A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 5
The Whole People of Sangamon 1834–37

WHILE ACTING AS THEIR REPRESENTATIVE, I SHALL BE GOVERNED BY THEIR WILL, ON ALL SUBJECTS. … 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.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Letter to the editor of the Sangamo Journal, June 13, 1836

AT 6 A.M. ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 1834, ABRAHAM LINCOLN boarded the weekly stage in Springfield for the ninety-five-mile journey to Vandalia, the Illinois state capital. The coach, crowded with other Sangamon County representatives, bumped along but Lincoln didn’t mind because of his eagerness to take his seat in the Ninth General Assembly of Illinois. At some point in the journey, he must have thought about how far he had traveled in the little more than three years since he first arrived in New Salem.
Before leaving for Vandalia, Lincoln had asked his friend Coleman Smoot, a prosperous farmer, “Did you vote for me?” Smoot told him, “I did.”
Lincoln replied, then “you must loan me money to buy Suitable Clothing for I want to take a decent appearance in the Legislature.”
Smoot loaned him two hundred dollars. Lincoln promptly paid sixty dollars for the first suit he ever owned.
The stage traveled a meandering route by way of Macoupin Point and Hillsboro. After thirty-four hours, the driver finally blew his horn to signal they had arrived in Vandalia. Lincoln claimed his bag and followed John Todd Stuart, a prominent Whig leader from Springfield, to one of the inns on the town square where they would share a room and a bed. Few people arriving for that session of the Illinois legislature knew anything about Lincoln, but he had traveled a long way in his twenty-five years and came to Vandalia determined to make his mark.
LINCOLN ARRIVED IN a capital invented by politicians. Vandalia had been founded in 1819 as the second capital of the new state of Illinois because the first capital, Kaskaskia, had become untenable due to routine flooding from the Mississippi River. The planners built Vandalia on a heavily timbered bluff in the wilderness above the Kaskaskia River. The Illinois legislature first met there in December 1820.
By December 1834, the second capital had grown to a town of eight hundred to nine hundred people. During the biennial sixty-to seventy-day sessions of the legislature, the town crowded to overflowing with fifty-five representatives and twenty-six senators, as well as lobbyists, office seekers, and hangers on. The state supreme court also met during these sessions, which brought in lawyers, plaintiffs, and witnesses. The small hotels on the town square—the Vandalia Inn, Charter’s Tavern, National Hotel, New White House, and the Sign of the Green Tree—each housed thirty to forty people. They were called “boarding taverns” because legislators and lawyers packed their taprooms in the evenings to enjoy strong drink, cigars, and political discussion. Although a statute prohibited it, gambling flourished in all the hotels during legislative sessions.
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 about 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.
On January 1, 1833, Douglas left school to study law full-time on his own. Six months later, twenty years old and confident in his own abilities, he decided to leave his family to seek his fame and fortune in the “great west.” After brief stops in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Louisville, he arrived in St. Louis and called on Edward G. Bates, a former Missouri congressman, but Bates had no opportunities in his law office. On the boat Douglas had heard many fellow immigrants speak glowingly of Illinois, so he set his sights on the prairie state on the other side of the Mississippi.
In November 1833, as Lincoln worked in New Salem as postmaster and surveyor, Douglas stepped off the stage in Jacksonville, Illinois, with five dollars in his pocket. To support himself, he opened a school in nearby Winchester while he continued his law studies. In March 1834, Douglas was examined by the Illinois Supreme Court and granted a certificate to practice law. He set up office in the Jacksonville courthouse.


Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln met in Vandalia during Lincolns second term in the Illinois state legislature. Small of stature, Douglas was a powerful Democratic politician who would cross paths with Lincoln again and again in the coming decades.

Politics became his passion. He had read the writings of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton and knew well the Federalist Papers. In his first year in Illinois, he established a reputation as an able political debater. At a courthouse meeting in the spring of 1834, after several of Jacksonville’s foremost lawyers railed against President Andrew Jackson, Douglas spoke for one hour in a vigorous defense of Old Hickory and his war on the Second Bank of the United States. The crowd cheered Douglas’s effort, lifted him to their shoulders, and hailed him the “Little Giant.”
Lincoln and Douglas were both in Vandalia for the beginning of the ninth legislative session in December 1834, Lincoln as a first-time legislator, Douglas as an applicant to become the state’s attorney for the First Judicial District. If Lincoln and Douglas met, neither recorded their meeting; they were destined to meet two years later.
IN DECEMBER 1836, an expansionist fever sweeping across Illinois generated an internal improvements convention in Vandalia prior to the opening of the legislature. Lincoln had campaigned on the issue in 1832, 1834, and 1836. He now led the push for a whole new system of canals, railroads, and roads that would foster growth and development.
Public meetings up and down the state attracted farmers and businessmen demanding the improvements to better their ability to bring products to market, and newspapers added their voices of support. “It is now time TO ACT,” editorialized the Sangamo Journal. Supporters pointed out that other states were moving rapidly ahead with internal improvements and that Illinois must do the same if they were not to lose potential new citizens as they moved west. Each legislator brought to Vandalia ideas for projects that should be built in or through their district. Land speculators, hoping to make huge profits from the many proposals, traveled to Vandalia to lobby the legislature.
A few voices tried to slow the process. No studies had been done, they said. No surveys taken. What would be the cost of this bold new plan? From the beginning of his political career, Lincoln was a fervent believer in internal improvements to boost economic nationalism. Attuned to the rapid developments of the transportation revolution in neighboring states, he had a hard time acknowledging the questions and objections of colleagues concerned about the particular problems and possibilities in Illinois. He argued in the legislature that the improvements would pay for themselves. The pre-assembly convention recommended that the legislature appropriate $10 million to be financed by state bonds.
Governor Joseph Duncan, in his annual message to the legislature, cautioned that the state should provide only one-third of the requested public monies, but the legislators, afraid of private monopolies, raced forward with their plans to fund the entire cost. Lincoln feared the state would be penalized economically if it did not move ahead rapidly. The success of projects in such developed states as New York and Pennsylvania provided a precedent. Some legislators tried to point out that Illinois, a state just emerging from the frontier, did not have the money, manpower, or raw materials of the older, long-settled states. But in a time of expansive plans and hyperbolic rhetoric, not many legislators could focus on the problems when the possibilities seemed so bright.
The House Internal Improvements Committee proposed a $10 million bill for internal improvements on January 9, 1837. The biggest allocation, $3.5 million, was for an Illinois Central Railroad track from Cairo in the south to Galena and the lead mines in the north. Lincoln supported the argument that sister states were “adopting and prosecuting gigantic schemes of improvement” and it was time for “the patriot and enlightened statesmen of Illinois” to act. Governor Duncan threatened to veto the bill. John J. Hardin, a first-term Whig representative from Jacksonville, voiced his concern that the appropriation was precariously large, to no avail.
With Lincoln helping to lead the effort, the House passed the bill on January 31; the Senate followed a few weeks later. The final passage set off wild celebrations. Bonfires were built in the streets of Vandalia. Lincoln and the bill’s supporters hailed its passage as the great step forward that would enable Illinois to take its rightful place as a leading state in the West. By the next morning, people eager to acquire property crowded land offices even as the prices doubled, fueled by the prospects of so many improvements across the state.
The enthusiasm would be short-lived. The national financial panic of 1837, caused in part by unbounded speculation—especially in land—brought economic destruction to Illinois. Confidence waned. Banks suspended transactions. The value of land plunged. Some towns disappeared. Governor Duncan suggested stopping the internal improvements already approved, but Lincoln was adamant that the legislature would not curtail the various construction plans. The legislative boom and the economic bust resulted in a $10 million millstone around the necks of Illinois residents for years to come. Four years after the internal improvements package passed, the state of Illinois had a debt of $15 million, and state bonds sold at fifteen cents on the dollar.
BY THE EARLY 1830S, it had become apparent that growth in Illinois was accelerating in the central and northern parts of the state. Vandalia, although situated north of the first capital, Kaskaskia, was still located in the south. On top of this, the legislators discovered that the newly built third capitol building was already too small. They decided to find a new location for the capital. A number of cities—Alton, Peoria, Jacksonville, Decatur—-jumped into the contest. Springfield also advanced its case.
As the Whig floor leader, Lincoln, along with the Long Nine, represented the largest delegation of any county in the state. They lobbied hard for Springfield as the most central location in Illinois. This effort required all of Lincoln’s legislative skills. He added an amendment obliging the selected city to contribute $50,000 and two acres of land for the new site of state buildings. Lincoln believed the amendment would ensure Springfield’s selection as it was the only city that could afford this new stipulation. One of the Long Nine, Robert T. Wilson, said Lincoln “never for one moment despaired” when on more than one occasion “to all appearances” the bill seemed “beyond resuscitation.” The voting was contentious, with much horse trading, or railroad trading, taking place. One member, disgusted, cast his vote for Purgatory, a place that could not be found on any Illinois map. Finally, on February 28, 1837, on the fourth ballot, the House and Senate voted to establish the new capital in Springfield. Lincoln and the other members of the Long Nine invited one and all to a lavish celebration party at Ebenezer Capps’s tavern, where they consumed eighty-one bottles of champagne and plenty of cigars, oysters, almonds, and raisins.
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ALARMED ABOUT THE RISE OF ABOLITIONISM and its call for interference with the institution of slavery in the Southern states, Governor Duncan brought to the legislature memorials from Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, New York, and Connecticut. On January 12, 1837, a resolution deplored “the unfortunate condition of our fellow men, whose lots are cast in thralldom in a land of liberty and peace,” but stated that “the arm of the General Government has no power to strike the fetters from them.” The purpose of the resolution was both to denounce the abolitionist societies and affirm “that the right of property in slaves, is sacred to the slave-holding States by the Constitution.” The resolution stated that the federal government did not have the right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the “consent” of the citizens of the district. Without much debate, the legislature adopted the resolution by a vote of 77 to 6. Lincoln was one of the six who voted no, his first public stand on the issue of slavery.
Illinois, though counting itself a “free” state, was not so free in the 1830s. In the two decades after Illinois became a state in 1818, the largest number of new settlers came from the South. Slavery persisted in the popular folkways of the state despite the provisions against it in the 1818 constitution. And slavery was growing in Missouri, the state’s neighbor to the west, which shares a long border with Illinois.
As Illinois grew in population, the debate about slavery became more divisive. Immigrants from New England and New York generally settled in northern Illinois. Although they were a small minority of the total population, they had loud antislavery voices. Immigrants from Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky tended to settle in central and southern Illinois, and most were pro-slavery. But not all. Some, like Thomas Lincoln, had immigrated to Illinois precisely because they did not like slavery in their home states.
In the last days of the legislative session, with Lincoln certainly thinking of the congratulations he would be receiving in Springfield for helping to relocate the capital, he decided to enter a protest. He had already served his most successful term, but he believed he needed to restore some balance to the resolution condemning abolitionism. He wanted to voice his dissent and found a cosponsor in Dan Stone, a Whig lawyer from Springfield. Stone, a Vermonter, opposed slavery.
Lincoln and Stone’s “protest against the passage” of the already adopted resolution began, “They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.”
Central to Lincoln’s protest was shifting the emphasis on the initiative to end slavery in the District of Columbia. The original resolution stated the matter in the negative: “Resolved, that the General Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the consent of the citizens of said District without a manifest breach of good faith.”
Lincoln and Stone turned that part of the resolution upside down by stating, “They believe 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 exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.”
Lincoln and Stone’s protest has often been called “cautious,” but their amendment should not be underestimated. In 1837, Lincoln publicly defined slavery as both unjust and bad policy. He reversed the resolution’s intent on slavery in the District of Columbia by affirming that Congress did have the power to abolish it under the Constitution. Lincoln knew he would gain no political points in central Illinois for the elements in his protest. He made his stand, not with the majority and their willingness to admit only a negative or passive role for government, but rather on government’s positive, active role in abolishing slavery.
Twenty-three years later in his autobiographical statement of 1860, Lincoln said little about his terms in the Illinois legislature, but he paused to recall his protest, even taking pains to cite the exact pages of the Illinois House Journal in which the protest is still printed. He asked Scripps to insert the entire protest in the campaign biography, which the Chicago Tribune writer failed to do.
THE TENTH LEGISLATIVE SESSION adjourned on March 6, 1837, and Lincoln returned to New Salem. The small town was dying as other Illinois towns were rising. The Sangamon River proved to be unnavigable. In 1836, New Salem had lost its post office. It was the beginning of the end. Many residents simply picked up their houses and stores and moved them two miles downstream to the newer town of Petersburg.
While living in New Salem, Lincoln had tested the waters of both politics and law and found that he could navigate both with strength and dexterity. At age twenty-eight, he left New Salem a profoundly different young man from the one who had arrived just six years earlier.
He was ready to move to Springfield, which he had been instrumental in designating as the new capital of Illinois. With his political service moving ahead, and about to become a full-fledged lawyer, he looked forward to the next chapter in his life.


Lincoln moved to Springfield in 1837 and would spend much of his life in the law offices, courts, and stores on this square. The city grew in stature and population when the capital of Illinois moved there from Vandalia in 1839.