The controversy was continued for several weeks. General Adams used, mostly, the columns of the "Springfield Republican," filling six columns of a single issue. He charged that the assault upon him was the result of a conspiracy between "a knot of lawyers, doctors, and others," who wished to ruin his reputation. Lincoln's answers to Adams are most emphatic. In one case, quoting several of his assertions, he pronounced them "all as false as hell, as all this community must know." Adams's replies were always voluminous. "Such is the turn which things have lately taken," wrote Lincoln, "that when General Adams writes a book I am expected to write a commentary on it." Replying to Adams's denunciation of the lawyers, he said: "He attempted to impose himself upon the community as a lawyer, and he actually carried the attempt so far as to induce a man who was under the charge of murder to entrust the defence of his life to his hands, and finally took his money and got him hanged. Is this the man that is to raise a breeze in his favor by abusing lawyers? ... If he is not a lawyer, he _is_ a liar; for he proclaimed himself a lawyer, and got a man hanged by depending on him." Lincoln concluded: "Farewell, General. I will see you again at court, if not before--when and where we will settle the question whether you or the widow shall have the land." The widow did get the land, but this was not the worst thing that happened to Adams. The climax was reached when the "Sangamo Journal" published a long editorial (written by Lincoln, no doubt) on the controversy, and followed it with a copy of an indictment found against Adams in Oswego County, New York, in 1818. The offence charged in this indictment was the forgery of a deed by Adams--"a person of evil name and fame and of a wicked disposition."