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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April — June 2007 Number 82
Long-Time Staffer Susan Krause Retires
After seventeen years
of service to the
Lincoln Legal Papers and
the Papers of Abraham
Lincoln, Susan Krause
retired from the project in
May. She began working
for the Lincoln Legal
Papers in the summer of
1990 as a volunteer, while
she was a graduate student
in public history at Sangamon State University (now
the University of Illinois at Springfield). That fall,
she held an internship with the project, which
resulted in the completion of her Master’s project
about two Lincoln cases involving county courthouse
relocations.
After finishing her Master’s degree, she came
to work full time with the project in the spring of
1991, when the search for Lincoln cases was
underway in county courthouses across the state.
Krause conducted research in numerous counties,
including Tazewell, Cass, Mason, Menard, and
Macoupin counties. It was in Macoupin County
where she found the longest known Lincoln
document, a forty-three page answer in the case of
Clark and Morrison v. Page et al.
Krause’s service to the project included the
accessioning of hundreds of Lincoln legal cases,
participation in the development of The Law Practice
of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary
Edition (2000), and authorship of eight chapters for
the four-volume book edition, The Papers of
Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases
(forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press).
She was also the author of three donor premium
booklets: From Log Cabins to Temples of Justice:
Courthouses in Lincoln’s Illinois (2000), Judging
Lincoln: The Bench in Lincoln’s Illinois (2002), and
Now They Belong to the Ages: Abraham Lincoln and
His Contemporaries in Oak Ridge Cemetery (2005).
During the past two years, she has been
engaged with the rest of the staff in extensive travel
to repositories across the United States in the project’s
efforts to digitize Lincoln documents for Series II
and Series III of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. She
recently completed an extensive five-week trip to
more than three dozen repositories and collections
in the Southwest. Krause has been a devoted member
of the staff and an esteemed colleague. She served as
a mentor to half a dozen graduate assistants and a
documentary editing fellow and offered her wisdom
and humor to everyone with whom she worked.
The project will miss her work ethic,
productivity, and top-quality efforts as a member of
this staff. Her colleagues will miss her grace,
intelligence, and uncanny ability to cut to the chase
with a few words or a humorous retort. We all regret
her departure, but we wish her all the best in her
retirement.
Susan Krause with researcher John Lupton (standing to
her right), Macon County Circuit Clerk Paul Hogan (to
her left), and researcher Mike Duncan in 1991.