Lincoln’s Last Trial

When I was about eleven, I fell in love with the story of Abraham Lincoln. We lived only a block from the town’s library. I checked out everything I could find on the 16th President of the United States. At the time, I desperately needed an honorable male role model in my life. My father didn’t fill the bill. I read everything I could find on Lincoln more than once. My excitement at the publication of this new book, Lincoln’s Last Trial, by Dan Abrams and David Fisher, is based on personal history.

Lincoln’s struggle with depression helped me understand my mother’s history of despondency.

Lincoln’s Last Trial is a Murder Mystery

Lincoln one of my favorite characters to read about. But I also love a good mystery. Add to that, the political implications of the trial and you have a realistic setting amid the political controversies today to create a perfect story.

Lincoln was considered one of the best lawyer in Illinois at the time.

Can you even imagine any lawyer today who would take on a controversial defendant in a murder trial if they were running for President?

Discovery

They found the transcript of the trial in the basement of a house in Fresno, California in 1989. It was in a shoe box wrapped in a yellow ribbon. This is the only known copy to exist to this day. Who was the man who kept this historical evidence protected for so many years? The trial took place in 1859, so this is something a father entrusted to his son generation after generation. One mystery built on another!

The Accused Holds the Evidence

The man who saved it was the great-grandson of the actual defendant in the trial.

Can you even imagine? It wasn’t found in the National Archives or the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. No, they found this classic piece of American history in possession of the great-grandson of a man accused of murder back in 1859.

Background on writing Lincoln’s Last Trial

The only known transcript of any trial Lincoln ever argued was in an old box held together with a yellow bow in the man’s garage.

Stenography was a new tool first used in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln realized how important records were to the field of law. He refused to begin the discussion until the transcriber arrived.

The Andrew Luck Book Club interviewed Dan Abrams. That interview provided these and more incredible insights into the production of the book, Lincoln’s Last Trial. Go here to listen to the entire interview.

Abrams shared an amusing side-story to the book: Someone complained that the authors took far too many liberties in writing the story.

Abrams admits that he recreated some private conversations and things the men were thinking at the time. He also states that everything about Lincoln at the time and the city of Springfield are entirely accurate.

The complainer talked about the fact that Lincoln supposedly purchased a bed bug remedy during the trial. Abrams laughingly explains that there are websites that accurately recorded things Lincoln did and the exact days they happened in history. He used that information to determine what Lincoln did during the days of the trial. Lincoln did purchase a bed bug remedy. (Even Presidents aren’t exempt from the everyday irritants we all experience.)

Lincoln’s Last Trial Overview

At the end of the summer of 1859, twenty-two-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in more than three thousand cases—including more than twenty-five murder trials—during his two-decades-long career, was hired to defend him. The trial was to be his last great case as a lawyer.

What should have been a local case took on momentous importance. Lincoln’s debates with Senator Stephen Douglas the previous fall had gained him a national following, transforming the little-known, self-taught lawyer into a respected politician. He was being urged to make a dark-horse run for the presidency in 1860.

Taking this case involved significant risk. His reputation was untarnished, but should he lose this trial, should Harrison be convicted of murder, the spotlight now focused so brightly on him might be dimmed. He had won his most recent murder trial with a daring and dramatic maneuver that had become a local legend. But another had ended with his client dangling from the end of a rope.

Challenges for Lincoln

The case posed extreme personal challenges for Lincoln. The murder victim had trained for the law in his office. Lincoln had been his friend and his mentor.

His accused killer, the young man Lincoln would defend, was the son of a close friend and loyal supporter.

To win this trial, he would have to form an unholy allegiance with a longtime enemy, a revivalist preacher he had twice run against for political office—and who had bitterly slandered Lincoln as an “infidel…too lacking in faith” to be elected.

Lincoln’s Last Trial captures the presidential hopeful’s dramatic courtroom confrontations in vivid detail as he fights for his client—but also for his blossoming political future. It is a moment in history that shines a light on our legal system, as in this case, Lincoln fought a legal battle that remains incredibly relevant today.

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