Lance Walker, oil & gas title attorney in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, has posted Forever and Aye: A Lawyer's Deed in Verse, further subtitled, "A Note on J. Henry Shaw’s Warranty Deed--and the Lawyer Who Once Stood Beside Lincoln":
In 1881, a Beardstown, Illinois lawyer named J. Henry Shaw executed a warranty deed written entirely in rhyme-granting language, legal description, and warranty covenant all in verse, with the notary's certificate of acknowledgment answering in matching couplets from a second hand. This note first tests the deed against Illinois's Conveyances Act, then in force largely unchanged since 1874, and confirms that the instrument satisfies each formal requirement for a valid conveyance despite its unusual form. The more substantial part of the note traces the life of the deed's author. Self-taught, admitted to the Illinois bar at twenty-five, and a lifelong writer of occasional verse under a local pen name, Shaw turns out to have a documented professional relationship with Abraham Lincoln predating the deed by over two decades-as co-counsel in one Cass County case and opposing counsel in another during the same 1857 court term. The following spring, Shaw was in Beardstown when Lincoln tried the case that would become known as the Almanac Trial. An 1866 letter from Shaw to Lincoln's law partner and biographer, William H. Herndon, preserved in the Herndon-Weik Collection, offers a firsthand account of that trial and records Lincoln's gift to Shaw, at its close, of the murder weapon itself.
--Dan Ernst
