Anthony Thornton and Abraham Lincoln led fairly similar early lives: both were born in Kentucky, were tall, were Whigs, began practicing law in Illinois in 1836, and served in the Illinois legislature, though Thornton was college-educated and read law in an uncle’s law office while Lincoln had little schooling and was self-taught in the law. Thornton served in the constitutional convention in 1847, when Lincoln was elected to the U. S. Congress. After 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act destroyed the Whig Party and sent the two men onto different political paths, with Thornton, concerned about the anti-slavery zeal of the Republicans, choosing the Democrats while Lincoln took several years before finally calling himself a Republican, although they remained friends. Thornton supported Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois Senate race and served as a presidential elector for Douglas in 1860. During the Civil War, he was a pro-war Democrat, sold bonds to pay bounties for Shelby County volunteers, and won election to the U. S. Congress in 1864, taking office in March 1865, one month before Lincoln’s assassination. After the war, Thornton served one term in the U. S. House on the Committee of Claims, was elected to the Illinois Supreme Court in 1870, heard more than 1,500 cases, and wrote approximately 200 opinions during his four-year tenure. In 1877, he became the first president of the Illinois State Bar Association and served three terms before returning to the law and dying in Shelbyville in 1904. Thornton also helped protect Lincoln’s professional reputation in 1853, when Oldham and Hemingway, partners with Lincoln’s deceased father-in-law Robert Todd, sued Lincoln in a Kentucky court over money allegedly not paid from a note he had collected against Shelbyville residents William F. Thornton and Marshall Basye; when Lincoln came to Shelbyville to take William Thornton’s deposition and found him away, Anthony Thornton, who had served as attorney for William Thornton and Basye and knew the circumstances, testified that “Lincoln has never had anything to do with said note,” leading the plaintiffs to dismiss their lawsuit.