Frederick Trevor Hill

By way of avocation during three or four decades of legal practice at New York, Frederick Trevor Hill also applied himself to Lincoln’s history. His own knowledge of the law had already found expression in a treatise on “The Care of Estates” and in a descriptive booklet, somewhat less technical, on “Decisive Battles of the Law.” But when he approached the Lincoln puzzle with careful examination of the earlier episodes in the record of “Lincoln, the Lawyer,” he too entered the ranks of best-selling historians. In this little book and in those which followed it, Hill’s own legal acumen, backed by painstaking research, throws a light on the War President’s early professional achievement, long before the Douglas debates, such as neither Nicolay and Hay nor Herndon gave. Of Lincoln’s lucidity of reasoning, even in those days, he drew a picture more compact and convincing than even Beveridge has drawn.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook