LINCOLN FINALLY DECIDES ON A LEGAL CAREER.—HIS FIRST SESSION IN THE
GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF ILLINOIS.
[Illustration:
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS.
Born at Brandon, Vermont, April 23, 1813; died in Chicago, June 3,
1861. Douglas learned a trade when a boy, but abandoned it to study
law. Obliged to support himself, he went to Illinois in 1833, where
he taught school until admitted to the bar. In 1835 he was elected
State Attorney-General, but resigned at the end of the year, having
been elected to the General Assembly. In 1837 he was appointed
register of the land-office at Springfield; in 1838 was defeated in
a contest for Congress; in 1840 was appointed Secretary of State; in
1841 was elected judge of the Supreme Court of Illinois. From 1843
to 1846 he was in Congress, and for fourteen years after was a
United States Senator. The Lincoln and Douglas debates took place in
his last senatorial canvass. In 1860 Mr. Douglas was the Democratic
candidate for President, and was defeated by Lincoln. He died in
1861.
]
The best thing which Lincoln did in the canvass of 1834 was not winning
votes; it was coming to a determination to read law, not for pleasure,
but as a business. In his autobiographical notes he says: “During the
canvass, in a private conversation, Major John T. Stuart (one of his
fellow-candidates) encouraged Abraham to study law. After the election
he borrowed books of Stuart, took them home with him, and went at it in
good earnest. He never studied with anybody.” He seems to have thrown
himself into the work with an almost impatient ardor. As he tramped back
and forth from Springfield, twenty miles away, to get his law-books, he
read sometimes forty pages or more on the way. Often he was seen
wandering at random across the fields, repeating aloud the points in his
last reading. The subject seemed never to be out of his mind. It was the
great absorbing interest of his life. The rule he gave twenty years
later to a young man who wanted to know how to become a lawyer, was the
one he practised:
[Illustration:
REPORT OF A ROAD SURVEY BY LINCOLN.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
Photographed for this biography from the original, now on file in the
County Clerk’s office, Springfield, Illinois. The survey here
reported was made in pursuance of an order of the County
Commissioners’ Court, September 1, 1834, in which Lincoln was
designated as the surveyor.
]
[Illustration:
A MAP MADE BY LINCOLN OF A PIECE OF ROAD IN MENARD COUNTY,
ILLINOIS.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
Photographed from the original for this biography. This map, which, as
here reproduced, is about one-half the size of the original,
accompanied Lincoln’s report of the survey of a part of the road
between Athens and Sangamon town. For making this map, Lincoln
received fifty cents. He received three dollars for the day he spent
in relocating the road. (See report, page 198.) The road evidently
was located “on good ground,” and was “necessary and proper,” as the
report says, for it is still the main travelled highway leading into
the country south of Athens, Menard County.
]
“Get books, and read and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone’s
‘Commentaries,’ and after reading carefully through, say twice, take up
Chitty’s ‘Pleadings,’ Greenleaf’s ‘Evidence,’ and Story’s ‘Equity,’ in
succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing.”
Having secured a book of legal forms, he was soon able to write deeds,
contracts, and all sorts of legal instruments; and he was frequently
called upon by his neighbors to perform services of this kind. “In
1834,” says Daniel Green Burner, Berry and Lincoln’s clerk, “my father,
Isaac Burner, sold out to Henry Onstott, and he wanted a deed written. I
knew how handy Lincoln was that way, and suggested that we get him. We
found him sitting on a stump. ‘All right,’ said he, when informed what
we wanted. ‘If you will bring me a pen and ink and a piece of paper I
will write it here.’ I brought him these articles, and, picking up a
shingle and putting it on his knee for a desk, he wrote out the deed.”
As there was no practising lawyer nearer than Springfield, Lincoln was
often employed to act the part of advocate before the village squire, at
that time Bowling Green. He realized that this experience was valuable,
and never, so far as known, demanded or accepted a fee for his services
in these petty cases.
Justice was sometimes administered in a summary way in Squire Green’s
court. Precedents and the venerable rules of law had little weight. The
“Squire” took judicial notice of a great many facts, often going so far
as to fill, simultaneously, the two functions of witness and court. But
his decisions were generally just.
James McGrady Rutledge tells a story in which several of Lincoln’s old
friends figure, and which illustrates the legal practices of New Salem.
“Jack Kelso,” says Mr. Rutledge, “owned, or claimed to own, a white hog.
It was also claimed by John Ferguson. The hog had often wandered around
Bowling Green’s place, and he was somewhat acquainted with it. Ferguson
sued Kelso, and the case was tried before ‘Squire’ Green. The plaintiff
produced two witnesses who testified positively that the hog belonged to
him. Kelso had nothing to offer, save his own unsupported claim.
“‘Are there any more witnesses?’ inquired the court.
“He was informed that there were no more.
“‘Well,’ said ‘Squire’ Green, ‘the two witnesses we have heard have
sworn to a —— lie. I know this shoat, and I know it belongs to Jack
Kelso. I therefore decide this case in his favor.’”
An extract from the record of the County Commissioners’ Court
illustrates the nature of the cases that came before the justice of the
peace in Lincoln’s day. It also shows the price put upon the privilege
of working on Sunday, in 1832:
“JANUARY 29, 1832.—Alexander Gibson found guilty of
Sabbath-breaking, and fined 12½ cents. Fine paid into court.
“(Signed) EDWARD ROBINSON, J. P.”
THE ILLINOIS ASSEMBLY OF 1834.
The session of the ninth Assembly began December 1, 1834, and Lincoln
went to the capital, then Vandalia, seventy-five miles southeast of New
Salem, on the Kaskaskia River, in time for the opening. Vandalia was a
town which had been called into existence in 1820 especially to give the
State government an abiding-place. Its very name had been chosen, it is
said, because it “sounded well” for a State capital. As the tradition
goes, while the commissioners were debating what they should call the
town they were making, a wag suggested that it be named Vandalia, in
honor of the Vandals, a tribe of Indians which, said he, had once lived
on the borders of the Kaskaskia; this, he argued, would conserve a local
tradition while giving a euphonious title. The commissioners, pleased
with so good a suggestion, adopted the name. When Lincoln first went to
Vandalia it was a town of about eight hundred inhabitants; its
noteworthy features, according to Peck’s “Gazetteer” of Illinois for
1834, being a brick court-house, a two-story brick edifice “used by
State officers,” “a neat framed house of worship for the Presbyterian
Society, with a cupola and bell,” “a framed meeting-house for the
Methodist Society,” three taverns, several stores, five lawyers, four
physicians, a land-office, and two newspapers. It was a much larger town
than Lincoln had ever lived in before, though he was familiar with
Springfield, then twice as large as Vandalia, and he had seen the cities
of the Mississippi.
[Illustration:
SURVEY OF A SECTION OF LAND BY LINCOLN.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original, in the possession of Z. A. Enos, Springfield,
Illinois. “The Sangamon River runs through this section,” says Mr.
Enos, himself a veteran surveyor, “and the section lines in the
government survey were not extended across, but closed on the river,
without any connection being made between the opposite marginal
corners or lines; and though shown on the government plats as being
continuous straight east or west lines across the river, they were,
in fact, surveyed by the government surveyor as represented by Mr.
Lincoln’s plat.” This plat is also interesting as “showing,” as Mr.
Enos says, “how Illinois lands were valued at that date, as
indicated by the value of the several lots in the school section, as
determined by the trustees, and marked by them on each tract, and at
those estimated values the lots were then subject to purchase.”
]
The Assembly which he entered was composed of eighty-one
members—twenty-six senators and fifty-five representatives. As a rule,
these men were of Kentucky, Tennessee, or Virginia origin, with here and
there a Frenchman. There were but few Eastern men, for there was still a
strong prejudice in the State against Yankees. The close bargains and
superior airs of the emigrants from New England contrasted so
unpleasantly with the open-handed hospitality and the easy ways of the
Southerners and French, that a pioneer’s prospects were blasted at the
start if he acted like a Yankee. A history of Illinois in 1837,
published, evidently, to “boom” the State, cautioned the emigrant that
if he began his life in Illinois by “affecting superior intelligence and
virtue, and catechizing the people for their habits of plainness and
simplicity, and their apparent want of those things which he imagines
indispensable to comfort,” he must expect to be forever, marked as “a
Yankee,” and to have his prospects correspondingly defeated. A
“hard-shell” Baptist preacher of this date showed the feeling of the
people when he said, in preaching of the richness of the grace of the
Lord: “It tuks in the isles of the sea and the uttermust part of the
yeth. It embraces the Esquimaux and the Hottentots, and some, my dear
brethering, go so far as to suppose that it tuks in the poor benighted
Yankees; but _I don’t go that fur_.” When it came to an election of
legislators, many of the people “didn’t go that fur” either.
There was a preponderance of jean suits like Lincoln’s in the Assembly,
and there were occasional coonskin caps and buckskin trousers.
Nevertheless, more than one member showed a studied garb and a courtly
manner. Some of the best blood of the South went into the making of
Illinois, and it showed itself from the first in the Assembly. The
surroundings of the legislators were quite as simple as the attire of
the plainest of them. The court-house, in good old Colonial style, with
square pillars and belfry, was finished with wooden desks and benches.
The State furnished her law-makers few perquisites beyond their three
dollars a day. A cork inkstand, a certain number of quills, and a
limited amount of stationery were all the extras an Illinois legislator
in 1834 got from his position. Scarcely more could be expected from a
State whose revenues from December 1, 1834, to December 1, 1836, were
only about one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, with
expenditures during the same period amounting to less than one hundred
and sixty-five thousand dollars.
Lincoln thought little of these things, no doubt. To him the absorbing
interest was the men he met. To get acquainted with them, measure them,
compare himself with them, and discover wherein they were his superiors
and what he could do to make good his deficiency—this was his chief
occupation. The men he met were good subjects for such study. Among them
were William L. D. Ewing, Jesse K. Dubois, Stephen T. Logan, Thomas
Ford, and Governor Duncan—men destined to play large parts in the
history of the State. One whom he met that winter in Vandalia was
destined to play a great part in the history of the nation—the
Democratic candidate for the office of State attorney for the first
judicial district of Illinois—a man four years younger than Lincoln (he
was only twenty-one at the time); a new-comer, too, in the State, having
arrived about a year before, under no very promising auspices either,
for he had only thirty-seven cents in his pockets, and no position in
view; but a man of metal, it was easy to see, for already he had risen
so high in the district where he had settled, that he dared contest the
office of State attorney with John J. Hardin, one of the most successful
lawyers of the State. This young man was Stephen A. Douglas. He had come
to Vandalia from Morgan County to conduct his campaign, and Lincoln met
him first in the halls of the old court-house, where he and his friends
carried on with success their contest against Hardin.
[Illustration:
LINCOLN IN 1861.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From a photograph loaned by Mr. Frank A. Brown of Minneapolis,
Minnesota. This beautiful photograph was taken, probably early in
1861, by Alexander Hesler of Chicago. It was used by Leonard W.
Volk, the sculptor, in his studies of Lincoln.
]
The ninth Assembly gathered in a more hopeful and ambitious mood than
any of its predecessors. Illinois was feeling well. The State was free
from debt. The Black Hawk War had stimulated the people greatly, for it
had brought a large amount of money into circulation. In fact, the
greater portion of the eight to ten million dollars the war had cost,
had been circulated among the Illinois volunteers. Immigration, too, was
increasing at a bewildering rate. In 1835 the census showed a population
of 269,974. Between 1830 and 1835 two-fifths of this number had come in.
In the northeast, Chicago had begun to rise. “Even for Western towns”
its growth had been unusually rapid, declared Peck’s “Gazetteer” of
1834; the harbor building there, the proposed Michigan and Illinois
canal, the rise in town lots—all promised to the State a great
metropolis. To meet the rising tide of prosperity, the legislators of
1834 felt that they must devise some worthy scheme, so they chartered a
new State bank, with a capital of one million five hundred thousand
dollars, and revived a bank which had broken twelve years before,
granting it a charter of three hundred thousand dollars. There was no
surplus money in the State to supply the capital; there were no trained
bankers to guide the concern; there was no clear notion of how it was
all to be done; but a banking capital of one million eight hundred
thousand dollars would be a good thing in the State, they were sure; and
if the East could be made to believe in Illinois as much as her
legislators believed in her, the stocks would go; and so the banks were
chartered.
But even more important to the State than banks was a highway. For
thirteen years plans of the Illinois and Michigan canal had been
constantly before the Assembly. Surveys had been ordered, estimates
reported, the advantages extolled, but nothing had been done. Now,
however, the Assembly, flushed by the first thrill of the coming “boom,”
decided to authorize a loan of a half-million on the credit of the
State. Lincoln favored both these measures. He did not, however, do
anything especially noteworthy for either of the bills, nor was the
record he made in other directions at all remarkable. He was placed on
the committee of public accounts and expenditures, and attended meetings
with great fidelity. His first act as a member was to give notice that
he would ask leave to introduce a bill limiting the jurisdiction of
justices of the peace—a measure which he succeeded in carrying through.
He followed this by a motion to change the rules, so that it should not
be in order to offer amendments to any bill after the third reading,
which was not agreed to; though the same rule, in effect, was adopted
some years later, and is to this day in force in both branches of the
Illinois Assembly. He next made a motion to take from the table a report
which had been submitted by his committee, which met a like fate. His
first resolution, relating to a State revenue to be derived from the
sales of the public lands, was denied a reference, and laid upon the
table. Neither as a speaker nor as an organizer did he make any especial
impression on the body.
[Illustration:
MAP OF ALBANY, ILLINOIS. MADE BY LINCOLN.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
The original of this plat is owned by Mr. J. Davidson Burns of
Kalamazoo, Michigan, to whose courtesy we owe the right of
reproduction.
]