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.
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.
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.
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.
CHAPTER XVIII.
LINCOLN’S FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH ANN RUTLEDGE.—THE STORY OF THEIR LOVE.
In the spring of 1835 the young representative from Sangamon returned to New Salem to take up his duties as postmaster and deputy surveyor, and to resume his law studies. He exchanged his rather exalted position for the humbler one, with a light heart. New Salem held all that was dearest in the world to him at that moment, and he went back to the poor little town with a hope, which he had once supposed honor forbade his acknowledging even to himself, glowing warmly in his heart. He loved a young girl of the village, and now for the first time, though he had known her since he first came to New Salem, was he free to tell his love.
One of the most prominent families of the settlement in 1831, when Lincoln first appeared there, was that of James Rutledge. The head of the house was one of the founders of New Salem, and at that time the keeper of the village tavern. He was a high-minded man, of a warm and generous nature, and had the universal respect of the community. He was a South Carolinian by birth, but had lived many years in Kentucky before coming to Illinois. Rutledge came of a distinguished family: one of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence; another was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by appointment of Washington, and another was a conspicuous leader in the American Congress.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN 1858.
From an ambrotype owned by Miss Hattie Gilmer of Pittsfield, Illinois. The Gilmer ambrotype was taken by C. Jackson, in Pittsfield, October 1, 1858, during the Lincoln and Douglas campaign, immediately after Lincoln had made a speech in the public square. Lincoln was the guest of his friend D. H. Gilmer, a lawyer. He sat for two pictures, one of which was finished for Mr. Gilmer. The other picture is supposed to have been destroyed.
The third of the nine children in the Rutledge household was a daughter, Ann Mayes, born in Kentucky, January 7, 1813. When Lincoln first met her she was nineteen years old, and as fresh as a flower. Many of those who knew her at that time have left tributes to her beauty and gentleness, and even to-day there are those living who talk of her with moistened eyes and softened tones. “She was a beautiful girl,” says her cousin, James McGrady Rutledge, “and as bright as she was pretty. She was well educated for that early day, a good conversationalist, and always gentle and cheerful; a girl whose company people liked.” So fair a maid was not, of course, without suitors. The most determined of those who sought her hand was one John McNeill, a young man who had arrived in New Salem from New York soon after the founding of the town. Nothing was known of his antecedents, and no questions were asked. He was understood to be merely one of the thousands who had come West in search of fortune. That he was intelligent, industrious, and frugal, with a good head for business, was at once apparent; for he and Samuel Hill opened a general store, and they soon doubled their capital, and their business continued to grow remarkably. In four years from his first appearance in the settlement, besides having a half-interest in the store, McNeill owned a large farm a few miles north of New Salem. His neighbors believed him to be worth about twelve thousand dollars.
TWO NEW SALEM CHAIRS.
Now owned by Mrs. Samuel Hill, Petersburg, Illinois.