State Bar of Wisconsin

Molders and Shapers of Wisconsin Law:
Chief Justices Edward G. Ryan and Luther S. Dixon

To what extent is the law shaped by impersonal institutions and social forces, and to what extent by the personalities and beliefs of great lawyers and judges?

by Joseph A. Ranney

Two of Wisconsin's early chief justices, Edward G. Ryan and Luther S. Dixon, are widely considered to have been among the great American state judges of the 19th century. A close examination of their lives suggests that although the social and economic forces prevalent in Wisconsin and throughout the United States between 1840 and 1880 shaped the issues that the law was called upon to meet in Wisconsin, the way in which the law met those issues was shaped to an unusual degree by the personal force and intellect of these two men.

The Shield: Luther S. Dixon

Luther S. Dixon, 1825-1891, was born in Milton, Vt., and was educated in local academies near his home. Later he read law with Luke Poland, one of Vermont's preeminent lawyers and politicians of the early 19th century. Dixon was admitted to the bar in 1850. Concluding that his chances of advancement were better on the western frontier than in his native state, he moved to Wisconsin in 1851 and settled at Portage.¹

Dixon was a genial, convivial man who had a gift for making friends easily. He was elected Columbia County district attorney twice in the mid-1850s, and in 1858 he was appointed judge of the central Wisconsin circuit which included Columbia County. When Chief Justice Edward Whiton died suddenly in 1859, Gov. Alexander Randall appointed the 34-year-old Dixon to take his place. Dixon's selection surprised many because he was not well known outside his home area.² However, Dixon did not remain obscure for long.

Dixon and the Booth controversy. From 1854 to 1861 Wisconsin politics was dominated by the question of whether Wisconsin had to defer to the federal government's efforts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 within the state. The Act, which was a part of the Compromise of 1850, established commissioners within the states to return to their owners slaves who had fled north. The Act was reviled throughout the North.³

In March 1854 a mob led by Sherman Booth of Milwaukee forcibly freed Joshua Glover, a fugitive slave who had been jailed by federal authorities in Racine. The authorities then arrested Booth under the Fugitive Slave Act and held him for trial before Wisconsin's lone federal judge, Andrew G. Miller. Booth applied to the Wisconsin Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus. The court freed Booth and declared the Act unconstitutional. It also held that because the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution did not explicitly authorize the federal government to provide an enforcement mechanism, the Fugitive Slave Act violated Wisconsin's state sovereignty.⁴ The Booth decision created a stir throughout the United States. Although it was widely criticized, over the next few years support of the court's decision became a prerequisite for political success in Wisconsin.⁵

A few days before Dixon joined the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney, reversed the Booth decision.⁶ The Wisconsin Legislature promptly passed a resolution denying that the high court had the power to review state court decisions, and stating darkly "that a positive defiance ... is the right remedy."⁷ Shortly after that, the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to receive and file the high court's decision. One Wisconsin justice, Byron Paine, recused himself because he had been Booth's lawyer. The other justice, Orsamus Cole, voted not to receive the decision. Although the decision would not be received no matter how Dixon voted, Dixon voted to file the decision.⁸

Dixon's vote required a high degree of courage. Politically, he had nothing to gain and much to lose by voting the way he did; furthermore, he personally agreed with his colleagues that the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional. However, he felt obligated to warn Wisconsin states rights advocates that their desire to strike a blow at slavery did not justify striking a blow at the ideal of rule of law. He eloquently demonstrated the central flaw of the states rights position:

"[The states rights position] would place it in the power of any one state, beyond all peaceful remedy, to arrest the execution of the laws of the entire Union, and to break down and destroy at pleasure every barrier created and right given by the Constitution.... [Even] if it be granted that both Congress and the Supreme Court have improperly discharged the high trusts reposed in them by the American people, it has no tendency to prove or disprove the existence of this power."⁹

Dixon's opinion created a sensation. When he came up for election in 1860, the Republican Party, then dominated by the states rights faction, ran a candidate against him. Many Wisconsin voters were willing to put the state on record as opposed to the Fugitive Slave Act if the only price they had to pay was to defy local federal authorities, but they were not willing to go one step further and provoke a direct confrontation with Washington. Moderate Republicans defended Dixon and praised him for his courage, and the Democrats quietly supported him. In April 1860 Dixon was reelected by the razor-thin margin of 395 votes out of the more than 116,000 cast.¹⁰

Dixon's Booth opinion generally is regarded as his single most important contribution to Wisconsin jurisprudence.¹¹ Support for the states rights doctrine slowly receded in Wisconsin with the coming of the Civil War, but the doctrine continued to appear before the Wisconsin Supreme Court in one form or another throughout the 1860s and 1870s. Dixon consistently opposed Justice Paine's efforts to preserve the doctrine in Wisconsin case law. In Moseley v. Chamberlain, Justices Paine and Cole held, over Dixon's dissent, that federal laws providing for removal of state cases to federal court were unconstitutional.¹² In Knorr v. Home Ins. Co. of New York the issue was raised again. This time Dixon's position prevailed over Paine's dissent, as Cole reluctantly concluded that the Civil War had dramatically increased the federal government's power over the states, that the U.S. Supreme Court had given its sanction to that growth of power, and that opposing the federal removal laws "would be of no earthly advantage, that I can see, to any person or any principle."¹³

Dixon and the farm mortgage movement. Railroad law occupied much of Dixon's and the court's attention in the 1860s and 1870s. The first railroads in Wisconsin obtained much of their financing by persuading investors, mainly farmers hoping for better transport for their products, to buy railroad stock with promissory notes secured by mortgages on their lands. The railroads sold many of the notes and mortgages to Eastern financiers. After Wisconsin's railroads collapsed in the depression of 1857, the financiers tried to foreclose against the farm debtors.¹⁴

As the foreclosure threat grew, a powerful network of farm mortgage leagues formed throughout Wisconsin. During the late 1850s and early 1860s, the leagues induced the Legislature to pass a series of laws helping the farm debtors. Many of these laws, however, were struck down by the court. One law, passed in 1858, allowed farmers to assert fraud as a defense to liability on their notes both against the railroads and against third-party purchasers.¹⁵ In Cornell v. Hichens Dixon held that the law impaired creditors' rights in violation of the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution and struck it down.¹⁶ In 1861 the Legislature enacted procedural delays to creditors' claims and allowed farmers to demand a jury trial even though foreclosure actions sounded in equity.¹⁷ The court also struck down this law in Oatman v. Bond for violating the contract clause.¹⁸ Two additional acts providing for jury trials, passed in 1864 and 1867, also were struck down.¹⁹ The farm mortgage leagues retaliated by mounting strong challenges to Dixon when his term expired in 1863 and again in 1869, but he was narrowly reelected each time.²⁰

The Wisconsin Legislature tended to set low salaries for state officials, and Dixon repeatedly complained that he could not support his family on his salary. In 1874 he resigned from the court and launched a successful and lucrative career in private practice. Dixon served as counsel for several Wisconsin railroads and participated in several leading cases of the 1870s concerning railroad regulation and tort liability. He also served as a prosecuting counsel for the federal government in the Whisky Ring scandals of 1874-75. In 1879 he moved to Denver to relieve his chronic asthma, and he soon rose to prominence in the Colorado bar. He died in Wisconsin in 1891.

The Sword: Edward G. Ryan

Edward G. Ryan was born in County Meath, Ireland, in 1810. He received an intensive education at Clongowes Wood, a prominent Jesuit college near Dublin, which led him to a lifelong interest in religion and literature. At the age of 20 he emigrated to America and spent his first six years in New York City, learning the ways of American legal practice and Democratic politics. He then spent six years in Chicago, and in 1842 he moved to Racine.²¹

Ryan's first years in Wisconsin were undistinguished. However, in 1846 he was elected a delegate to Wisconsin's first constitutional convention, and he played a key role in the convention.²² Objectively, his work was a failure: the voters rejected the 1846 convention's constitution in large part because it contained a provision, drafted by Ryan, that would have hamstrung all efforts to maintain a viable banking system in the state. But Ryan's eloquence and energy won him notice throughout Wisconsin.²³

The stormy petrel of Wisconsin politics. For the next 20 years, Ryan was to be found at the center of almost every major legal and political dispute in Wisconsin. In 1848 he moved to Milwaukee, which he called home for the rest of his life. In the early 1850s he was a leading critic of what he considered the excessively informal procedure and loose practice in Wisconsin's courts and its other branches of government. Unfortunately, the 1850s supplied Ryan with plenty of targets to attack.

In 1853 Ryan helped prosecute Judge Levi Hubbell of Milwaukee, the only judge ever to be impeached by the Wisconsin Legislature.²⁴ In 1855 Ryan became convinced that William Barstow, his fellow Democrat, had been reelected governor based on fraudulent election returns. Along with several prominent Republican lawyers, Ryan represented Barstow's opponent, Coles Bashford, in proceedings before the Wisconsin Supreme Court to overturn the election result. The supreme court held that Bashford was elected and, after a short period when the two candidates operated separate governments at Madison, Barstow yielded. The fact that Ryan placed the rule of law above partisan advantage was widely noted and played a significant part in preserving order in Wisconsin during a period of great tension.²⁵ Ryan also played a central role in the Booth controversy. He represented the federal government in Booth, and he led Democratic opposition to the Booth decision in Wisconsin.²⁶

During the Civil War, Ryan became the leader of the Peace Democrats in Wisconsin. He repeatedly criticized Abraham Lincoln for suspending habeas corpus in parts of the border states, for liberating slaves in combat areas under the theory that they were contraband of war, and generally for not prosecuting the war within the strict limits of the U.S. Constitution.²⁷ As a result, he was labeled a Copperhead and a traitor by many, and his career suffered. By the early 1870s he faced the prospect of a poor and obscure old age.²⁸

The chief justiceship and the Potter Law decision. Fortunately for Ryan, the political wheel turned once more before he died, and in so doing gave him the chance to make what would be his most lasting contributions to Wisconsin legal history. In 1873 a "reform" coalition of Democrats, moderate Republicans and farmers unhappy with high railroad freight rates elected William Taylor governor. The reformers promptly enacted the Potter Law, Wisconsin's first effort to impose administrative control on the railroads. The law created a three-member commission that had power to set schedules of maximum railroad freight rates between points within Wisconsin.²⁹

The two biggest railroads in the state, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul and the Chicago & Northwestern, promptly announced that they would not observe the law because it changed the terms of their legislative charters and thus constituted an impairment of contract. The state then brought suit to force the railroads to comply with the law. In June 1874, shortly after the suit was filed, Dixon resigned from the supreme court and Governor Taylor appointed Ryan to succeed him as chief justice.³⁰ Taylor was well aware of Ryan's antimonopolistic sentiments and appointed him in large part because he thought Ryan would be "all right" on the Potter Law issue.³¹

Ryan did not disappoint the governor's expectations. In September 1874 the court, in a lengthy opinion written by Ryan, upheld the law.³² Ryan acknowledged that in such decisions as Fletcher v. Peck and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward,³³ the U.S. Supreme Court had held that the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution applied to corporate charters as well as to private contracts. Ryan reluctantly conceded that those decisions were binding on Wisconsin, but with typical forthrightness he urged the high court to move beyond them:

"It is not to be overlooked that the [Dartmouth College] decision was made long before the era of great corporations in this country, long before what were then private corporations had become of more public significance than municipal corporations were then.... The difficulty arises probably from applying old names to new things; applying the ancient definition of private corporations to corporations of a character unknown when the definition arose.... It deprives the states of a large measure of their sovereign prerogative, and establishes great corporations as independent powers within the states, a sort of imperia in imperiis, baffling state order, state economy, state policy."³⁴

Ryan then pointed out that Article XI, section 1 of the Wisconsin Constitution reserved to the Legislature the right to amend corporate charters at any time. He held that the Legislature had plenary power to alter corporate charters in any way, short of destroying a corporation's essential identity, and that the Potter Law constituted an amendment of every railroad charter in the state. Ryan tartly rejected the railroads' criticisms of the Potter Law as unjust:

"It was repeated, with a singular confusion of ideas and a singular perversion of terms, that the provisions of the chapter amount to an act of confiscation.... It was denounced as an act of communism. ...And these wild terms are as applicable to a statute limiting the rates of toll on railroads, as the term murder is to the surgeon's wholesome use of the knife, to save life, not to take it. Such objections do not rise to the dignity of argument. They belong to that order of grumbling against legal duty and legal liability, which would rail the seal from off the bond."³⁵

Molder of the law. Ryan remained on the court only six years; however, he was able to adapt the law in several different areas to fit changing economic and social conditions in Wisconsin. For example, in Sawyer v. Dodge County Mut. Ins. Co. Ryan overturned the common law rule that only property that existed at the inception of a policy was insurable. His holding that property not yet in existence could be insured if it was adequately described in the policy, paved the way for modern crop and building insurance in Wisconsin.³⁶ In Dodge v. Williams Ryan employed the doctrine of equitable conversion to overturn the old rule that charitable bequests had to be certain in all their details before they would be upheld. Ryan recognized that the old rule was designed for past times when charities and the objects of charity changed more slowly, and that in an era of rapidly changing needs, more generally worded bequests should be allowed.³⁷

In Wisconsin as elsewhere, the role of corporations in society expanded and changed dramatically throughout the last half of the 19th century and so did the law of corporate tort liability. Ryan was a major force in shaping this area of the law in Wisconsin. Ryan was more sympathetic to corporations in the area of tort liability than in the area of governmental regulation. For example, in Craker v. Chicago & Northwestern R. Co.³⁸ he held that a corporation is not liable for punitive damages for the willful act of an employee unless it ratifies the employee's act. In Curry v. Chicago & Northwestern R. Co.³⁹ Ryan held that notwithstanding a fencing statute, which on its face made railroads absolutely liable for damage to an animal straying into unfenced railroad rights of way, railroads could assert contributory negligence of the animal's owner as a defense.

Ryan also had a lasting influence on Wisconsin tax law. During the first decades of statehood, property assessments across Wisconsin were often widely inconsistent and property assessment techniques were casual at best. Ryan put an end to this in Marsh v. Supervisors of Clark County, holding that local property assessors were required to strictly comply with state statutes requiring all land to be taxed on a uniform basis.⁴⁰

Ryan dominated the court by the force of his personality and by sheer hard work as well as by his intellect. He was frustrated by the frequent inability of his colleagues, Orsamus Cole and William Lyon, to meet his standards for the quality and quantity of opinions to be issued. Cole and Lyon generally allowed Ryan to write the court's decisions in major cases, and Ryan often furnished his colleagues with the authorities and reasoning they needed to write the opinions assigned to them.⁴¹

The workload that Ryan imposed on himself, coupled with the court's rapidly expanding caseload, took a severe toll on his health. In 1878 the state constitution was amended to expand the court from three to five members. The new justices, David Taylor and Harlow Orton, were less deferential to Ryan than Cole and Lyon had been. "The new court demanded a chief justice who was, at most, primus inter pares, a mere presiding officer. Because of his intellectual pride, psychological neuroses, and physical debilitation, [Ryan] was incapable of playing the part."⁴² Ryan's health and his output declined steadily, and in the fall of 1880 he died.

Joseph A. Ranney, Yale 1978, is a trial lawyer with DeWitt Ross & Stevens S.C., Madison. He is the author of several articles on legal and historical topics.

Conclusion

One leading scholar of American legal history has concluded that as American society became larger and more complex in the last half of the 19th century, the role which state courts and judges played in society did not keep pace. The "grand style" of opinion writing used by great early 19th century judges such as John Marshall was replaced by a "formal style," which was distinguished for numbing detail and prolixity more than for deep thought and eloquence.⁴³ More importantly, "higher [state] courts were ... busier than ever, but heard proportionately less and less of the significant disputes in business and personal life. The history of the great American courts is also a history of the events that passed them by."⁴⁴

Dixon's and Ryan's judicial careers, particularly Ryan's, suggest that these conclusions hold less true for Wisconsin than elsewhere. Both men were unusually able and eloquent writers. Reading a Ryan opinion, one feels as though one is listening to an irascible but brilliant pedagogue examine the topic at hand from all angles, like a toy, and then produce a decision that seems at the time definitive and unanswerable. Dixon's style was plainer and more direct than Ryan's. Reading a Dixon opinion, one feels as though Dixon is inviting the reader to join him and help him think through the competing arguments and get through the reasoning process to a decision.⁴⁵ Ryan declaims; Dixon converses. Dixon's technique in many ways gives his opinions as much or more force than Ryan's.

Wisconsin's history in the last half of the 19th century is made up of far more than the actions of the Wisconsin Supreme Court; but the key disputes in Wisconsin's public and private life by no means passed the court by. Part of the reason for this is that during Dixon's and Ryan's time on the bench, Wisconsin was a young state that was still creating its legal system, particularly its judge-made law. The Wisconsin Supreme Court would have set important precedents during this era no matter who were its members. But Dixon and Ryan unquestionably left a permanent mark on Wisconsin law and enabled the court to make a greater impact on Wisconsin life than it otherwise would have done.

Photos: State Historical Society of Wisconsin

Endnotes

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¹ J. Berryman, ed., History of the Bench and Bar of Wisconsin (Chicago, 1898), Vol. I, 121-33; 81 Wis. xxx, xxxii-xxxiii (1892). Poland was at different times a congressman, a U.S. senator and chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court.

² Berryman, History of the Bench and Bar of Wisconsin, Vol. I, 121-22.

³ 9 U.S. Stats. at Large 462 (1850). Wisconsin's entire congressional delegation, regardless of party, voted against the Fugitive Slave Act and against all parts of the Compromise of 1850 that were designed to placate the South. R. Current, The History of Wisconsin, Vol. II: The Civil War Era, 1848-1873 (Madison, 1976), 208.

⁴ In re Booth, 3 Wis. 1 (1854). Beitzinger, Federal Law Enforcement and the Booth Cases, 41 Marq. L. Rev. 7 (1957), contains a good discussion of the procedural history of the Booth case and of the range of legal issues involved in it.

⁵ J. Winslow, The Story of a Great Court (Chicago, 1912), 67-163, contains a full discussion of the political history of the Booth controversy. Ranney, 'Suffering the Agonies of Their Righteousness': The Rise and Fall of the States Rights Movement in Wisconsin, 1854-1861, 75 Wis. Mag. Hist. 83 (Winter, 1991-92), describes the nature and extent of opposition in Wisconsin to the Booth decision.

⁶ Ableman v. Booth, 62 U.S. 514 (1859).

⁷ Milwaukee Sentinel, March 18, 1859.

⁸ Ableman v. Booth, 11 Wis. 501 (1859).

⁹ Id. at 513.

¹⁰ Ranney, 'Suffering the Agonies of Their Righteousness': The Rise and Fall of the States Rights Movement in Wisconsin, 1854-1861, supra at 108-11.

¹¹ See, for example, the appraisals of Dixon's career in the eulogies given for him. 81 Wis. at xliii-xlv; 17 Colo. xix, xxxiii-xxiv, xxxiii-xxxiv (1892).

¹² 18 Wis. 700 (1861).

¹³ 25 Wis. 143, 149 (1869). But the next year the court, over Dixon's dissent, reaffirmed one of the holdings it had made in the Booth case: namely, that state courts could grant writs of habeas corpus in federal criminal proceedings. In re Tarble, 25 Wis. 390 (1870). This decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Tarble's Case, 80 U.S. 397 (1871).

¹⁴ Current, The History of Wisconsin, Vol. II: The Civil War Era, 1848-1873, 243-50; R. Hunt, Law and Locomotives (Madison, 1958), 44-47.

¹⁵ L. 1858, c. 49.

¹⁶ 11 Wis. 353 (1860).

¹⁷ L. 1861, c. 88.

¹⁸ 15 Wis. 20 (1862).

¹⁹ L. 1864, c. 169, struck down in Truman v. McCollum, 20 Wis. 360 (1866); L. 1867, c. 79, struck down in Callanan v. Judd, 23 Wis. 343 (1868). However, the court did uphold one statute that improved the procedural position of debtors by giving them six months to answer a foreclosure complaint and allowing a six-month redemption period after foreclosure. Dixon reasoned that the Legislature had broad power to establish remedies for breach of contract, provided that the remedies did not "materially impair the rights and interests of the creditors." Von Baumbach v. Bade, 9 Wis. 559, 579 (1859).

²⁰ Hunt, Law and Locomotives, 58-59; Winslow, The Story of a Great Court, 202-17, 253-59. A future article in this series will discuss the railroad era in Wisconsin legal history in more detail.

²¹ A. Beitzinger, Edward G. Ryan: Lion of the Law (Madison, 1960)(hereinafter Ryan), 1-13.

²² Ryan's work in the convention has been described in detail in a previous article in this series. See 65 Wis. Law. 14-17, 59-60 (Sept. 1992).

²³ Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 14-25; see generally Brown, The Making of the Wisconsin Constitution, 1949 Wis. L. Rev. 648. A series of articles that Ryan wrote for the Racine Advocate, at that time one of the state's leading newspapers, under the thinly disguised pseudonym of "Lobby," have been described as the "ablest political essays in Wisconsin's early literature"-sort of a Wisconsin version of the Federalist Papers. In them, Ryan advocated the superiority of a democratic system with a broad franchise over other governmental systems; the use of state laws, and even state constitutions, as laboratories for new governmental techniques in order ultimately to benefit American society as a whole; and the use of government to prevent political and economic power from concentrating in the hands of the few. Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 22-24.

²⁴ Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 28-39; Grant, Judge Levi Hubbell: A Man Impeached, 64 Wis. Mag. Hist. 28 (Autumn 1980). The main charges against Hubbell were bribe taking and hearing cases in which he had an interest. Hubbell ultimately was acquitted, but Ryan's attack was so devastating that he never fully recovered his reputation.

²⁵ Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 40-46; Winslow, The Story of a Great Court, 98-107.

²⁶ See Madison Argus and Democrat, June 30, 1854; Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 55-61. In 1859 Ryan assisted the Milwaukee County district attorney in prosecuting Booth on a charge of statutory rape. Ryan brought the same energy to bear in his personal pursuit of Booth as he had in his political pursuit. The trial resulted in a hung jury and Booth was freed, but it soon became clear that Ryan had largely destroyed Booth's usefulness to the states rights movement. Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 63-64.

²⁷ Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 67-82; E.B. Thompson, Matthew Hale Carpenter: Webster of the West (Madison, 1954), 64-83.

²⁸ Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 97-101.

²⁹ L. 1874, c. 273.

³⁰ R. Nesbit, The History of Wisconsin, Vol. III: Urbanization and Industrialization, 1873-1893 (Madison, 1976), 98-106; Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 106-110.

³¹ Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 107-09.

³² Attorney General v. Chicago & Northwestern R. Co., 35 Wis. 425 (1874).

³³ 6 Cranch 87 (1810); 4 Wheat. 518 (1819).

³⁴ 35 Wis. at 567-68.

³⁵ 35 Wis. at 579-80. Ironically, Ryan's decision was soon mooted. In 1875 the Republicans regained control of state government; the Legislature repealed the Potter Law and replaced it with a weaker statute that did not give the state railroad commission any power over rates. L. 1876, c. 57; Hunt, Law and Locomotives, 126. Nevertheless, the Potter Law case was one of the earliest state court decisions to uphold governmental power to regulate railroads.

³⁶ 37 Wis. 503 (1875).

³⁷ 46 Wis. 70 (1879).

³⁸ 36 Wis. 657 (1875).

³⁹ 43 Wis. 665 (1878).

⁴⁰ 42 Wis. 502 (1877). In 1878 the Legislature enacted a law that validated old assessments that were substantially just and eased the transition to the new regime; but the court also struck that down. L. 1878, c. 334; Plumer v. Board of Supervisors of Marathon County, 46 Wis. 164 (1879). The Legislature then enacted a Ryan proposal that gave taxpayers adequate rights to challenge both old and new assessments. The court upheld that enactment. L. 1879, c. 255; Flanders v. Town of Merrimack, 48 Wis. 567 (1879).

⁴¹ Beitzinger, Ryan, supra at 148-58.

⁴² Id. at 165.

⁴³ Friedman, A History of American Law, 333-34.

⁴⁴ Id. at 339.

⁴⁵ Abraham Lincoln's greatness as a speaker has been attributed in part to his use of the same technique. See C. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, Vol. II (New York, 1926), 13, 103, 161-62.

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