V. THE CHAMPION OF FREEDOM
For four or five years after his return from Congress, Lincoln
remained in Springfield, working industriously at his profession.
He was offered a law partnership in Chicago, but declined on the
ground that his health would not stand the confinement of a great
city. His business increased in volume and importance as the
months went by; and it was during this time that he engaged in
what is perhaps the most dramatic as well as the best known of
all his law cases--his defense of Jack Armstrong's son on a
charge of murder. A knot of young men had quarreled one night on
the outskirts of a camp-meeting, one was killed, and suspicion
pointed strongly toward young Armstrong as the murderer. Lincoln,
for old friendship's sake, offered to defend him--an offer most
gratefully accepted by his family. The principal witness swore
that he had seen young Armstrong strike the fatal blow--had seen
him distinctly by the light of a bright moon. Lincoln made him
repeat the statement until it seemed as if he were sealing the
death-warrant of the prisoner. Then Lincoln began his address to
the jury. He was not there as a hired attorney, he told them, but
because of friendship. He told of his old relations with Jack
Armstrong, of the kindness the prisoner's mother had shown him in
New Salem, how he had himself rocked the prisoner to sleep when
the latter was a little child.
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