fectiveness in handling a case before a jury.

Though he was called homely, there was a commanding dignity about his
presence; his appearance inspired confidence; and when in the heat and
passion of forensic effort, his features lighted up with a strange and
compelling beauty and attractiveness. He was never petty, never quibbled
and never tried to gain an unfair advantage or even use an unworthy
means of attaining a worthy end. Consequently courts and juries believed
what he said. He was a poor lawyer when on the wrong side of the case,
and would not take a bad case if he knew it. Upon one occasion, when, in
the very midst of a trial, he discovered that his client had acted
fraudulently, he left the courtroom and when the judge sent for him, he
sent word back that he "had gone to wash his hands." He had too much
human sympathy to be the most effective prosecutor unless there was a
clear case of Justice on his side; and he was too sympathetic to make
money--for his charges were so small that Herndon and the other lawyers
and even the judge expostulated with him. Though his name appears in the
Illinois Reports in one hundred and seventy-three cases,--a record
giving him first rank among the lawyers of the state, his income was
probably not much over two or three thousand a year. And he was engaged
in some of the most important cases in the state, such as Illinois
Central Railroad Company v. The County of McLean, in which he was
retained by the railroad and successfully prevented the taxation of land
ceded to the railroad by the State,--and then had to sue to recover his
modest fee of five thousand, which was the largest he ever received. In
the McCormick reaper patent litigation he was engaged with Edwin M.
Stanton, who treated him with discourtesy in the Federal Court at
Cincinnati, called him "that giraffe," and prevented him from delivering
the argument which he had so carefully and solicitously prepared. Such
an experience was, of course, very painful to his sensitive nature, and
it shows how great he was that he could forgive the injury entirely as
he did later when he appointed Stanton as his Secretary of War, despite
the protest of friends who recalled it all to him.

In one of his most notable murder cases he defended William or "Duff"
Armstrong, the son of his old friend, Jack Armstrong. It was a
desperate case for William and for his mother Hannah, who had also been
a warm friend to Lincoln when he was young. T