Honest Abe is courtroom star in Dan Abrams' entertaining history, 'Lincoln's Last

Abraham Lincoln’s legend was formed well before he became America’s 16th president in 1860. Popularly known to his Illinois friends, neighbors and colleagues as “Honest Abe,” he was admired as much for his rough-hewn, self-educated, rail-splitting youth as for his mature identity as one of the leading lawyers in the state capital of Springfield.

There he took on civil and criminal cases, along with minor legal transactions, and polished the oratorical skills that would vault him to the White House, after arguing against slavery in his fabled debates with Stephen Douglas.

The historic outlines are all too familiar, but now ABC News chief legal affairs anchor Dan Abrams and author David Fisher deliver the pre-presidential Abe from hazy myth with Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency (Hanover Square Press, 320 pp., ★★★ out of four).

This detailed account of the 1859 murder trial that captivated Springfield is an atmospheric work, its accuracy buttressed by the shorthand trial transcript produced by Robert R. Hitt, one of the nation’s best (and first) stenographers. As Lincoln’s preferred “steno man,” Hitt observed the lawyer’s tall, folksy charisma in all its ragged glory, from his dusty black shoes to the silk top hat in which Lincoln carried his case notes.

Through Hitt’s eyes — and with more than a few deductive leaps, such as Abrams’ and Fisher’s description of how a solitary Lincoln stared out the window of his cluttered law office — the book captures Lincoln’s manner convincingly enough.

We can sense his careful, self-possessed attention to detail, his warm, direct gaze and his way of addressing a jury as a group of equals, disarming them with homespun anecdote, then playing on their emotions with Shakespearean rhetorical flights.

As for the murder case itself, it’s a sad, small-town affair, involving two young men from local families who scuffled briefly in a Springfield drugstore. Claiming self-defense, “Peachy” Quinn Harrison slashed Greek Crafton with a knife when Crafton and his buddies grabbed Harrison with intent to “stomp his face” over vague insults to the Crafton clan.

Mortally wounded in the abdomen, Crafton lingered for three days before dying, but not before allegedly forgiving Peachy in a deathbed admission.

Unfortunately, steno man Hitt didn’t make a practice of copying the attorneys’ closing arguments, so we’re left with a spotty record of Lincoln’s eloquence for the defense, as in this paraphrase: “What happened was a tragedy, and to find Quinn Harrison guilty of anything other than being young and impetuous and scared would do nothing but further the tragedy. (Lincoln’s) words poured out of him without even a slight pause, and sounded to Hitt almost musical in their rhythm.”

While this was indeed Lincoln’s last trial before the 1860 election that would spark the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s a stretch to claim that it “propelled” Lincoln to the presidency.

The case had no bearing on the dominant issue of slavery, and was more of a trauma for Springfield than a national distraction. At most, it cemented Lincoln’s image as a courtroom star — and Abrams and Fisher have made the most of their material, polishing a musty transcript into an entertaining slice of life.

WPXI