Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln to James W. Grimes, [after 14] August 18571
Springfield, Ills. Aug: 1857.2His Excellency,James W. GrimesDear Sir
Yours of the 14^th is received; and I am much obliged for the legal information you give–3

You can scarcely be more anxious than I, that the next election in Iowa shall result in favor of the Republicans–4 I lost nearly all the working part of last year, giving my time to the canvass; and I am altogether too poor to lose two years together–5 I am engaged in a suit in the U. S. Court at Chicago, in which the Rock-Island Bridge Co. is a party. The trial is to commence the 8^th of September, and probably will last two or three weeks–6 During the trial it is not improbable that all hands may come over and take a look at the Bridge, & if it were possible to make it hit right, I could then speak at Davenport–7 My courts go right on without cessation till late in November–8 Write me again, pointing out the most striking points of difference between your old, and new constitutions; and also whether Democratic and Republican party lines were drawn in the adoption of it; & which were for, and which against it–

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If by possibility I could get over amongst you, it might be of some advantage to know these things in advance–9
Yours very trulyA. Lincoln–

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[ docketing ]
A Lincol[n?]
Aug.[August] 185710

1Abraham Lincoln wrote and signed this letter.

2Lincoln omitted the day of composition of this letter. Roy P. Basler, editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, assigned this letter a date of circa August 17, 1857. Basler may have calculated this date based on Lincoln’s dating this letter in August, and the approximate travel time of James W. Grimes’s letter of the 14th, which Lincoln mentions below as having received and which was presumably sent from Grimes’s home in Iowa. Lincoln fails to mention what month Grimes’s letter of the 14th was composed, but it seems likely to have been written in August, as Lincoln is apparently here writing after the August 3, 1857 referendum vote on the 1857 Iowa state constitution. As it is unknown when Lincoln received Grimes’s letter, the only certainty is that this letter was composed by Lincoln some time after Grimes wrote his letter on 14 August.
Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:413-14; William Salter, The Life of James W. Grimes, Governor of Iowa, 1854-1858; A Senator of the United States, 1859-1869 (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 94.

3Grimes’s letter of August 14, 1857, to which this is a response, has not been located.

4On August 3, 1857, the voters of Iowa had voted to approve a new state constitution which reduced the term of the governor from four years to two and added the position of lieutenant governor. The first election to be held under the new constitution was scheduled for October 13, 1857. Grimes was the current Republican governor of Iowa, having run for the office in 1854 as a member of the Whig Party, then joining the newly-organized Republican Party during his term. As governor, the new constitution had been one of his priorities, and he was influential in its drafting. In the October 1857 election Iowans ultimately elected Republicans Ralph P. Lowe as governor and Oran Faville as the state’s first lieutenant governor, and returned a Republican majority to the Iowa General Assembly. Grimes was credited with turning Iowa firmly Republican.
Grimes outlined his anxieties before the election in a circular letter dated September 3, 1857. He argued that a Democratic victory at the polls would be a blow to the causes of free soil and free labor, and would ensure that Kansas was admitted as a slave state. Grimes was also concerned by the declaration of Iowa Democrats that they intended to amend the new constitution to prohibit African Americans from being able to testify in court. The new constitution was also written with an eye to expanding and strengthening banking in Iowa, and Grimes posited that the election of anti-bank Democrats to the governorship and to a majority of seats in the Iowa General Assembly would prevent any such expansion from being enacted. He further pointed out that party control of the Iowa General Assembly was important as that body would soon chose Iowa’s next U.S. Senator. Grimes himself ultimately won Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat in 1858.
Joseph Frazier Wall, “Grimes, James Wilson,” American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9:617-19; Michael J. Dubin, United States Gubernatorial Elections, 1776-1860: The Official Results by State and County, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 65-67; History of Mitchell and Worth Counties, Iowa (Springfield, IL: Union, 1884), 233; Quasqueton Guardian (IA), 27 August 1857, 2:1; The Daily Gate City (Keokuk, IA), 2 November 1857, 2:1; William Salter, The Life of James W. Grimes, Governor of Iowa, 1854-1858; A Senator of the United States, 1859-1869, 94-102; Iowa Const. of 1846, art. V, § 1-2; Iowa Const. of 1857, art. IV, § 1-2.

5During the 1856 election campaign, Lincoln gave over fifty speeches from July of 1856 onwards across Illinois in support of Republican presidential candidate John C. Fremont and to rally the disparate elements of the emerging Republican Party. See the 1856 Federal Election.
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:425-33.

6Lincoln is referring to the case of Hurd et al. v. Rock Island Bridge Co., the so-called Effie Afton case. In April 1856 the Rock Island Bridge Company completed construction of a railroad bridge across the Mississippi River connecting Rock Island, Illinois, with Davenport, Iowa. On May 6, 1856 the steamboat Effie Afton struck the bridge and was destroyed along with its cargo. The owners of the steamboat sued the Rock Island Bridge Co. in October 1856 in an action of trespass on the case for damages to recover the value of their lost property. John M. Douglass, Norman B. Judd, and Joseph Knox were retained as defense attorneys, and Lincoln was added as an additional attorney in July 1857. The trial commenced in U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago on September 8, 1857 and ran until September 24. The plaintiffs argued that the bridge was a hazard since the piers were not parallel to the current of the river. Lincoln and the defense countered that fewer than one percent of boats that traveled under the bridge had accidents and that operator error was to blame. The trial resulted in a hung jury on September 24, 1857, and while the plaintiffs later attempted unsuccessfully to retain Stephen A. Douglas to pursue the matter further, no evidence has been located that the court heard the case again.
Hurd et al. v. Rock Island Bridge Co., Martha L. Benner and Cullom Davis et al., eds., The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition, 2d edition (Springfield: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 2009), http://www.lawpracticeofabrahamlincoln.org/Details.aspx?case=137684; Daniel W. Stowell et al., eds., The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 3:308-83; The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, September 1857, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarMonth&year=1857&month=9.

7Lincoln reportedly traveled with a group of attorneys and engineers from Chicago to Rock Island via special railroad car on September 1, 1857 prior to the commencement of the trial to inspect the bridge and speak with witnesses, although the reliability of the evidence for this trip has been debated. No evidence has been found that Lincoln spoke in Davenport, Iowa in September 1857.
Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 2:414; Daniel W. Stowell et al., eds., The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases, 3:325-27; Brian McGinty, Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America (Liveright: New York, 2015), 104-5, 224-25; The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, September 1857, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarMonth&year=1857&month=9.

8Following the conclusion of Hurd et al. v. Rock Island Bridge Co. in late September 1857, Lincoln had cases in the circuit courts of Woodford County, DeWitt County, Champaign County, Vermilion County, and Cass County in October and November.
The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, September 1857, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarMonth&year=1857&month=9; October 1857, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarMonth&year=1857&month=10; November 1857, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarMonth&year=1857&month=11.

9No response to this letter has been located.
The constitutional convention that drafted the Iowa state constitution of 1857 met in Iowa City in February and March of that year and was composed of twenty-one Republicans and fifteen Democrats. In addition to the changes to state offices described above, the new constitution included provisions for an elected judiciary. The previous Iowa constitution of 1846 had prohibited the creation of any corporations with the power to circulate money or with banking privileges; the new constitution of 1857 included provisions to allow for the creation and regulation of corporations with banking powers. The delegates to the constitutional convention also debated the civil rights of African Americans in Iowa, and the August 3, 1857 referendum in which Iowans voted whether to accept the new constitution also included a question on whether the word “white” should be struck from the constitution clause on suffrage. The constitution was approved by a vote of 40,311 to 38,681, but only 8,207 votes were cast in favor of enshrining suffrage without reference to race, so the constitution as enacted in 1857 restricted voting to white citizens.

Contemporary newspapers were split over the extent to which the adoption of the 1857 Iowa constitution followed party lines. In the reporting of election results newspapers pointed out examples of counties where Republican candidates lost, but the constitution claimed a majority of votes. The editors of the Davenport Daily Gazette, however, indignantly claimed the adoption of the constitution as a Republican victory, arguing that Republican newspaper editors across the state had campaigned vigorously in support of it.
Iowa Const. of 1846, art. VI, § 3; IX, § 1; Iowa Const. of 1857, art. V, § 3; art. VIII, § 5-10; Benjamin F. Shambaugh, ed., Proceedings of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Constitution of Iowa (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1907), 166, 174-99, 362-403; Daniel W. Stowell et al., eds., The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases, 3:326; William Salter, The Life of James W. Grimes, Governor of Iowa, 1854-1858; A Senator of the United States, 1859-1869, 94; Muscatine Weekly Journal (IA), 22 August 1857, 2:5; Davenport Daily Gazette (IA), 24 August 1857, 2:1-2.

10An unknown person wrote this docketing.