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 euphonous
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.
The Assembly which he entered was composed of eighty-one
members,--twenty-six senators, 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 about
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 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 no superfluities--three
dollars a day, a cork inkstand, a certain number of quills, and a
limited amount of stationery was all 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.
[Illustration: JOSEPH DUNCAN, GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS DURING LINCOLN'S
FIRST TERM IN THE LEGISLATURE.
Joseph Duncan, Governor of Illinois from 1834 to 1838, was born in
Kentucky in 1794. The son of an officer of the regular army, he,
at nineteen, became a soldier in the war of 1812, and did gallant
service. He removed to Illinois in 1818, and soon became prominent
in the State, serving as a major-general of militia, a State Senator,
and, from 1826 to 1834, as a member of Congress, resigning from
Congress to take the office of Governor. He was at first a Democrat,
but afterwards became a Whig. He was a man of the highest character
and public spirit. He died in 1844.]
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 Wm. L.D. Ewing, Jesse K. Dubois, Stephen T.
Logan, Theodore 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.
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
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 an
organizer did he make any especial impression on the body.