilson, who complained that one Seth Cutter failed to pay $220 for goods he had purchased; they obtained a divorce for John Jackson from his wife, Maria; and so on and on.

Business was so good that the partners could afford to leave their crowded quarters on North Fifth Street and move to the premier business location in Springfield, the newly constructed Tinsley Building, on the southwest corner of Sixth and Adams streets. The post office occupied the ground floor, and the United States District Court, before which both Logan and Lincoln frequently appeared, was on the second floor. Their office was just above it, in a front room overlooking both the state capitol and the county courthouse.

Billy Herndon, who was studying law with Logan and Lincoln, described how Lincoln dealt with a prospective client. He would listen to the man's story "well-patiently, occasionally now and then breaking in as the story progressed by asking a question: the man would answer it, and then he would proceed and end his story." After the man had finished, Lincoln would often say: "I am not exactly satisfied about some point-Come into the office in an hour or so, and I will give you my opinion-a positive one." When the client returned, Lincoln might say, "You are in the right," and they would proceed to draw up the papers leading to a suit. But he might also tell the client: "You are in the wrong of the case and I would advise you to compromise,... do not bring a suit on the facts of your case, because you are in the wrong."

Lincoln learned much from Logan, unquestionably the leading figure in the Sangamon County bar. Nine years older than Lincoln, Logan had made a name for himself as commonwealth's attorney in his native Kentucky before moving to Illinois, where his merits were so promptly recognized that he was elected circuit court judge. In that position he had certified Lincoln's enrollment in the Sangamon County bar in 1837. Unhappy over the meager compensation given judges, he resigned and returned to private practice with Edward D. Baker, a spellbinding orator who could mesmerize juries. Logan's sharp a.n.a.lytical mind and his knowledge of legal precedents and technicalities made him a formidable opponent in the courtroom. But his harsh, cracked voice kept him from becoming an effective public speaker, and juries were often put off by his wizened figure and his wrinkled countenance, topped by a ma.s.s of frowzy hair.

It was to compensate for these deficiencies that, after the breakup of his partnership with Baker, Logan turned to Lincoln, thinking, as he said later, he would be "exceedingly useful to me in getting the good will of juries." Lincoln's years as a surveyor and his service in the state legislature had given him a wide range of acquaintances. It was hard to find anyone in Sangamon County who did not recognize his lanky figure, and his remarkable memory enabled him to identify by name, residence, and family connections nearly every person called to jury duty.

In the courtroom Lincoln maintained that personal connection, seeming to speak to each juror individually and in a conversational tone. He rarely used technical language, and he was a master of the homespun anecdote to ill.u.s.trate his point. In a McLean County case where a physician claimed that a man charged with murder was insane, evidencing that he frequently picked at his head, Lincoln, appearing for the state, skillfully deflated the doctor's testimony. "Now," he remarked, "I sometimes pick my head, and those joking fellows at Springfield tell me that there may be a living, moving cause for it, and that the trouble isn't at all on the inside. It's only a case for fine-tooth combs."

He knew the importance of an effective summing-up statement. In a lecture prepared for young lawyers he advised: "Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business, if he cannot make a speech." But he also knew that lawyers could not make "a more fatal error..., than relying too much on speech-making," instead of looking up precedents and logically examining the evidence. In his concluding remarks to a jury he usually spoke from a short but carefully prepared outline, and he avoided the flowery pastures of rhetoric into which he had strayed in his lyceum and temperance lectures. As he warned Herndon: "Billy, don't shoot too high-aim lower and the common people will understand you. They are the ones you want to reach."

To Logan's surprise, Lincoln proved to be much more than a courtroom litigator. Up to this point his knowledge of the law was, as Logan recalled, "very small," for he had largely imitated Stuart, who "never went much upon the law." But now he "began to pick up a considerable ambition in the law." Observing the care and precision with which his senior partner drafted his pleadings, Lincoln sought to make his own equally succinct and correct. On occasion, he would seek Logan's advice on technical points. Very early in the partnership, representing the plaintiff in a slander case, Lincoln drew up a declaration charging that the defendant had called his client "a d.a.m.ned rogue." Reviewing the doc.u.ment, Logan recognized that the words, though offensive, were not legally significant and inserted the necessary formula: "And the plaintiff... says that the Defendant thereby meant and intended to charge the plaintiff with the crime of Larceny and that he was so understood by those who heard him."

Mostly, though, Lincoln learned by reading. Logan's example taught him that there was more to the law than common sense and simple equity, and he began studying procedures and precedents. The partners had no considerable law library of their own, but after the Illinois Supreme Court moved into its quarters in the statehouse in 1841, attorneys had access to an excellent collection of legal reports and standard reference works.

Lincoln never did become a devoted reader of general texts or theoretical books on the law. Years later Herndon claimed that Lincoln "never thoroughly read any elementary law book. In fact... I never knew him to read through and through any law book of any kind." The charge was largely true. "I cannot read generally. I never read text books for I have no particular motive to drive and whip me to it," Lincoln explained. "I don't, and can't remember such reading." But Herndon's remark was really beside the point, for Lincoln spent night after night in the Supreme Court Library, searching out precedents that applied to the cases he was working on. This was work he enjoyed. "When I have a particular case in hand," he explained, "I... love to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind." Logan's final judgment on Lincoln's legal accomplishments was more perceptive than Herndon's: "I don't think he studied very much. I think he learned his law more in the study of cases.... He got to be a pretty good lawyer though his general knowledge of law was never very formidable. But he would study out his case and make about as much of it as anybody."

Lincoln's growing mastery of the law became evident in his increasingly frequent appearances before the Illinois Supreme Court. In his earliest ventures before the high court he based his case on the hairsplitting technicalities of which young lawyers are so often fond. In 1841, for instance, he represented a man named Amos Worthing, who had won a verdict in the Tazewell County Circuit Court, which his opponent, Jacob Maus, appealed. The law required Maus to post an appeal bond-a doc.u.ment guaranteeing that he would pay the costs of the appeal if he lost. The bond was supposed to be "under seal." In earlier days signatures on such legal doc.u.ments had been attested by the impression of a signet ring in sealing wax, but by the 1840s a signer merely made a vaguely circular scrawl, looking something like a child's drawing of a puffy cloud, under his name. Discovering that Maus's surety had carelessly failed to add such a scrawl below his signature, Lincoln asked the supreme court to dismiss the case. A majority of the judges agreed, to the dismay of Justice Sidney Breese, who dissented: "The rule ... seems to me to be dest.i.tute of any good reason on which to base it, and altogether too technical for this age."

In subsequent years Lincoln had many more cases before the Illinois Supreme Court, but, perhaps through Logan's influence, they less and less frequently depended on such technicalities. He came to feel very much at home in this court, where, as Herndon said, an attorney had "ample time to read the record and gather up the facts of the case-the issues and the law arising thereon." The court required attorneys to prepare "abstracts of the case ... stating the facts in a condensed form and the issues made thereby." The supreme court limited oral arguments and made its decisions largely on the basis of these written briefs, which were sometimes elaborate, with extensive citations of precedents. In preparing his presentations for the court, Lincoln took nothing for granted and frequently offered precedents that stretched back to the beginnings of English common law. When Herndon asked why he went to so much trouble, he responded: "I dare not trust this case on presumptions that this court knows all things. I argued the case on the presumption that the court did not know any thing." His care and thoroughness made him one of the most successful pract.i.tioners before the court, and by the time he left for Washington in 1861 he had appeared before the highest court in Illinois in at least three hundred cases.

III

In the fall of 1844, Logan and Lincoln decided to dissolve their highly successful partnership. The senior partner told Lincoln that he wanted to go into business with his son, David Logan, and Lincoln did not argue with his decision. Perhaps he was not satisfied to receive less than half the income from the partnership; perhaps he realized that his political aspirations must clash with those of Logan, since both wanted to go to Congress. But there were no hard words as the partners decided, as Logan said, to go their ways "amicably and in friendship." The severance was not an abrupt one. Logan and Lincoln continued to appear together in the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, and their professional notice ran in the Sangamo Journal until March 1845. They continued to join forces on important cases throughout the remaining years of Lincoln's practice.

Lincoln took a new partner. One fall morning in 1844 he came dashing up the stairs to the third floor of the Tinsley Building, where he found William H. Herndon busily studying. "Billy," he asked breathlessly, "do you want to enter into partnership with me in the law business?" Herndon managed to stammer, "Mr. Lincoln this is something unexpected by me-it is an undeserved honor; and yet I say I will gladly and thankfully accept the kind and generous offer." Sensing that the young man was fl.u.s.tered with grat.i.tude, Lincoln remarked easily, "Billy, I can trust you, if you can trust me," and the partnership came into being.

Many found the new partnership puzzling. Now an established, prominent lawyer, Lincoln could have had his pick of distinguished Illinois attorneys. Herndon heard that John Todd Stuart very much wanted to renew his a.s.sociation with Lincoln and was resentful when a beginner was chosen instead. Lincoln left no record of his reasons, but it is clear that he was tired of being a junior partner and wanted to head his own firm. He was already attracting all the business he could handle, so that he did not need a partner with a name to draw in clients. He thought Herndon had considerable promise as a lawyer. He had watched him read law for two or three years in the office of Logan & Lincoln and found him "a laborious, studious young man... far better informed on almost all subjects than I have been."

There were also political reasons behind his choice of Herndon. Lincoln aspired to go to Congress, but the Whig party in central Illinois was split into two distinct factions. In the past, leadership had come from the eminently respectable Stuarts and Edwardses, few in number but rich in family tradition, but the majority of the Whig voters were now "self made men-men who had power," scorned the older leadership, and wanted a hand in shaping party policy. Lincoln needed the support of both factions. Marriage to the elegant Mary Todd gave him a connection to the silk-stocking element of the party, but the "shrewd, wild boys about town" favored the enormously popular Edward D. Baker. Recognizing that Herndon was a leader of this populist element in the party, Lincoln chose him as partner in part to give a signal to the insurgent young Whigs that he had not deserted them.

More important than any of these calculations was an essential fact: Lincoln really liked Herndon. He respected Stuart and he admired Logan, but for neither of them did he have genuine affection. Toward Herndon, however, he had an almost paternal feeling, and Herndon, in turn, gave him absolute and unquestioning loyalty. During the long years of their partnership he always addressed Herndon, nine years his junior, as "Billy," while Herndon invariably called him "Mr. Lincoln."

There was much to like about this new partner. He bubbled over with ideas and enthusiasm. He longed to be part of the larger intellectual world, and, though he had been born in Kentucky, he wrote that he steadily "turned New Englandwards for my ideas-my sentiments-my education." He developed an unmanageable appet.i.te for books. A credulous law student believed that "in addition to all his professional reading, Mr. Herndon read every year more new books in history, pedagogy, medicine, theology, and general literature, than all the teachers, doctors, and ministers in Springfield put together." On his shelves were authors almost unknown in the Mississippi Valley-Kant, Renan, Fichte, Buckle, Froude. Perhaps he did not always understand what he read, but he learned enough to become a kind of frontier evangelist for transcendentalism, that Emersonian faith that the questioning heart could, without mediation of religion or authority, discern truth. He prided himself on his "mud instinct," his "dog sagacity," which enabled him to see "to the gizzard" of questions. What he saw encouraged him to believe in illimitable progress, and he greeted the unseen with a cheer: "The Struggles of this age and succeeding ages for G.o.d and man-Religion-Humanity and Liberty ... may they triumph and Conquer forever, is my ardent wish and most fervent soul-prayer."

He and Lincoln were in almost every way exact opposites. Lincoln was tall, slow-moving, and careless in dress; Herndon was short, quick, and something of a dandy, affecting patent-leather shoes and kid gloves. Lincoln was melancholy, his depressed moods interrupted by outbursts of antic humor; Herndon was always upbeat and optimistic, and he had no sense of humor at all. The senior partner disliked generalities, and his mind cautiously moved in logical progression from one fact to the next, while his junior leapt ahead, using intuition to arrive at his conclusions.

Once when Herndon urged his partner to talk faster and with more energy when addressing a jury, Lincoln replied by graphically ill.u.s.trating the difference between his mind and his partner's. "Give me your woman's little knife with its short twin blades, and give me that old jack knife lieing [sic] over there," he told Herndon. Then he opened the short blades of the small knife and said: "See here it opens quickly and at the point travels through but a small portion of s.p.a.ce-but see this long bladed jack knife: it opens slowly and its points travel through a greater distance of s.p.a.ce than your little knife: it moves slower than your little knife, but it can do more execution." "Just so with these long convolutions of my brain," Lincoln added; "they have to act slowly-pa.s.s as it were through a greater s.p.a.ce than shorter convolutions that snap off quickly I am compelled by nature to speak slowly. I commence way back like the boys do when they want to get a good start. My weight and speed get momentum to jump far."

The new partners occupied a room in the Tinsley Building, and Herndon took the lead in buying desks, a table, and some basic books, at a cost of $168.65, half of which was charged to his partner. It remained wretchedly bare. Gibson W. Harris, a student in the law office, described it: "The furniture, somewhat dilapidated, consisted of one small desk and a table, a sofa or lounge with a raised head at one end, and a half-dozen plain wooden chairs. The floor was never scrubbed.... Over the desk a few shelves had been enclosed; this was the office bookcase holding a set of Blackstone, Kent's Commentaries, Chitty's Pleadings, and a few other books."

At the outset it was not an equal partnership. Lincoln interviewed most of the clients, wrote the important legal papers, and pleaded the suits in court. Herndon, still the student and the learner, performed routine jobs; he answered inquiries as to Lincoln's whereabouts or "'toated books' and 'hunted up authorities'" for the senior partner's use. It was also his responsibility to manage the office, preserve the records, and keep the files straight. As Lincoln later told Henry C. Whitney, a fellow lawyer in Urbana, he supposed that Herndon "had system and would keep things in order."

His hope was misplaced, for Herndon was not an orderly person. It is doubtful, though, that anyone could have kept Lincoln's papers in order. The firm had no filing cabinets and no files. In one corner of the office was a bundle of papers with a note in Lincoln's handwriting: "When you can't find it anywhere else, look in this." Herndon sometimes took legal papers home, where they were lost. Lincoln frequently stuck doc.u.ments and correspondence in his stovepipe hat, which Herndon said was "his desk and his memorandum-book." As a result the partners were constantly looking for misplaced letters and doc.u.ments, and there were times when they had to confess frankly that papers sent them were "lost or destroyed and cannot be found after search among the papers of Lincoln & Herndon."

Lincon's name drew clients to the new firm, and soon the partners had as much business as they could well manage. They appeared in their first case in the Sangamon County Circuit Court in March 1845, and their first suit in neighboring Menard County was called in May of the same year. During the first twelve months of the partnership, the firm had fourteen cases in the circuit court at Springfield; the following year the partners handled more than twice as many. The Lincoln & Herndon fee book for 1847 listed over one hundred cases in which Lincoln partic.i.p.ated before he left in October to serve in Congress.

Like most other attorneys, Lincoln and Herndon took on whatever clients came their way. They defended persons charged with murder, burglary, a.s.sault, embezzlement, and almost every other kind of crime. Sometimes their clients were innocent and sometimes they were guilty, but the partners felt that all were ent.i.tled to be represented. Nor was Lincoln squeamish about the social implications of the cases that he argued. In 1841 he appeared before the Illinois Supreme Court in the case of Bailey v. Cromwell, which concerned the attempted sale of a young black woman, Nance, in Tazewell County. The court followed his reasoning in ruling: "the presumption of law was, in this State, that every person was free, without regard to color.... The sale of a free person is illegal." But six years later he appeared for Robert Matson, who was trying to recover his runaway slaves in Coles County. Matson had brought his Kentucky slaves across the Ohio River to work on his farm in southern Illinois. When the slaves ran away and, with the backing of local abolitionists, brought suit for their freedom, on the ground that the Northwest Ordinance forbade the introduction of slavery into the state of Illinois, Matson employed Lincoln, along with Usher F. Linder, to defend him. Characteristically Lincoln admitted his opponents' main argument, that the slaves were free if Matson had brought them to Illinois for permanent settlement, but he invoked the right of transit, which the courts had guaranteed to slaveholders who were taking their slaves temporarily into free territory. He placed great stress on Matson's public declaration, at the time he brought the slaves into Illinois, that he did not intend the slaves to remain permanently in Illinois and insisted that "no counter statement had ever been made publicly or privately by him." The circuit court ruled against Lincoln and his client, who, it was reported, left immediately for Kentucky without paying his attorneys' fees. Neither the Matson case nor the Cromwell case should be taken as an indication of Lincoln's views on slavery; his business was law, not morality.

The partners' fees remained small. An appearance before a justice of the peace cost $5, and the usual fee for representing a client in the circuit court ranged from $10 to $25. In a very few cases of special difficulty the firm charged $50, and on one occasion an appearance before the Illinois Supreme Court brought $100. Lincoln believed strongly in making explicit financial arrangements before entering into a case. "The matter of fees," he noted in his projected lecture to young lawyers, "is important far beyond the mere question of bread and b.u.t.ter involved." Occasionally he took on a case for a contingency fee. If the client was willing to risk the cost, he promised in one letter, "I will do my best for the 'biggest kind of a fee'... if we succeed, and nothing if we fail." But for the most part he worked for fixed and agreed-upon fees, and he advised young lawyers not to take more than a small retainer in advance, lest they lose incentive and interest. He did not hesitate to dun a client: "I would like to have the little fee in the case, if convenient." He disliked suing for fees, but on at least six occasions he felt obliged to do so.

Despite differences in age and experience, the partners divided all income equally; Lincoln imitated the generosity that Stuart had shown him rather than the n.i.g.g.ardliness that Logan had practiced. After the first few months the partners kept no systematic accounts, simply dividing equally the fees they received. As Lincoln told Whitney: "Billy and I never had the scratch of a pen between us; we jest divide as we go along." But Herndon did keep a record of cases in which the fees due to the partners were not immediately collected, carefully marking them "Paid" as the money was received.

IV

No amount of industry or care could earn a lawyer a satisfactory income from practice in Sangamon County alone. Most Springfield attorneys who were not independently wealthy felt obliged to travel with the judge of the circuit court when he made, twice every year, his pilgrimage from one county seat to another in his district. The vast Eighth Circuit, which eventually encompa.s.sed 11,000 square miles, stretched across two-thirds of the width of the state and one-third of its length. Both Stuart and Logan regularly traveled at least part of the circuit; even Herndon, who disliked the migratory life and preferred to remain in Springfield, estimated that he was on the circuit about one-fourth of the time. Lincoln, who had only occasionally attended courts in neighboring counties during the first years of his practice, became one of the most regular riders of the circuit.

The judge and the more affluent lawyers traveled the circuit in buggies, but Lincoln in the early days rode his rather decrepit horse, "Old Tom," carrying a change of underclothing, any necessary legal papers, and perhaps a book or two in his capacious saddlebags. When he could afford it, he had a local blacksmith make him a nondescript buggy. The countryside through which the procession traveled was spa.r.s.ely inhabited, and they could go for miles without seeing another human. The caravan could usually travel only about four miles an hour, because the roads were atrocious. Most were little more than trails, and when the heavy black loam of the Illinois prairie began to thaw in the spring, it became fathomless mud, dangerous not merely to carriages but to horseback riders as well. Many streams had no bridges, and the judge often asked Lincoln, who had the longest legs of any member of the bar, to explore for a ford; if Lincoln could get over, the others would follow.

At night they stopped wherever they could find lodgings. Sometimes, Herndon remembered, they slept "with 20 men in the same room-some on old ropes-some on quilts-some on sheets-a straw or two under them." When they arose the next morning, a pitcher of cold water outside and a single towel served for their ablutions; those who got up late often found the towel too wet to use. After a breakfast of greasy food and what Leonard Swett, the Bloomington lawyer who regularly traveled the Eighth Circuit, called "pretty tough coffee-pretty mean," the caravan moved on toward the next county seat. Arriving on a Sat.u.r.day or a Sunday, the lawyers resorted to a favorite hotel or tavern near the courthouse, where, again, they slept two or three to a bed.

The next morning the lawyers would be approached by litigants, often with their local counsel, who were glad to have the help of more experienced attorneys from Springfield and Bloomington-the two largest towns on the circuit. Business had to be transacted speedily-declarations and traverses drafted, pet.i.tions written, lists of witnesses drawn up-so that the judge could hear cases on Monday afternoon. There was little time to study cases closely, much less to look up precedents; lawyers on the circuit had to rely mostly on general knowledge and common sense.

Clients and local counsel eagerly sought Lincoln's services. On the circuit his reputation for integrity and fairness was even more important than in more technically difficult cases appealed to the state supreme court. In about a third of the cases in which Lincoln appeared on the circuit, he acted alone; in the others he worked with local counsel. He had few criminal cases and not many cases in chancery. Herndon enumerated the kinds of cases that formed the bulk of his circuit practice: "a.s.sault and battery-suits on notes-small disputes among neighbors-slander-warranties on horse trades-larceny of a small kind." Lincoln nearly always had as much business as he could readily handle, but it was never as great as that of the most prominent local attorneys.

After the court adjourned each day the lawyers had leisure to prepare new cases or they could explore the meager resources of the little towns they visited, all of which, except Springfield, Bloomington, and Pekin, had fewer than one thousand inhabitants. Mostly the attorneys had to amuse themselves, and, according to Herndon, they engaged in "fights-foot and horse races-knock down-wrestling-gambling etc." "Whiskey," he noted, "was abundant and freely used." After supper the judge and the lawyers might attend some local amus.e.m.e.nt, like a circus or a lecture, but if there was no other diversion they would sit before the fire and swap tall tales and anecdotes. When that happened, Lincoln, of course, was a center of attention, and, as Herndon remembered, "Judges-Jurors-Witnesses-Lawyers-merchants-etc etc have laughed at these jokes ... till every muscle-nerve and cell of the body in the morning was sore at the whooping and hurrahing exercise." By the end of the week the session was ended, and the judge and the attendant lawyers moved on to the next county seat.

It took at least ten weeks to complete the circuit-and then the whole process had to be repeated in the fall. Consequently Lincoln spent about three months of every year traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit-and he sometimes made additional trips on legal business to other counties that were not on this circuit. Many of the other attorneys returned to their homes over the weekends, but Lincoln generally remained with the court. In the early years of his marriage friends reported that he was "desperately homesick and turning his head frequently towards the south," and he usually broke the long fall term with a visit to Springfield. But it made no sense for him to keep rushing home; he was on the circuit to earn money, and the longer he stayed in the small county towns, the better acquainted he became with the local lawyers who could throw cases his way. His investment of time and energy paid off; he probably earned more than $150 a week, beyond expenses, while he was on the circuit.

Staying in these small towns also gave him a political advantage, and in his future political contests his strongest supporters were attorneys and clients he met on the circuit. He got to know thousands of central Illinois voters by name. In 1847, when J. H. Buckingham, a reporter for the Boston Courier, made a stage-coach trip through central Illinois with Lincoln, he found that he "knew, or appeared to know, every body we met, the name of the tenant of every farm-house, and the owner of every plat of ground." "Such a shaking of hands-such a how-d'ye-do-such a greeting of different kinds, as we saw, was never seen before," the newspaperman continued; "it seemed as if... he had a kind word, a smile and a bow for every body on the road, even to the horses, and the cattle, and the swine."