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Lawyers filled campaign rolesAbraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were not the only Illinois attorneys who played roles in their debates and related campaigns for office. Douglas’ 1858 campaign against Lincoln for election to the U.S. Senate was managed by Chicago attorney Melville Weston Fuller, whose legal and political career concluded with 22 years as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Another Chicago lawyer, Edwin C. Larned, was known for his strong stand against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and, therefore, was opposed to Douglas on that issue. After his election as president, Lincoln made Larned his first appointment as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. He served throughout most of the Civil War. The law firm he founded in 1859, Goodwin, Larned & Goodwin, evolved through the years into Fitch, Even, Tabin & Flannery, which lays claim to being the oldest in Chicago. Melville Fuller, born in Maine, headed west after studying law at Harvard, settled in the railroad hub of Chicago and began a practice in real estate and commercial law. After Lincoln’s election, Fuller was a delegate to the 1861 Illinois Constitutional Convention and a member of the Illinois House in 1863-64. His appointment to the Supreme Court in 1888 ended an 11-year span in which the 7th Circuit had been unrepresented since the resignation of Justice David Davis in 1877. Ironically, Davis had been appointed by Lincoln, the close friend with whom he had often shared judicial duties while circuit riding in Illinois. So Fuller, who had backed Douglas over Lincoln in the 1858 Senate campaign, filled the Supreme Court vacancy of Davis, who had supported Lincoln for the presidency two years later.
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