The same day that this story appeared, Lincoln issued an anonymous handbill reviewing the complicated details of the lawsuit and once again accusing Adams of forgery. When queried, the editor of the Sangamo Journal, Simeon Francis, revealed Lincoln’s authorship of the handbill. Lincoln’s charge seems justified, based on the evidence he marshaled cogently, if intemperately, and also on Adams’s long record of ethical lapses. (In 1818, at the age of 25, Adams had been indicted for forging and backdating a deed in New York. Rather than standing trial, he jumped bail and fled the state, leaving behind his wife and young daughter. In 1832, he had unsuccessfully defended an impoverished man accused of murder and then fleeced the man’s family of their few worldly goods. In 1838, attempting to discredit a petition drive calling for the division of Sangamon County, Adams obtained a blank copy of the petition and forged the names of free blacks. At Springfield, he engaged in dubious land transactions, which Elijah Iles, one of the city’s founding fathers and most influential leaders, publicly denounced. Adams accused attorney Stephen T. Logan of slander, eventually dropping the charge and paying all court costs. In 1841, he so alienated his fellow Masons in Springfield that their lodge almost dissolved. Two years later, Adams committed bigamy; at that same time, he ran for office in Hancock County, though he was still a resident of Sangamon.)
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
(echo:: @ ⌗)