Lincoln found that Crothers’ use of the chicken bones made the technical medical evidence completely comprehensible, and he immediately decided to adopt the same technique in the courtroom. It would not be the only time that the frontier-bred Lincoln would use farm-related metaphors to make his points to a jury or, as president, to Congress and the American people.

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During the well-attended, week-long trial, 15 doctors and 21 other witnesses testified on behalf of the plaintiff. The defendants also called upon a bevy of medical men to buttress their claims. Many years after the trial, Dr. Crothers’ daughter Lulu wrote that she had been told of an exchange that took place during Lincoln’s cross-examination of Fleming on the witness stand. When Lincoln asked the plaintiff if he were able to walk, she related, Fleming answered that he could, “but my leg is short, so I have to limp.” At that, Miss Crothers continued, Lincoln dramatically replied: “Well! What I would advise you is to get down on your knees and thank your Heavenly Father, and also these two Doctors that you have any legs to stand on at all!”

Lincoln saved his lesson on how bones heal for his summation to the jury. Then, holding up two chicken-leg bones–one from an old chicken and the other from a young one–he demonstrated to the jury their respective texture and resilience. The bones of the young bird were supple, while those of the old chicken were brittle and broke easily. Fleming, being in middle age, Lincoln pointed out, would have bones more closely resembling the latter than the former. Unable, according to Lulu Crothers, to “remember about the lime or calcium deposited in older peoples’ bones,” Lincoln told the jurors that the bone from the older chicken, “has the starch all taken out of it–as it is in childhood.”

This graphic demonstration had the desired effect on some of the jurors, a majority of whom probably entered the courtroom predisposed toward Fleming and prejudiced against the more affluent defendants. After 18 hours of deliberation, the jurors failed to reach a decision. Judge Davis put the case over to the fall term of court.

By September, the doctors had suffered the loss of another vital witness from the Bloomington area. Isaac Small, who had helped to administer the chloroform to Fleming at the time the attempt was made to re-break his right thigh bone, had moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Judge Davis’s decision to grant this latest continuance in the Fleming suit, however, was based more on Lincoln’s preoccupation at the time with an important regional case involving the Rock Island Bridge–the first built over the Mississippi River–and the importance of east-west transportation to the expanding United States.

Just before 1857 came to an end, Brier and Birch, two of the other attorneys for the defense, asked the judge for a change of venue for the case on the grounds that Fleming had “undue influence over the minds” of the people of McLean County, where the first trial had been heard. The plaintiff’s lawyers not objecting, Davis ordered the case transferred to the Logan County Circuit Court, whose county seat of Lincoln was, ironically, named for opposing counsel.

The retrial of the case never took place, both sides having agreed to a settlement before the March 1858 court term began. The doctors named in the suit agreed to pay the fees incurred by Fleming, whose expense probably totaled less than a thousand dollars.

The “Chicken Bone Case” illustrates the great communicative skills of Abraham Lincoln, who understood his audiences–in this case, the jury–and used wit and metaphor to explain complex issues. Soon after the Fleming suit was settled, Lincoln became preoccupied with the race for U.S. senator from Illinois. Nominated by the new Republican Party in June, Lincoln engaged in a series of debates with the Democratic incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas, that propelled him onto the national political stage.

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