Lincoln and Herndon: The Law Office on the Square

On the third floor of the Tinsley Block, a plain brick building on the corner of Sixth and Adams, Abraham Lincoln kept his law office from eighteen forty-three until about eighteen fifty-two. The partnership with William Herndon began in eighteen forty-four. Lincoln was thirty-five and already well-known in Springfield.

Herndon was twenty-six, a former store clerk who had read law and recently passed the bar. By Lincoln's own account he chose Herndon for qualities that were harder to quantify than legal skill: loyalty, honesty, and an appetite for hard work. Lincoln once said Herndon was 'my man always above all other men.'

The office was deliberately plain. Two worn chairs, a desk, a bookcase, a battered sofa. Law books stacked wherever they fit.

Lincoln had the habit of tucking important papers inside his tall hat for safekeeping, a practice that drove Herndon to distraction. When Lincoln returned from the circuit he would set the hat on a table, remove his papers one by one, and distribute them across the room. Herndon handled the research and kept the library organized.

Lincoln handled the courtroom, practicing before the Illinois Supreme Court across the street at the old State Capitol. Between them they covered a territory of more than a dozen county courthouses, riding out in all seasons through the flat central Illinois landscape. They never formally dissolved the partnership.

When Lincoln left for Washington in February eighteen sixty-one he told Herndon to leave the shingle hanging. 'Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm,' Lincoln said. 'If I live, I'm coming back some time and then we'll go right on practicing law as if nothing had happened.'

Herndon spent the rest of his life writing Lincoln's biography.