“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.
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.
