and the lower part of my breeches, and whilst I was growing taller, they were becoming shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my legs that can be seen to this day. If you call this aristocracy I

plead guilty to the charge."

3

Mr. Lincoln was elected by a larger vote than any other candidate. Sangamon County, that had usually gone Democratic, went Whig by more than four hundred majority. The Convention System was now taking root in the west. Some of the members of the legislature of 1836 and 1837, among whom was Stephen A. Douglas, were nominated by conventions, and hereafter the Whigs are compelled to fall into line. Elections are to be conducted no more on the self-nominating plan and personally conducted canvass. But national issues and national parties are to control in state affairs. This change, in the minds of many, was prejudicial to the real interests of state affairs and certainly detracted much from the grotesqueness and individuality displayed in the self-nominating and self-conducted campaign. Men now stood upon the platform of a party, when they accepted a nomination. Mr. Lincoln was hereafter to be a party man, sometimes leading his party, but all the time loyal to it, and seeking to force no movement until the rank and file of his party were abreast with him.

In national politics, at the time of the meeting of the legislature of 1836-37, the country was on the verge of a panic. The deposits of the United States had been withdrawn from the U. S. Bank and deposited in specie-paying state banks. The whigs had passed an act requiring

the funds of the government to be deposited with the states, the act to go into effect Jan. 1st, 1837. A month before this date the Legislature of Illinois met at Vandalia. Thither Mr. Lincoln went with the intention of being an active member. He had been instructed by his constituents to vote for a system of internal improvements. All parts of the state were clamoring for them and men of all parties were of one mind in the matter. Lines of railroads, improvement of rivers, the Illinois canal, and the location of the capital and the setting up of state banks, were the great questions of the session. Members of the legislature interested in one locality swapped votes to other localities for votes in favor of their project. Thus the log-rolling went on till nearly every county in the state shared in the plunder of their common treasury which was recruited by issues of bonds that ought to have paralyzed any sane company of legislators who could foresee the consequences; but they were intoxicated by the spirit of speculation.

Among the schemes in which Mr. Lincoln chiefly figured was the removal of the capital to Springfield. As a member of the Long Nine from Sangamon County-so called because their average height was over six feet-he so skillfully disposed of the votes of himself and his colleagues, in return for votes on behalf of Springfield, that that city was selected as the capital of the state. Ford estimates, in his "History of Illinois," that it was made to cost the state six millions of dollars for the removal of the capital from Vandalia, and naming the men who participated in this reckless legislation and the high po

sitions to which most of them later attained, he declares all of them to be "spared monuments of popular wrath, evincing how safe it is to a politician, but how disastrous it may be to the country to keep along with the present fervor of the people."

Mr. Lincoln, in his part in the proceedings of the leg

islature, obeyed the will of his constituents in locating the capital at Springfield, and the will of the people at large in voting for a general system of improvements at the public expense, and his own judgment was committed to the policy. The fruition of their reckless legislation was debt and disaster,all had sinned and all suffered, and the penalties were not visited upon the legislators who recorded the popular will. More creditable to Lincoln's mind and heart at this session of the state legislature was the protest in which he joined, against the action of the legislature on the subject of slavery. state was more pronounced than Illinois on the subject of repressing the Abolition movement. Illinois had decided once for all, in 1824, that it was not disposed to become a slave state, but its people had no sympathy

Library Chair used by Lincoln during his
Occupancy of the White House.

No

as yet with the movement to interfere with slavery in the South. The name Abolitionist was counted by the people of Illinois as hardly better than Horse-thief and the so-called Black Code of the state, discriminating against negroes whether free or slave would have been a disgrace to Turkey.

In 1836, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had been publishing a moderately anti-slavery paper in St. Louis, moved to Alton, where he found the opposition even stronger than in Missouri, and his press was broken up and thrown into the river. He again set up his press which was to publish a religious paper, and not distinctively an abolition paper, though he claimed the right as an American citizen to publish whatever he pleased on any subject, holding himself answerable to the laws of the country in so doing. Only occasionally, did he discuss the subject of slavery, but so repugnant was abolition sentiment to the people about him that his office was again destroyed. The setting up of another press was followed by his murder in defence of his life and his property. It was during

own.

this state of feeling, that culminated in Lovejoy's murder, that Lincoln bravely wrote a protest against the extreme action of the legislature on the slavery question, and obtained the signature thereto of a colleague with his The resolutions were read and ordered to be spread upon the journal of the house. In these resolutions he stated that he believed that the institution of slavery is founded upon injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrine tends rather to increase than to abate its evils. That the Congress of the United

States has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different states.

That the Congress of the United States has the power under the Constitution to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but that the power ought not to be exercized unless at the request of the people of the district. On this question he saw clearer than his colleagues and came nearest to the view of wise statesmanship that at that stage of the game would make the abolition of slavery the result of growth and of the logic of events, rather than the result of upheaval and revolution. We do not decry the work of the abolitionists, nor would he in his later years. They preached the iniquity of slavery and roused the moral sense of the nation for the final struggle when the hand that wrote the protest of 1838 might write the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, with a possibility of its enforcement. Between these documents lies, perhaps, the most critical period of American history. Lincoln is at length to be the foremost figure of that period, moving without haste, but steadily, to the accomplishment of that supreme act which the impatient Abolitionist would have performed at once, regardless of the wreck and ruin which the attempt at immediate enforcement of his policy would work.

Mr. Lincoln was again elected to the legislature in 1838, and had reached such prominence that he was the candidate of his party for speaker. He was not elected, but remained on the finance committee and took a hand in trying to extricate the state from the almost hopeless bankruptcy into which it had been plunged by the ex