Abe Lincoln, trial lawyer

The Montana GOP E-Brief says "a lot of Montanans just aren’t comfortable with Trial Lawyers running the state," which is true, but it set me wondering why no Republicans have disowned the party's greatest trial lawyer, Abe Lincoln. That set me off wandering until I found this, which is Lincoln on the Mexican War (spelling and punctuation from the original):

Again, it is a singular omission in this message, that it, no where intimates when the President expects the war to terminate. At it's beginning, Genl. Scott was, by this same President, driven into disfavor, if not disgrace, for intimating that peace could not be conquered in less than three or four months. But now, at the end of about twenty months, during which time our arms have given us the most splendid successes--every department, and every part, land and water, officers and privates, regulars and volunteers, doing all that men could do, and hundreds of things which it had ever before been thought men could not do,--after all this, this same President gives us a long message, without showing us, that, as to the end, he himself, has, even an imaginary conception. As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscious, more painful than all his mental perplexity!"

"The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln," Volume 1, Edited by Roy P. Basler, Rutgers University Presss, New Brunswich, New Jersey, 1953, pages 431-42

The man was not only a lawyer but a traitor!