So he left.
He went to Iowa, where the towns were young and
nothing was settled yet. Keokuk in 1850 wasn’t pretty. There was mud
everywhere, steamboats coughed smoke into the sky, and strangers drifted in
with the river current. Men trying to become something they weren’t yet. Miller
stepped onto the landing with a medical degree in one hand and a law license in
the other, not sure which one would carry him farther.
People trusted him sooner than he expected. He
spoke plainly. He didn’t pretend to know more than he did. When he knew more,
he didn’t make a show of it. One lawyer said Miller “could read an entire
library before breakfast,” and maybe that was true. He read because he couldn’t
help himself. Books steadied him. They made the world feel a little less
chaotic.
Keokuk leaned Democratic, but Miller leaned toward
anything that looked honest and open. Slavery had chased him out of Kentucky,
and he didn’t plan on letting it creep into Iowa. “A nation cannot be half free
and half pretending,” he said once. It wasn’t meant to be a famous line. It was
just the truth as he saw it. He joined the Young Republican Party because it seemed
to move toward that truth.
Word spread. By 1862, people in Washington were
hearing about the sharp-minded lawyer from Iowa who worked like a man trying to
outrun himself. Lincoln needed new Supreme Court justices—men who wouldn’t
flinch when the war pushed the Constitution to its limits. Miller’s name came
up. Lincoln looked at his record, at his steadiness, and said yes.
