Blockchain Papers

Sandra Faustino

Abstract This paper explores the influence of financialization in the post-2008 credit crisis, which led to a general mistrust in financial institutions and states. Simultaneously, Web3 and digital finance emerged as a way to navigate this problematic state of affairs, and many individuals were drawn to the agency of machines, code, and algorithms in making a deviation from austerity toward some form of liberation. Taking the form of an oracle reading, this paper uses the “Gambler” archetype to explore the subjective movement of those who engage with digital finance as a strategy to face the generalized climate of austerity and to claim their share of the economy, now that work has ceased to be a lifetime calling.

David Krause

No abstract is available for this record.

Seán Kelly

Writing in the Georgia Review in 1964, Charles Thomas Samuels provocatively inquired, “How can a bad writer be a major figure? About Edgar Allan Poe, no more important question can be asked.”1 Samuels’s question reflects his—and many critics’—uneasiness at the time with what he describes as the baffling paradox of Poe’s iconic cultural status despite “anything like a critical consensus”2 regarding the meaning and artistic merit of his literary works. To twenty-first-century ears, Samuels’s remarks may simply sound old-fashioned, expressing sentiments similar to T. S. Eliot’s infamous (and later somewhat revised) derisive judgements about Poe’s writing and intellect.3 However, Samuels’s jarring provocation and Eliot’s studied ambivalence both make reference to what might diplomatically be called the twentieth century’s “Poe problem”: the fact that Poe presented “a stumbling block for the judicial critic.”4 While there was no doubt among scholars that Poe’s cultural influence was equal to or even surpassed that of many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, his exact position in the American literary canon was subject to intense debate.5 Although much ink was spilled in analyzing Poe the man, Poe the writer continued to languish as “a scholarly and critical orphan.”6 One might suggest that the eventual solidification of Poe’s reputation as a literary artist has, quite literally, depended on scholars figuring out how to read his works. As David Ketterer acknowledged in 1979, the real “breakthrough” in reevaluating Poe’s writing coincided with G. R. Thompson’s founding of the Poe Newsletter at Washington State University in 1968. That moment marked the inception of what turned out to be a true “Poe renaissance,” characterized by the “considerable resurgence of American academic interest in the actual words that Poe committed to paper.”7 It is in this dynamic context that Thompson’s groundbreaking study Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) appeared, offering a new and influential set of critical interventions and interpretive frameworks with which to approach Poe’s fiction—in short, a “new way of reading Poe” (8).In prefacing his study, Thompson describes the “uncomfortable” situation facing scholars as one of accounting for the apparent unevenness and inconsistency in Poe’s oeuvre, noting that “the body of [Poe’s] fiction splits disturbingly into two large, seemingly inconsistent, groups: flawed Gothic tales on the one hand and flawed comic and satiric tales on the other” (4). Equally important, Thompson suggests that, historically, apparent inconsistencies and failures in Poe’s works had been explained by critics as reflections of the author’s own psychological fragmentation. Citing the failure of outmoded biographical and psychoanalytically oriented approaches, which, as David Halliburton has suggested, “tend to regard the text as a clinical phenomenon,”8 Thompson observes: Indeed, it has come to be conventional to explain the curious incongruities in Poe’s works by means of a pseudo-Freudian biographical approach, as proceeding from his lack of self-identity (Poe as the orphaned child of itinerant actors reared in the home of a tyrannical and unloving father). This lack of identity is supposed to have caused him to assume various unsuitable masks or guises and to spend his life in “role playing.” (5) Thompson’s inventive solution is to challenge the myth of Poe—the “merely . . . schizophrenic genius of the demonic imagination” (7)—with the portrait of a writer deeply informed by the aesthetic and philosophical currents of his milieu, namely the German school of Romantic Irony. From this perspective, apparent inconsistencies (and even deficiencies) in Poe’s writing may be viewed as the hallmarks of an ironic “multiple vision” (17) that allowed him to transcend personal obsessions and genre limitations.Central to Thompson’s thesis is that Poe inherited from the German Romantics not only their “Gothic gloom and horror” (20) but also their “theories . . . about the subconscious mind, about ‘objective subjectivity,’ about the ultimate ‘annihilation’ of contradictions through ironic art, and about the idealistic ‘transcendence’ of earthly limitations through the Godlike immanence and detachment of the artistic mind” (20). Thus, influenced by the German Romantic Ironists, Thompson argues that Poe developed peculiar forms of self-parody in his fiction that allowed him to transcend “mere selfness” and view circumstances from a “mystical” or “ideal” perspective (10). Although Thompson frames Poe’s relation to the German Romantics—especially Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and others—in terms of their broad metaphysical speculation, his discussion, for much of the book, specifically addresses the ways in which Poe’s aesthetics seek to accomplish a “transcendental mastery of the world and oneself through simultaneous detachment and involvement” (23). In this light, Poe is, in effect, rediscovered as a masterful ironist and brilliant hoaxer; his works—when traced to their obscure sources—often reveal a winking self-parody or a highly nuanced critique. One at least implicit goal of Thompson’s book, then, was to account for the troubling ambiguity surrounding Poe’s works and thereby re-present the author, himself, as a more self-aware, deliberate, and respectable literary figure.At the time of its publication, some reviewers found in Poe’s Fiction a much-needed supplement to traditional Poe scholarship, while others perceived a potential threat in Thompson’s approach. Nina Baym, for example, observed that Thompson’s method was a “good corrective to the excesses of the Weltschmerz tendency” in Poe criticism.9 J. Gerald Kennedy, who found merit in Thompson’s attempted synthesis of the comic and Gothic strains of Poe’s work, enthusiastically asserted that if the “implications of Thompson’s study are accepted,” it would require a “thorough reassessment of Poe’s art and his position in our literature.”10 There were others, however, who resisted Thompson’s “new” way of reading. In his lively assessment of Thompson’s study, David H. Hirsch remarked: Poe, according to Mr. Thompson, is a super-conscious super-rational super ironist who never meant any of the things that, for some hundred years, scholars, critics, and general readers thought he was saying. All these years the real Poe has been lurking contemptuously behind his masks of “mocking irony,” “ironic mockery,” “hoaxlike mockery,” “hoaxing satire,” “satiric hoax.”11 One gets the sense, when reading Hirsch’s (what may as well be described as a) diatribe against the book, that something valuable risked being lost in revamping Poe’s image and re-presenting him as a self-conscious ironist. Hirsch’s frankly emotional response to Thompson’s work reflects not so much the rejection of a critical methodology as a reaction to the idea of Poe that emerges through the application of that method. For Hirsch—who was also experimenting with a new, existentialist way of reading Poe—the ambiguity was the point.12 In response to Thompson, Hirsch concludes, “If the key to reading Poe lies in the concepts of tension and irony, then what happens to this key when contradictions (that is to say, tensions) are annihilated? The answer is that Poe (Mr. Thompson’s Poe, that is) becomes a dull boy.”13 From this perspective, Poe’s ambiguity, his darkness, to which the reader has become accustomed through careening tales of madness, sensation, and uncanniness, are no longer evidence of a mind or artistry on the brink. Rather, in gazing into the abyss of the “ultimately incomprehensible, absurd, or . . . possibly malevolent universe” (Thompson 12), Poe, the Romantic Ironist, seeks (only) to attain, through aesthetic means, “an ambivalent joy of stoical self-possession and intellectual control” (13).14There are moments in the early chapters of Poe’s Fiction when readers might tend to agree with some of Hirsch’s concerns. Thompson’s discussion of several of Poe’s early comic tales, for example, presents Poe as a sly and occasionally sophisticated satirist, but one whose objects of parody would have been obscure to most nineteenth-century readers and virtually undetectable by modern ones. Thompson’s overview of the Philadelphia Saturday Courier tales of 1831–32 is ostensibly meant to make the case that Poe’s use of ironic parody is, in fact, “deep-seated and all pervasive,” even in Poe’s earliest works (39). Although Thompson admits that Poe’s satiric aim was “only vaguely understood by his contemporaries” (42), the proof of his intention may be discerned through the meticulous textual excavation of primary sources and corroborating marginalia. “The Duke de L’Omelette,” for example, is revealed to be Poe’s mocking satire of a contemporary editor, Nathaniel Parker Willis. One would only realize this, however, if one recognized Willis’s signature affectations of refinement in the tale’s imagery. Thompson points out, for instance, that the roasted Peruvian ortolan served to the Duke represents Willis’s pet bird (45). Likewise, Thompson notes that “olives and ottomans” are meant to caricature Willis’s “symbols of refinement,” while the French phrases sprinkled throughout the tale are allusions to his pretentious style (45). Another Courier tale, “A Tale of Jerusalem,” performs a similarly veiled satire of the nineteenth-century “rage for didactic historical novels set in the Holy Land” (46). By imitating and even plagiarizing elements of such popular works as Horace Smith’s Zillah: A Tale of the Holy City (1828), Thompson argues, Poe achieves a “remarkable phony style” (46), and he offers this as proof that Poe must be “satirizing something, even if only the Jews themselves” (46).15 Such erudite analyses of Poe’s early comic works are plentiful in Poe’s Fiction and ultimately valuable in that they offer plausible interpretive strategies for approaching idiosyncratic texts that would otherwise remain indecipherable for most readers. For as Thompson himself observes, without the addition of such esoteric contexts, some of Poe’s early comic tales “see[m] simply pointless” (45). But while such readings prove that Poe was indeed capable of satire, they also suggest that most readers would likely never comprehend the targets of his parodic jabs without professional help.It becomes clear that exposing the subtle (and sometimes even offensive) satire in Poe’s early comic tales is not really the point of Thompson’s study. Rather, Thompson highlights the techniques involved in these early comic pieces (satires, hoaxes, burlesques) in order to trace Poe’s passage from satire to irony, specifically with regard to his view of the Gothic genre, as his title indicates. Thompson maintains that the early Gothic performance “Metzengerstein,” which had previously been viewed by critics, who regarded Poe only as a Gothicist, as a “false start” (67), can instead be viewed as a transitional text in Poe’s development as a writer and a “paradigm for [his] subsequent Gothic hoaxes” (67). Even with its convoluted plot line, (involving a blood feud between the Berliftzing and Metzengerstein families, superstitions concerning the occult doctrine of metempsychosis, and the supernatural appearance of a colossal and ghostly white horse), it reflects Poe’s serious philosophical consideration of the Gothic aesthetic universe while, at the same time, maintaining a skeptical stance against a “society that believes in such things” (67). Thompson points out, however, that because the tale’s satire is often subtle and Poe’s approach apparently serious, to many critics it seemed to be merely a failed Gothic tale. Thompson provocatively maintains that “Metzengerstein” is, on the contrary, a “carefully flawed” (67) tale by design, intended, precisely for that reason, as a hoax. Moreover, the critical confusion over the tale results from the fact that the ironic perspective is “somewhat blurred” (67). The careful consideration of how Poe’s ironic perspective comes into focus throughout his career—both in terms of its aesthetic refinement and its philosophical aims—emerges as the compelling primary focus of Thompson’s study.Some of the most insightful moments in Poe’s Fiction occur when Thompson translates the Romantic Ironists’ interest in the “deliberate breaking of the illusion” (21) of a literary work into Poe’s adoption of the characteristic posture of “ambivalent self-division” (176). Poe both meets the public’s expectations for Gothic sensational effects while, at the same time, perversely undermining them through hidden clues, on the one hand, and outrageous self-parody on the other. His tales not only depict instances of psychological perversion in the forms of obsession, self-deception, and self-destruction but they also enact such perversion at a structural-aesthetic level. If, as Thompson argues, “the universe created in Poe’s fiction is one in which the human mind tries vainly to perceive order and meaning,” the nature of that universe is, itself, deceptive and built on the “constant shifting of appearances” (165). Thompson describes Poe’s technique as a Gothic writer, then, as that of constructing a “deceptive tripleness” (77) in his tales, which he notes, reflects the peculiarly American version of the Gothic. In contrast to the English (Radcliffean) Gothic novel that depicts supernatural elements only to explain them away as the misperception of a character, the American Gothic retains an ambiguous attitude toward the supernatural (76). Poe’s tales are, within this tradition, meant to be viewed as “supernatural on one level, psychological on another, satiric and ironic on another” (77). It is the third, ironic element that offers something surprising for students of Poe.Thompson suggests that Poe’s readers, following Gothic conventions, may become “locked” into the delusional point of view of the narrator, notwithstanding the narrator’s explicit indications of his compromised perspective, “his madness, or nervousness, or terror” (77). However, Poe introduces a third position in relation to the psychological and the supernatural—the ironic—in order to disrupt the reader’s identification with the narrator’s perspective and establish a new, “transcendental” perspective—one that allows the reader to confront the deceptive nature of the human mind, literary texts, and reality itself. The “English” Gothic desire for rational explanation is fully apparent (“if the alert reader will look for it”; 82), though repressed in the text, displaced onto subtle symbolic imagery, obscure references, or barely perceptible frames. According to Thompson, then, the reader is essentially placed in the position of a ratiocinator searching for clues or, potentially, a member of Poe’s inner circle, sharing an inside joke with reference to the Gothic genre and his own works.In order to demonstrate this idea, Thompson offers the example of how multiple levels of irony operate in Poe’s popular tale “Ligeia” (1838). On the surface, the tale famously depicts the death and supernatural metempsychosis of the narrator’s lover, Ligeia, in the body of his subsequent wife, Rowena. Thompson suggests, however, that the tale’s real subjects are the narrator’s “delusive madness” and possibly even murder (82). According to Thompson, the perceptive reader may come to realize that Ligeia “exists [only] in the narrator’s mind” (80). It is clear enough that the narrator’s psychological state is being called into question when, in the opening of the story, he can remember neither the circumstances of meeting Ligeia nor her last name. Furthermore, as Thompson points out, the narrator’s mention of opium shifts from a potent metaphor for Ligeia’s “strange” beauty (she has the “radiance of an opium dream”; M 2:311) to a description of the narrator’s actual drug addiction (82). What is more profound in Thompson’s approach, however, is his insistence that Poe uses the term “arabesque” not only to describe certain odd features of the narrator’s Gothic interior but also to signify, from within the tale, a perspective of judgment on the events taking place. Citing, in particular, the description of the phantasmagoric effect of arabesque figures of Norman myth inscribed on the narrator’s draperies, Thompson argues that “the arabesque decor as Poe uses it is not merely the monstrousness of supernatural things but is a matter of appearance, of deceptiveness, of perspective and point of view in an overall design” (81). The interior details, in other a way of a of through which readers and thereby their own to In his analyses of several of Poe’s “The of “The and “The of the Thompson that such interior more the of Gothic explicit to the arabesque (and meant to the arabesque as an aesthetic be as to how a According to Thompson, who much to an historical overview of the of the terms “arabesque” and the for Poe, is with of odd and with and with and and with the of In Poe’s and symbolic then, “arabesque” with and represents and deceptive Gothic conventions, such as and to the status of the tale, itself, as an deceptive textual to and to the narrator’s into question while, the reader’s that the perspective is one in Thompson argues, Poe’s effects are “the of . . . a mind” In his reading of “The of Thompson that Poe the ironic self-parody of “Ligeia” to his ostensibly serious description of an home Poe’s of the of American ultimately the Gothic interior of his tale of is at in Poe’s Fiction is Thompson’s that Poe’s Gothic writing a a skeptical philosophical view of the universe is with and Thompson’s Poe, it out, is not simply to on his readers or them as the of his Rather, the Poe with his readers is to reveal of mind, namely the human to as a for the human of Thompson’s Poe of his His Romantic is not the of some of the the philosophical perspective in the of of (165). As Thompson observes, is only in the of that Poe comes to The effect of Poe’s aesthetic is the of an ironic tension between the of an mind . . . the of the and the reader’s “transcendental” that are Thompson suggests, in other that the of stoical and by Poe’s Romantic Irony is, itself, a merely of Poe’s of the Gothic of his own in its deceptive not offer the that there a for on which identity may be Poe’s ironic only to that the of a malevolent universe” can only be if it can at through a of the limitations of own The Thompson is “an ambivalent a of or irony, and as well a by the of the human mind out toward an

N Venkatesh, nbspMs. Kalyani Vaidyanathant

No abstract is available for this record.

Mark E. Steiner

After John J. Duff and John P. Frank published books on Abraham Lincoln’s legal career in the early 1960s, more than forty years passed before another book on the subject appeared.1 This remarkable drought for the fecund soil of Lincolniana ended, however, when the Lincoln Legal Papers project (LLP) revitalized interest in lawyer Lincoln. Under the leadership of Cullom Davis and Daniel Stowell, the LLP collected, cataloged, and scanned thousands of documents. A complete edition was published in 2000 in DVD format; it has been superseded by an online edition that appeared in 2009.2 A four-volume selected edition was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2008.3 Moreover, members of the LLP staff—the late William D. Beard, Davis, Susan Krause, John A. Lupton, Stacy Pratt McDermott, Christopher A. Schnell, and Stowell—also were producing much of the new scholarship on Lincoln’s law practice or, more generally, law in Lincoln’s Illinois.4In the antediluvian era, biographers paid little attention to Lincoln’s law practice. Lincoln biographies usually included a couple of chapters that touched on his legal career. Albert J. Beveridge, in his 1928 biography, mentioned a fair number of cases but discussed at length only a handful; those cases have become canonical. Until the onset of the LLP, most biographies only mentioned the same cases that Beveridge had highlighted: In re Jane Bryant (the Matson case); State v. Armstrong (the Almanac Trial); Illinois Central Rail Road v. McLean County; McCormick v. Talcott (the Manny Reaper case); and Hurd v. Rock Island Bridge Company (the Effie Afton case).5Biographers had neglected Lincoln’s law practice for a couple of reasons. First, as Herndon once wrote, “a law office is a dull, dry place.”6 Biographers weren’t interested in the legal practice, because they believed the legal practice wasn’t interesting. But there were other reasons as well. J. G. Randall, in 1936, noted how important sources for Lincoln’s law practice “still remain difficult of access.”7 Mark E. Neely, in 1993, concluded that “Lincoln’s professional life remains surprisingly inaccessible to the historian as well, though the problem in this realm is largely archival.” Neely also believed that “more specialized studies” of the “arcane legal practices” of Lincoln’s day were needed.8 Those two problems—accessibility of documents and demystifying specialized studies—have been met by the publication of the legal papers and by the extensive scholarship by the LLP staff and others.Although David Donald’s 1995 biography was written while the LLP was still collecting and sorting documents, it nonetheless showed the LLP’s impact on Lincoln scholarship. Donald hailed the LLP as “perhaps the most important archival investigation now under way in the United States.” Donald had been able to examine unpublished documents from the LLP files and thus gave the most complete accounting of Lincoln’s law practice in a biography. The benefits of the LLP were again seen in Michael Burlingame’s magisterial biography, published in 2008. Recent books that have focused on the pre-presidential years also reflect the influence of the LLP in their treatment of the law practice.9Other writers also have benefited from LLP’s vast riches. At least fourteen books on Lincoln’s law practice have been published since 2000. There have been two general treatments of the law practice, a study of Lincoln’s cases involving the medical profession, an analysis of Lincoln’s murder cases, a collection of articles on different aspects of the law practice, and two books examining Lincoln’s circuit riding.10 Seven books have focused on one particular case handled by Lincoln. Five are on canonical cases: two on the Almanac Trial, two on the Effie Afton case, and one on the Matson case.11 The other two books explore relatively overlooked murder cases.12Both Dekle and McGinty have taken great advantage of the materials collected by the LLP. McGinty notes that “all modern studies of Lincoln’s legal practice are indebted to the Lincoln Legal Papers project.” After noting the Legal Papers are “indispensable sources of information,” McGinty states, “This book could not have been written, nor could the story of the Effie Afton case have been told—or told as well—without them” (10). Dekle reproduces all the legal documents from the LLP case file on the Almanac Trial as an appendix (151–64). Both cases were included in The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases.13Dekle and McGinty have very different goals for their books. Dekle calls the Almanac Trial Lincoln’s “most famous case.” He does not argue that the case was particularly important for Lincoln or that it has any wider significance for American history. He is interested in trying to uncover what actually happened at the trial. McGinty calls the Effie Afton case the “most significant of Lincoln’s career” and “one of the most important ever heard in Illinois.” If anything, McGinty believes that this “strangely neglected” case should be more widely known. His goal is not only to tell the story of the Effie Afton case but to explain Lincoln’s role and to place the case in a broader context of the “epochal clash of the railroads and the steamboats at the river’s edge” (2). Both authors achieve their aims in writing these books. And both books share something else: well-chosen illustrations.Most of the documents uncovered by the LLP yield little without great effort. Docket entries, pleadings, and subpoenas are all mostly formulaic. The materials available for these two cases are markedly different, and the two authors capitalize on the differences. The Effie Afton case was one of only three cases handled by Lincoln that produced what would now be called a transcript of the trial (102).14 Because the Duff Armstrong murder trial was featured in Lincoln campaign biographies, participants and observers left behind many reminiscences.15 Dekle’s main task is sorting out these conflicting reminiscences to determine what probably happened at the trial.Both Dekle and McGinty are lawyers. James G. Randall in his 1936 essay “Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?” observed that “the hand of the amateur has rested heavily upon Lincoln studies.” Randall believed that Lincoln scholarship required “further critical development by historically trained scholars.”16 The hand of lawyers has rested heavily on studies of lawyer Lincoln. The first five books about Lincoln’s law practice were written by lawyers who had no historical training: Frederick Trevor Hill (1906); John T. Richards (1916), Albert A. Woldman (1936), Duff (1960), and Frank (1961).17 When Neely revisited Randall’s essay in 1979, he noted that “legal history is an area where professionalism has been slow to take command.” In 1979 this was still an area where Randall’s “trained historical specialist is rarely seen.”18Dekle in the preface to his book modestly admits he is “neither a historian nor a Lincoln Scholar” (x). Dekle practiced criminal law for thirty years as an assistant district attorney. He is now the director of the Criminal Prosecution Clinic at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. McGinty left the practice of law to become a professional writer and historian. Like Lincoln the lawyer, McGinty the historian is self-taught. Among his ten previous books are well-received studies of the Supreme Court during the Civil War and the case of Ex parte Merryman.19Both authors believe that their own experiences as lawyers help them understand lawyer Lincoln. This, in fact, is the central conceit of Dekle’s book. Dekle says that he “felt equal to the task of unraveling the Almanac Trial because if I had learned anything during my three decades as a criminal trial lawyer, I learned how to investigate, prosecute, and defend murder cases.” Dekle carries this argument of authority too far, and it sometimes leads him to presentism. He assumes throughout the book that practicing law in Illinois in 1850s is the same as practicing law now. Dekle often makes conclusions based on his own experience, assuming that his time spent in a Florida courtroom in the past thirty years are the same as Lincoln’s experiences in antebellum Illinois. For example, he says, “In my experiences as a trial lawyer, negative character evidence of this type is near worthless” (104).For example, Dekle points out that Duff Armstrong could have had a lawyer appointed to represent him if he couldn’t afford the services of one but that the lawyer wouldn’t have been paid. Dekle then asserts, “It is an unfortunate fact of life, however, that underpaid lawyers often do not defend their clients with the zeal displayed by well-paid lawyers” (3). But has this “fact of life” always been true? Armstrong’s case was tried when judges and lawyers rode the circuit. Each county of the circuit held two terms of court. Holding court was a form of public entertainment, and members of the community would turn out to see trials. With large crowds in attendance, wouldn’t even an unpaid lawyer have a lot at stake? Effective representation would be an advertisement for future legal services.This presentist viewpoint permeates the book. One example is the discussion of William Norris, who was charged with murder along with Duff Armstrong. Norris, who had been charged and acquitted of murder a year earlier in Macon County, did not attempt to change venue to another county, a move that might have benefited him. This fact has led to “unjustified criticism” of his lawyer, William Walker, according to Dekle, who explains that this “gross error” wasn’t his lawyer’s fault.The assumption is what is lawful or ethical for lawyers now was lawful or ethical in Illinois in 1857. The law of lawyering was not fully developed in antebellum America; there weren’t any laws or formal bar association rules that are analogous to modern codes of ethics or disciplinary rules.20Dekle rejects one version of Lincoln’s cross-examination of Charles Allen (which claimed Lincoln didn’t question Allen about the almanac but instead turned to the jurors and asked whom they believed), because it would have been “excellent theater but improper trial procedure. During the examination of a witness, the lawyers simply ask questions of the witness without making asides to the jury.” Lincoln’s purported behavior would have been a “breach of courtroom protocol” (88). While this behavior would undoubtedly be a breach of courtroom protocol in any modern courtroom, I’m not sure the rule applied in 1857. A complicating factor for Dekle’s assumption about courtroom rules is that in 1857, an Illinois statute said that the jury was to “be judges of the law and the facts.”21Dekle in his penultimate chapter is more careful about not applying twenty-first-century standards to the Almanac Trial. Some writers have characterized Lincoln’s final argument as inflammatory and unethical, as Lincoln assumed facts not in evidence and made emotional appeals based on his relationship with the Armstrong family. While Dekle concedes by “modern standards” Lincoln’s argument was objectionable, he answers this criticism by pointing out, “We have no business using a twenty-first-century yardstick to measure a nineteenth-century speech” (113). Another criticism of Lincoln is that he unethically refused to hear what a witness wanted to tell him about what he saw that fateful evening. Lincoln was planning to call Will Watkins to establish that he was the owner of the possible murder weapon. Watkins, who later said he had seen Armstrong strike Metzker with a wagon hammer, was afraid that once he got on the witness stand he would have to tell what he saw. According to one account, Watkins “began to tell Lincoln what he knew, and Mr. Lincoln would not allow him to tell him anything” (135). Dekle establishes that there would been no duty for a defense lawyer in 1857 to discover what Watkins knew. Finally, Dekle discusses whether the cross-examination of Watkins by the state would have been restricted to matters Watkins had testified about during Lincoln’s direct examination, as some writers have questioned whether that rule existed in antebellum Illinois. While Dekle can’t find a case on point from Illinois before 1929, he cites a U.S. Supreme Court opinion that in 1840 had recognized this rule as “well established” (115–16).Dekle presents three different versions of the Armstrong murder trial that he has found in the literature about the case. Version one has Lincoln securing acquittal by his masterful cross-examination of a key prosecution witness. Through the use of an almanac, Lincoln proves that the witness would not have been aided by moonlight to have seen what he claimed he saw. This version “has entered the pantheon of great moments in the history of American trial advocacy” (7). The urtext for the version was the novel The Graysons: A Story of Illinois (1887).22 Version two (which, chronologically, appeared first) has Lincoln securing acquittal primarily through an emotional appeal in his closing argument that mentioned Lincoln’s relationship in New Salem with Armstrong’s father, who had recently died. This version, which doesn’t mention Lincoln’s cross-examination or use of the almanac, was tied to Lincoln’s campaign for president; it first appeared in the Cleveland Leader the day after Lincoln was nominated for president at the Republican national convention. Lincoln’s representation of Duff Armstrong then figured prominently in campaign biographies, which obviously helps explain why it became Lincoln’s “most famous case” (13).23 Version three also was connected to Lincoln’s presidential campaign; it was the counternarrative advanced by Lincoln’s opponents. This version depicted Lincoln faking the almanac. Instead of the virtuous lawyer, there was “Lincoln the Trickster” (18–19).Dekle ultimately concludes that “the famous cross-examination” didn’t happen. He looks at the various versions of it. (That Dekle calls these versions “variant transcripts” is like calling a forged Monet painting a “variant Monet,” since none of them is a transcript of the cross-examination [87].) Some of these versions are rightly dismissed out of hand because they are fictional or dramatizations of what the writer believed likely happened. Others are dismissed because they are factually inaccurate. Irving Younger, an expert of the law of evidence, concocted a mixture of earlier versions (94).Dekle is convinced that Lincoln used an almanac to contradict Allen’s testimony. The dispute, for Dekle, “arises over when Lincoln did his contradicting” (87). Lincoln could have immediately confronted the witness during the cross-examination, or he could have waited to contradict the witness during his final argument. Dekle concludes Lincoln waited. J. W. Donovan, the first to claim that Lincoln confronted Allen during his cross-examination, did so in 1898 (over forty years later!) and appears to have appropriated the cross-examination from Eggleston’s fictional account.But what good did the almanac do? Dekle details the “precise nature of the contradiction Lincoln found in the almanac.” Charles Allen, the key witness against Armstrong, testified that he saw the by the of the Some sources claim that the almanac showed there was no in the that while claim Lincoln’s almanac showed the was near Dekle concludes that the almanac showed the was near He rejects those who the almanac no as their as they Dekle also rejects the which first appeared during the presidential campaign of for 1857 showed the on the the almanac would have been a because the for 1857 showed that the had not that the was a Dekle the that Lincoln used a almanac by pointing out that the would have him as Dekle had a McGinty the Effie Afton case on the The first five chapters the of the by the of the Effie Afton against the Bridge McGinty with a discussion of the of on the He also discusses Lincoln’s with and and his early for like and McGinty also details the of The chapter be the of Lincoln’s law chapter details the of the Rock Island In gave of way to public to any by a state to a The Illinois the Bridge it to a near Rock Island so as it did not the of the McGinty also does a good of the in and the legal in earlier One of the more aspects of Lincoln’s career is how some who would later prominently during the Civil War his years Davis the story as of the War Davis tried to the of the probably because he a to the The U.S. for Illinois to the but John McLean later in the McLean did that if were by any of by the then the would be chapter does a masterful of the which two after the The Effie Afton had and over of The of the the Effie Afton with a before for the When it was through the it one of the then and then a in the of the and The was also with the on the Illinois against the was The chapters are about that The were and had significant were also by in and other who for the After the was in court in for the of Rock Island Lincoln didn’t the defense after the was books are of how Lincoln often with other lawyers to In the Almanac Trial, Lincoln and William in Duff Lincoln the defense many had been and many had been was Lincoln’s McGinty fair with the evidence and concludes that the did not believe that Lincoln was to as Dekle’s book is based largely on McGinty on on the case that appeared in the trial for the and for the and later the McGinty notes that recognized the trial one of the most that had ever taken place in an American The trial in 1857. Lincoln does not to have taken in the The then over Lincoln does not to have made his during the case in was then the and McGinty were about to their by a lawyer from with a remarkable and a of trial as the lawyer for the Lincoln made his first in the trial an whether about the over the was The to this because it wasn’t to the of the first for the that “the good of the should be Lincoln then that the would not be a one in of the of the While the for an of the in Lincoln’s as they should to the nature and of McLean the evidence for the of the of the the evidence couldn’t be used to “the nature of the other significant to the defense was one of the closing to the closing and he only gave of what he the most important by the lawyers” McGinty is able to use to a of how good Lincoln was as a trial Lincoln by the jury did not to that he to as he but not Lincoln many used of two He that the of the the of railroads and and the of the Lincoln also that the was if the jury the would Lincoln are by the to the when a along it is for him to on of this which has been trial in a a for the since the had the of While the case wasn’t Lincoln’s tried their with other which didn’t One of the Effie Afton a which was dismissed in A to the was in Lincoln’s Afton career. He in my to the Effie Afton case a for Lincoln’s to the Because of the for Lincoln and at the state in were critical for Lincoln’s If Lincoln in then Lincoln wouldn’t have been the and there wouldn’t have been a and then Lincoln wouldn’t have been the Republican in explains that history two First, railroads over steamboats and a key role in a new Lincoln became a in an American The Effie Afton case how lawyer Lincoln to the with to the on the and to turn the an future of and books to Lincoln McGinty has written the of the Effie Afton case by not only the but also wider Dekle the of what probably happened at the Almanac the most famous cross-examination in American history didn’t actually But he written the on the trial. on Dekle’s a future of lawyer Lincoln to explain why this trial became Lincoln’s “most famous case.”