Lincoln Legal Briefs

              A Quarterly Newsletter of The Lincoln Legal Papers
A Documentary History of the Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, 1836-1861
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January — March 2006 Number 77
Unknown Cache of Lincoln Legal Documents Emerges
Within a month after publication in 2000 of The
Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete
Documentary Edition on three DVD-ROMs, the
project found a new Lincoln legal document. Over
the past six years, private collectors or auction houses
have frequently alerted the project to documents in
their possession. Since publication, we have added
more than two hundred new legal documents. Staff
members have accessioned these documents and will
add the data and images to a second
edition of Lincoln’s legal papers.
In February of this year, Heritage
Auction Galleries sold a portion of the
Henry E. Luhrs Collection. The auction
house, based in Dallas, Texas, was kind
enough to provide the project with high-resolution
.tiff images of all of the
documents. The collection contained
many documents and artifacts, including
seventy-seven legal documents relating
to cases that Abraham Lincoln and his
partners handled. Luhrs was a collector
of manuscripts in the mid-twentieth
century. He helped to organize the Shippensburg
Public Library in Pennsylvania, the Lincoln
Fellowship of Pennsylvania, and the Shippensburg
Historical Society. He particularly enjoyed collecting
Lincolniana because of his fascination with the
sixteenth president. Luhrs probably purchased most
of his Lincoln legal documents in the 1940s and
1950s. He died in 1962.
Of the seventy-seven legal documents,
thirteen had already been published in The Law
Practice of Abraham Lincoln. Fifty-three of the
documents were new documents that belonged with
cases the project had already identified. Most
importantly, eleven documents related to new cases.
Five new cases came from the circuit court in
Tazewell County, two in Edgar County, two in
Champaign County, and two in Sangamon County.
In one of the new Champaign County cases,
Joseph T. Everett sued Albert Evans in an action of
trespass quare clausum fregit, which is an action to
recover damages against a person who unlawfully
entered another person’s land. The reason for and
outcome of this case is still unknown pending a return
to Urbana to find the additional case documentation,
such as entries in the court record. In the plea
presented above and written and signed by Lincoln,
Lincoln pleaded not guilty for his client. What is
unusual is that someone, perhaps Lincoln, scratched
out Lincoln’s name.
After its ten-year search for Lincoln legal
documents across the country, the Lincoln Legal
Papers never claimed to have found everything.
Documents still remain unknown to us in attics, safe-deposit
boxes, frames on walls, and other places. We
especially appreciate the efforts of collectors, dealers,
and auction houses, particularly Heritage Galleries,
to notify us when they find a new Lincoln legal
document.
Image courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries.