Out of all this came a deepening of his power to reach and impress men through words.  The tournament of the story-tellers was a lawyers’ tournament.  The central figure was reading, studying, thinking, as never in his life before.  Though his fables remained as broad as ever, the merely boisterous character ceased to predominate.  The ethical bent of his mind came to the surface.  His friends were agreed that what they remembered chiefly of his stories was not the broad part of them, but the moral that was in them.(9) And they had no squeamishness as critics of the art of fable-making.

His ethical sense of things, his companionableness, the utterly non-censorious cast of his mind, his power to evolve yarns into parables—­all these made him irresistible with a jury.  It was a saying of his:  “If I can divest this case of technicalities and swing it to the jury, I’ll win it."(10)

But there was not a trace in him of that unscrupulousness usually attributed to the “jury lawyer.”  Few things show more plainly the central unmovableness of his character than his immunity to the lures of jury speaking.  To use his power over an audience for his own enjoyment, for an interested purpose, for any purpose except to afford pleasure, or to see justice done, was for him constitutionally impossible.  Such a performance was beyond the reach of his will.  In a way, his nature, mysterious as it was, was also the last word for simplicity, a terrible simplicity.  The exercise of his singular powers was irrevocably conditioned on his own faith in the moral justification of what he was doing.  He had no patience with any conception of the lawyer’s function that did not make him the devoted instrument of justice.  For the law as a game, for legal strategy, he felt contempt.  Never under any conditions would he attempt to get for a client more than he was convinced the client in justice ought to have.  The first step in securing his services was always to persuade him that one’s cause was just He sometimes threw up a case in open court because the course of it had revealed deception on the part of the client.  At times he expressed his disdain of the law’s mere commercialism in a stinging irony.

“In a closely contested civil suit,” writes his associate, Ward Hill Lamon, “Lincoln proved an account for his client, who was, though he did not know it at the time, a very slippery fellow.  The opposing attorney then proved a receipt clearly covering the entire cause of action.  By the time he was through Lincoln was missing.  The court sent for him to the hotel.  ‘Tell the Judge,’ said he, ’that I can’t come; my hands are dirty and I came over to clean them.’"(11)

“Discourage litigation,” he wrote.  “Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can.  Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser, in fees, expenses, and waste of time.  As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a Superior Opportunity of being a good man.  There will still be business enough."(12)