Extra Credit Questions

[Eva Elisabeth]

A brilliant gues and explanation, Anita and Roger, but this is not either what Abraham Lincoln's words referred to.

The bar exam requirements reminds me of Gustav Koerner's assessment...

[Gustav Koerner was a refugee from Germany. He had met Mary Todd when he was a student at Transylvania University in Lexington - he had already earned a doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. He moved to Illinois, became the law partner of James Shields, and then a Supreme Court Justice in Illinois before whom Abraham Lincoln practiced in the 1840s.]

I quote Koerner's thoughts in context from M. Burlingame's Vol.I:

"1836, Lincoln took some of the necessary formal steps to become a lawyer. In March, he obtained a certificate of good moral character from Stephen T. Logan, and six months later he received his license from the Illinois Supreme Court. After another six months, a clerk of that court officially enrolled him as a lawyer.[lxix] No record survives of the required examination that Lincoln took, but it probably resembled the one administered to John Dean Caton by Justice Samuel D. Lockwood of the Illinois Supreme Court. (According to his family tradition, Lockwood examined Lincoln by taking him out for a walk and questioning him as they strolled along.)[lxx]
The judge asked Caton what books he had read and how long and with whom he had studied. Then he 'inquired of the different forms of action, and the objects of each, some questions about criminal law, and the law of the administration of estates, and especially of the provisions of our statutes on these subjects.' The exam lasted no more than half an hour, after which Lockwood told Caton that 'he would give me a license, although I had much to learn to make me a good lawyer, and said I had better adopt some other pursuit, unless I was determined to work hard, to read much and to think strongly of what I did read; that good strong thinking was as indispensable to success in the profession as industrious reading; but that both were absolutely important to enable a man to attain eminence as a lawyer, or even respectability.' [lxxi] Gustave Koerner remembered undergoing a similarly casual examination, after which he and another candidate for the bar treated their examiners to a round of brandy toddies. Koerner found this quite a contrast to the bar exam he had taken in his native Germany, where leading jurists grilled him for four hours in Latin. [lxxii]"

Sources:
[lxix] Statement by J. McCan Davis, clerk of the Illinois supreme court, Springfield, 15 March 1909, Joseph B. Oakleaf Papers, Indiana University.
[lxx] Mary King Porter to Bernard J. Cigrand, Washington, D.C., n.d., quoted in an article by Cigrand, Chicago Daily News, 12 February 1916, clipping in William E. Barton’s scrapbooks, University of Chicago, “Abraham Lincoln,” vol. 1.
[lxxi] John Dean Caton, Early Bench and Bar of Illinois (Chicago: Chicago Legal News, 1893), 170-71.
[lxxii] Thomas J. McCormack, ed., Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1809-1896 (2 vols.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1909), 1:373-76.

Back to the trivia - hint #1: Abraham Lincoln's words referred to something later than his admission to the bar.