simplicity; for the bridal pair paid her altogether some sixteen or seventeen shillings a week for food and lodging. Under her roof their first child, Robert, was born. Presently, when Lincoln's income justified it, he removed to a comfortable, unpretending house of his own, which he occupied as long as he remained in Springfield. Three other sons were born to him there, but none of them came to maturity.

From the time he left the Legislature and entered on his partnership with Logan—a year or two before his marriage-Lincoln devoted more of his energy to his profession, steadily rising in the esteem of his companions on the Eighth Circuit, as a conscientious, just and able lawyer. As might be surmised from what we already know of him, he was powerful in his appeals both to the reason and the emotion of the jury. His arguments were candid and convincing because he thought clearly, felt warmly, knew his facts and was a master of exposition. He was as honest a lawyer as old Sir Thomas More, and steadily refused cases in which he could not conscientiously support his client's cause. Indeed, when his sense of justice was not enlisted, his powers of persuasion were paralyzed and he made but a poor advocate.

He was not a learned, perhaps he was not even a great lawyer, in any technical sense; but in the Illinois of 1840 to 1860, it seems probable that he was the one man of all the bar most effective for justice. Singleness of sight, originality of thought, shrewdness and mastery of resources, sound practical knowledge, and common-sense dashed with a powerful vein of pathetic eloquence, and another of satire, and all interwoven together by his inimitable gift of

appropriate anecdote, rendered Lincoln more valuable to that community than if these qualities had been replaced by greater method and erudition.

Indeed, at this point, one ought to say frankly, that Lincoln's genius must have been thwarted and hindered from its full development by anything like an ordinary education. The secret of his growth into mastery lay in his having to find his own way, and depend upon his own resources under difficult circumstances. By this process, his mind became exceptionally well-adapted to its tasks, and if one may say so, extraordinarily muscular. There was no flabbiness about his thinking. He never took more material into his mind than it could use and assimilate. In this he was undoubtedly assisted by a certain deliberateness of mental movement very marked in him. His speech was slow. He loved leisure, and had, as we have several times had occasion to note, great power of mentally shutting himself away from his surroundings; thus, on circuit, he was often a somewhat absent spectator even of the mirth of his company. His slowness of reaction to mental stimulus has often been noticed. He observed his own processes with interest and once summing the matter up, he said to Herndon: "I may not emit ideas as rapidly as others, because I am compelled by nature to speak slowly; but when I do throw off a thought, it seems to me, though it comes with some effort, it has force enough to cut its own way and travel a greater distance. . . ."

The life on Circuit was one which he thoroughly enjoyed it was full of movement, Bohemianism and adventure-one of continual intercourse with

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men, and especially with young men, broken by long, solitary rides through forest and prairie. was, in short, a life that gave full play to a personality which could ill have endured the routine of an office, or the respectable dulness of a suburban home.

But if he was thus working hard at a profession, which more than any other was calculated to develop his peculiar powers, his heart was still set upon achieving political distinction. Nearly all of his ablest rivals and companions on the Circuit had a similar aim. It was not until after his own term in Congress, and his consequent disillusionment, that he devoted his undivided energy to the law.

Chapter IV

In Congress

Growth of Anti-slavery Feeling-Lincoln on the Tariff-In Washington —Electioneering-End of the Session-Returns to Springfield.

AT this point we must review the political events of the time as they affected Lincoln's life. The feeling against slavery to which he had so guardedly given expression in his resolutions of 1837, had been continually gaining adherents throughout the Northern States. With the growth of this constitutional antislavery sentiment came a new line of division in politics, a line which now separated the followers of Henry Clay from those of John C. Calhoun, the statesman of South Carolina and at this time the most powerful personality in the Democratic party. While Clay and the Whigs repudiated as revolutionary, the abolitionist demand for immediate emancipation, they hoped for the ultimate extinction of slavery and asserted the right of that free discussion so abhorrent to Southern sentiment.

Calhoun wished to render any attack upon the great domestic institution of the South impossible; and in order to achieve this end he promulgated the celebrated doctrine of "State Rights," which declared the paramountcy of individual States as against Federal interference. With this he also incorporated

the assertion that every assumption that slavery was immoral, sinful or otherwise obnoxious" was unconstitutional. In other words he desired all discussion of the question to be put into the category of treasonable acts.

As the position of parties developed it became clear that Clay's was for the Union, with or without slavery, while Calhoun's followers on the one side and the abolitionists on the other, frankly set their own respective objects before that of the nation per se, and were willing to divide the Union in order to realise

them.

Such was the situation in 1838. But it was becoming yearly more difficult to retain any appearance of neutrality on the question of slavery; and when, in view of the imminent presidential contest, in which he hoped to be elected, Clay had compromised his own personal anti-slavery position in the effort to obtain a larger measure of Southern support, that compromise had seriously affected his standing in the North. Thus he had failed to receive the Whig nomination, which went instead to General Harrison, who, as we have seen, was duly elected.

But hardly had Harrison been inaugurated in 1841, when death overtook him, and his place was filled by the vice-president, Tyler, formerly a Democrat. Under the Southern influences and associations of Washington, Tyler soon reverted to his earlier faith, and forthwith gathered around him a cabinet so Democratic in its complexion that the Whig party deserted him to rally again to Clay, its creator and only real leader. now carried within it, however, the seeds of disruption -seeds of Clay's own sowing. On the issue under

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