The capitol building where Lincoln would work was actually the second state capitol erected in Vandalia, the first having burned in December 1823. The plain two-story brick structure on the west side of the public square was ten years old. In addition to meeting rooms for the House and Senate, the capitol contained a courtroom for the Illinois Supreme Court. When Lincoln walked up the stairs to the second floor, he saw that, because the building had been constructed so quickly, the floors sagged and the walls bulged. Falling plaster would often interrupt debates.
ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1834, Lincoln arrived for his first session in the Illinois legislature. At twenty-five, Lincoln was the second youngest of the fifty-five representatives. Thirty-six representatives were also starting their first term, yet all brought more experience than Lincoln to the task.
On the first day of the new session, most members wore long black coats, white shirts with collars held high by stocks, and a wide band of scarf around their necks. Farmers constituted the largest group in the general assembly; about one-fourth of the members were lawyers. Lincoln participated in drawing lots for seats at a series of long tables, each built to accommodate three members. Each member had an inkstand made of cork. Sandboxes placed around the floor accommodated the many legislators who chewed tobacco. Candles lit the room. A single water pail was present with three tin cups.
On December 3, 1834, the third day of the session, the state of Illinois celebrated its sixteenth birthday. Illinois had grown rapidly from forty-five thousand inhabitants in 1818 to more than two hundred thousand people in 1834. The vast majority of the immigrants were frontier farmers.
Two days later, Lincoln rose for the first time and, in a high tenor voice with a Kentucky accent, intoned, “Mr. Speaker.” He introduced his first bill, “an act to limit the jurisdiction of Justices of the Peace.” Lincoln’s bill ran into difficulties; it was assigned to a committee, and then to a second special committee. Over the next few weeks, he watched his bill bog down in the arcane processes of state legislatures, never to resurface.
In his first weeks in Vandalia, Lincoln answered “present” for each day’s session. The roll call did not mark the times he slipped away in the midst of legislative sessions to observe the proceedings of the state supreme court. He had attended local courts in Indiana and Illinois, and he did not want to miss the opportunity to witness the proceedings of a state supreme court.
In the evenings, Lincoln joined the lively conversations around the fireplace in the various inns. Here he heard not simply political gossip and debate, but also legal shoptalk by lawyers who had come to Vandalia to present their cases before the supreme court. These ambitious lawyers, encouraged by alcoholic spirits, spoke freely of the fees they were receiving for their labors.
Along with his public duties in the legislature, Lincoln began to develop another skill while in Vandalia. Long an avid reader of newspapers, Lincoln started writing for them. Simeon Francis, editor of the Sangamo Journal, the Whig newspaper in Springfield, was eager to have firsthand reports on the legislative session. On December 13, 1834, the Sangamo Journal printed a brief letter “From Our Correspondent” summarizing five significant measures that would come before the legislature in the session. Two more letters “From Our Correspondent” would appear in January and February. The letters were from an anonymous hand, but the style and substance sounded like Lincoln, replete with humor.
WITHIN A MONTH, Lincoln had earned the right to be heard in the legislature. In the midst of a long report on internal improvements, William Dawson reminded the House that sometime before, they had moved to fill the post of surveyor for Schuyler County because a report had been received that the incumbent had died. The House nominated and the Senate confirmed Samuel McHatton to be the new surveyor. Representative Dawson had just learned, however, that the incumbent was in fact alive, and now that there was no vacancy, he moved that the nomination of McHatton “be vacated.”
Lincoln stood up to protest. He called Dawson’s motion an irregularity of parliamentary procedure. Lincoln pointed out the illogicality of having no vacancy, and yet two surveyors. What could the general assembly do? Lincoln offered a solution. “There was no danger of the new surveyor’s ousting the old one so long as he persisted not to die.” Lincoln then suggested “the propriety of letting matters remain as they were, so that if the old surveyor should hereafter conclude to die, there would be a new one ready made without troubling the legislature.”
Lincoln found his legislative voice with irony. He discovered in his first session that humor went a long way in breaking down walls in partisan legislative bodies. Lincoln made an impression on the Speaker, James Semple, a Jacksonian Democrat from Madison. The Speaker appointed Lincoln to ten special committees, and he called upon him regularly to speak to key motions.
The house doorkeeper blew out the candles on February 13, 1835, and the first legislative session of the Ninth General Assembly concluded on the day after Lincoln’s twenty-sixth birthday. In his first service as a legislator, Lincoln mostly listened. He was regular in his attendance and learned the political ropes from his roommate Stuart, the Whig leader. After receiving the second part of his salary, $258, Lincoln boarded the stage back to Springfield.
When Lincoln came home, his old boss, Abner Ellis, believed he saw a more self-confident and able Lincoln. “I always thought that Mr. Lincoln improved rapidly in Mind & Manners after his return from Vandalia his first session in the Legislature.”
DESPITE HIS NEW SALARY, Lincoln returned home to financial hardship. His former store partner, William F. Berry, had continued his drinking and died on January 10, 1835, leaving considerable debt. Lincoln himself owed more than five hundred dollars on their failed store, and because he and Berry were partners, Lincoln became responsible for Berry’s debts as well. Taken together, Lincoln’s liability was something over $1,100, a large sum of money in 1835, and equivalent to $25,000 in today’s dollars.
In the following months, creditors pressed various judgments against Lincoln. He had to put forward his horse, saddle, bridle, surveying instruments—and his house—to pay off his debts to just one creditor. When Lincoln’s goods were put up for sale, James Short, a close friend in New Salem, unbeknownst to Lincoln, bid successfully on all of them and then returned them to Lincoln.
Lincoln’s debt was not unusual in a pioneer life based on subsistence farming and a barter economy. It was common for debtors to skip out on their debts, escaping their creditors in the middle of the night. Lincoln’s first employer in New Salem, Denton Offutt, did so. Captain Vincent Bogue, owner of the Talisman, fled from Springfield.
But Lincoln stayed. He promised all his creditors that he would make good on his debt. He began calling it his “National Debt,” suggesting not only that his debt was huge, but that his debtors were from as far away as Cincinnati. Because of this, Lincoln could not pay off his debt in work or in barter; he had to pay it off over time in cash.
From this debacle Lincoln earned a nickname that would stick with him his whole life: “Honest Abe.” Yes, Lincoln wanted to become a self-made man, but he was learning that his reputation depended on the opinion of others. His venture with the Lincoln-Berry store may have failed, but his decision to stay and repay his neighbors raised his esteem among a growing circle of friends.
DURING THE CAMPAIGN for the legislature in 1834, Lincoln’s friend John Todd Stuart, a successful attorney, had urged Lincoln to study law. Stuart had taken a liking to Lincoln when they served together as volunteers in the Black Hawk War. In Vandalia, Stuart saw potential in Lincoln and went out of his way to encourage him to consider the vocation.
Lincoln had begun reading law books shortly after his arrival in New Salem. He drafted legal documents for his neighbors from an old form book, drawing up a document for James Eastep for a tract of land in 1831, for John Ferguson for the “right and title” for the New Salem ferry in 1832, and several deeds recorded in 1833 and 1834. Jason Duncan, a New Salem doctor,
recounted that “as there [were] no Attorneys nearer than Springfield his services were sometimes sought in suits, at law.”
Lincoln began arguing cases before the local justice of the peace, Bowling Green. Lincoln formed a friendship with Green, a round man with a large laugh who frequently entertained Lincoln in his home. Lincoln read books in Green’s small law library, and he encouraged Lincoln to write out simple legal forms. In Vandalia, Lincoln observed how many of his fellow legislators were both politicians and lawyers, and how Stuart used that prestige to help him become the leader of the Whig minority.
In 1860, Lincoln recalled that in 1834 “he thought of trying to study law,” but “thought he could not succeed at that without a better education.” Stuart offered to become his mentor.
Like Lincoln, Stuart was from Kentucky, but in everything else the pair could not have been more different. A strikingly handsome man with a captivating manner, he had graduated from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Arriving in Springfield in 1828 at barely twenty-one, he had rapidly established a successful law practice. He was elected to the state legislature in 1832 at age twenty-five and quickly became a leader in county and state politics.
After his first session in the state legislature, Lincoln returned to New Salem in the winter of 1835 determined to become a lawyer. At that time, there were only seven law schools in the United States—none in Illinois. In 1832, Massachusetts lawyer Josiah Quincy had described the rudimentary state of the study of law: “Regular instruction there was none; examination as to progress in acquaintance with the law,—none; occasional lectures,—none; oversight as to general attention and conduct,—none.” Aspiring lawyers generally learned the profession by studying and clerking in the law office of an experienced attorney.
Stuart, as Lincoln’s guide, gave his protégé the run of his law library in the offices of Stuart and Dummer in Springfield, located twenty miles from New Salem. He did not ask Lincoln to be his law clerk but rather gave him every resource at his disposal, believing that Lincoln had both the ability and self-discipline to prepare on his own.
Stuart’s law partner Henry Dummer, a New Englander who migrated to Springfield in 1833, recalled how Lincoln appeared in these initial visits. “He was the most uncouth looking young man I ever saw.” But Lincoln grew on him. Lincoln “seemed to have but little to say; seemed to feel timid, with a tinge of sadness visible in the countenance, but when he did talk all this disappeared for the time and he demonstrated that he was both strong and acute.” Dummer concluded, “He surprised us more and more at every visit.”
Lincoln approached the study of law with the same single-minded discipline he had previously applied to the study of grammar, elocution, and surveying. He bought Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, the standard legal treatise of the day, at an auction. Blackstone, who had been professor of common law at Oxford, wrote his Commentaries between 1765 and 1769. Lincoln, in his own words, “went at it in good earnest.” He discovered in Blackstone an ordered and comprehensive system that appealed to his rational sensibilities.
Henry McHenry, who married the sister of Jack Armstrong, the wrestler, recalled that in good weather Lincoln could be seen reading his law books sitting “on a goods box under a large white oak tree in Salem, barefooted as he came into the world.” In the campaign biography he wrote in 1860, William Dean Howells elaborated on that description.
His favorite place of study was a wooded knoll near New Salem, where he threw himself under a wide-spreading oak, and expansively made a reading desk of the hillside. Here he would pore over Blackstone day after day shifting his position as the sun rose and sank, so as to keep in the shade, and utterly unconscious of everything but the principles of common law.
LINCOLN DECLARED HIS CANDIDACY for a second term in the Illinois General Assembly on March 19, 1836. Only a few days later, Lincoln took his first formal step toward becoming a lawyer when he entered his name on the record of the Sangamon Circuit Court as a person of good moral character. In these two actions, Lincoln put himself on the dual track of politics and law that he would pursue for almost the next twenty-five years.
Lincoln stated his case for reelection in the Sangamo Journal. “In your paper of last Saturday, I see a communication over the signature of ‘Many Voters,’ in which the candidates who are announced in the Journal, are called upon to ‘show their hands.’ Agreed. Here’s mine!”
A persistent question in American politics is this: Who does a representative represent? Does the legislator vote the will of the constituents or his or her own will? Lincoln, having served one term, made the answer to this question the heart of his announcement. “If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon my constituents, as well those oppose, as those that support me.” At the beginning of his political career, Lincoln laid down a value that would become a lodestar to guide him in his future political profession. “While acting as their representative, I shall be governed by their will, on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will is; and upon others, I shall do what my own judgment teaches me will best advance their interests.”
Lincoln believed that an elected politician held an office for only a brief time at best; the people were the permanent representatives in a republic. In his first session in Vandalia, he had already encountered too many politicians who did not feel the need to be guided by the wishes of the people they represented.
In 1836, as Lincoln embarked on his reelection campaign, President Andrew Jackson, whom Whigs derisively called “King Andrew I,” declined to run for a third term. The Democrats, wanting to avoid a divisive contest, decided to rally around a single candidate. Their convention chose Jackson’s vice president, Martin Van Buren. The Whigs, not yet organized at a national level and with no national nominating convention, ended up with three sectional candidates, Daniel Webster from New England, William Henry Harrison from the Midwest, and Hugh L. White from the South.
Lincoln concluded the announcement of his candidacy in 1836 by declaring, “If alive on the first Monday in November, I shall vote for Hugh L. White for President.” Lincoln had said nothing about presidential politics in his first announcement for the legislature in 1832.
The power of President Andrew Jacksons presidency hovered over Lincoln’s first years in politics. He became a Whig partly in response to “King Andrew I,” caricatured here as a despotic monarch. Whigs accused Jackson of usurping the power of Congress.
With his personal popularity rising in 1834, an off year for presidential elections, he had won with the support of both parties. His decision to proclaim his choice for president in his 1836 campaign announcement—White was an anti-Jackson Southern Whig senator from Tennessee—indicated the growing prominence of national politics in local elections. Lincoln began actively campaigning in the middle of June 1836. Seventeen citizen politicians had declared their candidacies for the Illinois legislature in Sangamon County, and they all traveled on horseback from one grove to the next. The speeches began in the morning and continued into the afternoon, until each candidate had had his opportunity to speak. Robert L. Wilson, a Whig candidate from Athens, described Lincoln’s speaking style and content. “Mr. Lincoln took a leading part, espouseing the Whig side of all those questions, manifesting Skill and tact in offensive and defensive debates, presenting his arguments with force and ability.”
On Election Day, August 1, 1836, Lincoln received the highest number of votes of the seventeen candidates for the legislature, coming in first in New Salem and third in Springfield. That year, with a growth in population, Sangamon County sent to Vandalia a larger delegation of seven House members and two senators. Most of them still had more experience than Lincoln. All of the newly elected legislators were over six feet tall and were promptly dubbed “the Long Nine,” echoing an expression used by sailors to describe a long-barreled cannon that fired nine-pound balls. Just as the longer barrel gave the gun greater range, “the Long Nine” were abou
t to expand the range of the influence of Sangamon County.
ALTHOUGH HE WAS only twenty-seven and beginning his second term, when Lincoln returned to Vandalia in December 1836, the Whigs elected him their floor leader, a sign of his growing standing among his colleagues on the Whig side of the floor.
The tenth session would be long remembered for the remarkable number of future national leaders it included. “The present legislature embraces, perhaps, more talent than any legislative body ever before assembled in Illinois,” wrote the Sangamo Journal. But the editor could not have predicted that three future governors, six future U.S. senators, eight congressmen, a cabinet member, a number of generals, two presidential candidates, and one future president would eventually emerge from the session.
Lincoln soon met a man whose life and career would forever become linked with his own. Stephen A. Douglas would become better known than many presidents, but that winter at Vandalia he was a twenty-three-year-old attorney from Morgan County elected to his first term. He stood barely five feet tall, had thick brown hair and a face that communicated strength, with a strong jaw and an aggressive chin. Because of his height, some thought he looked like a boy among men, until he spoke. His deep baritone voice commanded attention.
Douglas was born in Brandon, Vermont, on April 23, 1813. Growing up in green mountains and valleys, he studied at the Brandon Academy. In 1830, his family moved to a farm near Canandaigua, by the shimmering lake of the same name, in the Finger Lakes region of western New York. Here he continued his education at the Canandaigua Academy and began to study law.
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