Lincoln Editor

              October - December 2005 Volume 5 Number 4
ABRAHAM LINCOLN ASSOCIATION NAMES PROJECT
AS SUCCESSOR TO COLLECTED WORKS
SAMUEL H. TREAT: PRAIRIE JUSTICE
THIS YEAR’S DONOR PREMIUM
Contributers of $200 or more will receive a thirty-eight-page
biography of Judge Samuel H. Treat, written by
project director and editor Daniel W. Stowell. In September,
the Illinois Bar Foundation held a reception to raise funds to
place a monument on Treat’s unmarked grave in Oak Ridge
Cemetery in Springfield. Stowell authored the booklet for
that event.
Samuel H. Treat: Prairie Justice recounts the life
of an important jurist in Illinois’s early legal history. Treat
became a lawyer in his native New York before settling in
Springfield, Illinois, in 1834. In 1840, he became the judge
of the Eighth Judicial Circuit. The following year, the
legislature elected him as an Illinois Supreme Court justice.
In 1848, Treat became the chief justice of that court and
served in that capacity until 1855, when he became the judge
of the United States District Court for the Southern District
of Illinois. He held that latter position until his death in 1887.
During his tenure as an Illinois Supreme Court justice,
Treat wrote at least 620 opinions for the court and, in 1857,
compiled and annotated the statutes of the State of Illinois, a
1,464-page volume, entitled The Statutes of Illinois,
Embracing All of the General Laws of the State.
Treat was a long-time
legal colleague and
friend of Abraham Lincoln
with whom he liked to share
a game of chess. Treat
presided in at least 932
circuit cases in which
Lincoln was an attorney and
was a justice in 167 cases
of Lincoln’s cases before
the Illinois Supreme Court.
This year’s donor
premium offers insight into
the life of an early Illinois
jurist and promises to be an
excellent addition to the growing collection of the project’s
publications.
In 1953, the Abraham Lincoln Association published The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, an eight-volume
compilation edited by Roy P. Basler, Marion
Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap. For more
than half a century, that edition has supported
Lincoln scholarship. In early October 2005, the
Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln
Association voted to endorse the Papers of
Abraham Lincoln as the successor of the
Collected Works and to seek a more formal supporting role
with the project.
The Abraham Lincoln Association,
founded in 1908, has a long tradition of
supporting primary scholarship about Abraham
Lincoln. In 1985, the Association was a vital
advocate for the creation of the Lincoln Legal
Papers, and for two decades, the Association
has served as a cosponsor of that project.