Rice, Edward Y.
b. February 8, 1820, in Logan County, Kentucky; d. April 16, 1883, in Hillsboro, Illinois. After moving to Illinois with his
family in 1835, Edward Y. Rice attended Shurtleff College in Alton, Illinois. He studied law
under John Palmer, was admitted to the bar in 1845, and moved to Hillsboro, Illinois, to begin the practice of law. A Democrat
in
politics, Rice was elected recorder of Montgomery County in 1847. In 1849, voters elected him to the Illinois House of
Representatives and also as Montgomery County judge. In 1853, circuit court judge Charles Emerson appointed Rice as master
in
chancery of the Montgomery County Circuit Court. Voters elected Rice as judge of the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, which included
Lincoln’s home county of Sangamon, in 1857. Judge Rice presided over at least 470 cases in which Lincoln was an attorney.
Rice
served as a member of the 1870 Illinois constitutional convention. That same year, voters elected Rice to a single term in
Congress, and he resigned his seat on the judicial circuit.
Daily Illinois State Register, 17 April 1883, 3:4; John J. Duff, A. Lincoln: Prairie Lawyer
(New York: Bramhall House, 1960), 364; John Palmer, ed., The Bench and Bar of Illinois: Historical and
Reminiscent (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1899), 1:155; 2:987-89; United States Biographical Dictionary:
Illinois Dictionary (Chicago: American Biographical Dictionary, 1876), 276-77; Albert A. Woldman, Lawyer
Lincoln (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1936), 109. Illustration courtesy of the Abraham
Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL.