Some time during the winter of 1855–56, as he struggled with the galling disappointment of having lost a surefire seat in the United States Senate to his late-coming colleague Lyman Trumbull, Abraham Lincoln sat in his law office in Springfield, Illinois, and jotted down a few lines of rueful reminiscence. He was thinking not of Trumbull, as might be expected, but of an altogether longer-lived opponent, Democratic senator Stephen Douglas. Looking back on their often tumultuous rivalry, Lincoln tried his best to be objective. “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted,” he recalled. “We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands.”1
About Stephen Douglas, Lincoln could speak with some authority. Indeed, few if any political opponents have ever known each other as well or as long as he and Douglas. Almost from the time they arrived, sixteen months apart, in their adopted home state of Illinois, they were fated to be rivals—first on the local, then the state, and finally the national scene. Lincoln, who was four years older, got there first, literally washing up on the shores of the tiny village of New Salem in the spring of 1831. Douglas, originally from Vermont, took a less direct route, going first to Cleveland, Ohio, then heading west to St. Louis, and finally settling down in the same west-central corner of Illinois that Lincoln had staked out a few years before him. The two men, so different from each other physically and temperamentally—Lincoln unusually tall, Douglas unusually short; Lincoln calm and rational, Douglas combative and excitable; Lincoln abstemious, Douglas a lover of whiskey, women, and fat cigars—would carry on a thirty-year struggle for political dominance. Between them they would debate and define the preeminent issues of their time. Unlike so many politicians, then and later, no one ever had to guess where they stood. They would say so, and by their actions they would give voice to millions of their fellow citizens who had not trained themselves, as Lincoln and Douglas had done, to mount the public stage and speak the truth, as they understood it, to both the powerful and the powerless.
In heading west to seek their fortunes, the two young men were following an already well-worn path. For decades, Americans by the thousands had been flocking westward, drawn by the lure of cheap land and wide-open opportunities. The chance to re-create or reinvent oneself in new surroundings—a peculiarly American concept—was particularly appealing to Lincoln and Douglas, each of whom was leaving behind a less-than-idyllic home life. Lincoln and his taciturn father, Thomas, had always had a distant relationship. The elder Lincoln could neither read nor write, and had little patience for his only son’s inherent inwardness, which served perhaps as a painful reminder of Abraham’s late mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, a tall, melancholy woman who died of “milk sickness” when her son was nine. Like countless other hardscrabble frontiersmen, Thomas Lincoln was a subsistence farmer and an inveterate wanderer. His own father, also named Abraham, had been shot down before his eyes by Shawnee Indians when he was eight, and that shocking death, his son later observed, placed Thomas in “very narrow circumstances” and set him on the path of “a wandering laboring boy.” In the twenty-one years that Abraham Lincoln lived at home, his father uprooted the family four times—twice the national average, even for that itinerant era—moving successively from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois in a more or less vain search for economic stability.2
Along the way, Lincoln acquired a lifelong aversion to physical labor that was ironically at odds with his later image as a hardy rail-splitter. “Lincoln was lazy—a very lazy man,” recalled his cousin Dennis Hanks, who lived with the family while they were growing up. “He was always reading—scribbling—writing—ciphering—writing poetry.” Neighbors, too, remembered the young Lincoln as being “awful lazy…he was no hand to pitch in at work like killing snakes.” It was not so much that Lincoln was lazy—few men ever worked harder at improving themselves—but that, gifted with a genius-level mind, he cared more about intellectual than physical pursuits. That dislike of the grindingly hard labor of the frontier did not stop Lincoln’s father from placing an ax in his son’s hands when he was seven, or from hiring him out to other farmers, for twenty-five cents a day, whenever he had a debt to pay. By the time he was seventeen, Lincoln had plowed, mowed, planted, and shucked hundreds of acres of his father’s and other people’s corn, cleared land, split fence rails, and hauled wool eighty miles back and forth to the nearest mill. That year, he began working on flatboats, an experience that opened up a “wider and fairer” world to the land-bound youth and eventually transported him far beyond his father’s hemmed-in world.3
Lincoln’s new life began one late-April morning in 1831, when the residents of New Salem, Illinois, awoke to a diverting spectacle. A makeshift flatboat bound for New Orleans and loaded down with wildly thrashing hogs and heavy barrels of bacon, wheat, and corn had become lodged athwart a dam on the Sangamon River. In the middle of the river, hatless and sweating, a tall, homely young man with a wild shank of black hair was striving mightily to dislodge the boat, which was taking on water at an alarming rate. It was Lincoln. With his tattered blue jeans rolled up to his knees and his blue-and-white striped shirt clinging wetly to his chest, Lincoln helped his three companions offload several barrels of cargo to shore. Then he borrowed an augur and drilled a hole in the foredeck of the boat. When enough barrels had been removed from the rear of the vessel, water drained out through the hole and the boat tipped easily over the dam and back into the river. It was a simple but ingenious solution to the problem, and the townspeople of New Salem were suitably impressed. One old settler, Caleb Carman, initially judged Lincoln to be “very odd” and “very curious,” but admitted later that “after all this bad appearance I soon found [him] to be a very intelligent young man.” So did the rest of the village. Two months later, on his return trip upriver, Lincoln settled in New Salem to manage a new dry goods store that his financial backer, a Micawberish businessman named Denton Offutt, planned to open. He would live there for the next six years, and when he left he would leave behind a wealth of memories, anecdotes, and tall tales that, taken together, would constitute the bedrock of the much-loved Lincoln legend.4
Like its newest resident, New Salem in 1831 was rough-hewn and rustic. Founded two years earlier by mill owners James Rutledge and John Camron, the village was a thrown-together conglomeration of about a dozen cabins clustered around a handful of stores and taverns on the bluff overlooking its lifeline, the Sangamon River. Lincoln, an experienced river hand, fit right in. He took over the management of Offutt’s store, whose owner, “a gassy, windy, brain-rattling man,” spent most of his time talking and drinking. Lincoln, too, did his share of talking, if not drinking—he was a confirmed teetotaler. The one useful trait he had inherited from his father was a gift for storytelling, and he entertained his new friends with shaggy-dog stories and rambling jokes, including one slightly off-color jab at the English. In Lincoln’s telling, Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen makes a postwar visit to England, where he is annoyed by his hosts’ derisive habit of placing a portrait of George Washington in their privies. This is entirely appropriate, retorts Allen, since “there is nothing that will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.” Another Lincoln story involved a Baptist preacher who confidently announces to his congregation that he is the physical representation of Jesus Christ. When a blue lizard runs up his pant leg, the startled preacher throws off his pants and shirt and cavorts across the stage in his underwear, at which point an old lady stands up and announces: “If you represent Christ then I’m done with the Bible.”5
Along with his storytelling talents, Lincoln won over the locals with his strength and grit. In a frontier society that valued courage above all other qualities, Lincoln was inevitably challenged to show his moxie. The challenger, a burly tough named Jack Armstrong, was the leader of a gang of homespun layabouts known locally as the Clary’s Grove Boys. Denton Offutt, as was his wont, had been bragging loudly that his new employee was the strongest man and the best rough-and-tumble wrestler in the area. Armstrong took exception. Despite his stated aversion to the “wooling and pulling” of a wrestling match, Lincoln had no choice but to accept the challenge—to have walked away would have branded him ineffaceably as a coward. He met Armstrong in the village square at the appointed time. Memories differed on the winner of the match, but everyone agreed that the funny-looking new shop clerk had shown the right stuff, and Armstrong and his gang eventually would become a combination private bodyguard and personal cheering section for Lincoln when he entered the hurly-burly of public life.6
More refined friends included millwright James Rutledge, New Salem’s de facto mayor; transplanted Vermont physician John Allen; village schoolteacher Mentor Graham; and 300-pound justice of the peace Bowling Green, nicknamed “Pot” for his enormous overhanging stomach. Besides welcoming Lincoln into the local debating club, the quartet made a suggestion in the spring of 1832 that surprised and flattered their callow young friend—in fact, it changed his life. Harking back to his experience on the river, they encouraged him to enter politics by running for the Illinois legislature from Sangamon County. It was not as much of a stretch as it seemed. Most of the legislators who met once a year at the hardscrabble state capital in Vandalia were as unpolished as Lincoln—farmers, millers, and humble tradesmen who typically voted on nothing more elevated than whether or not to fence in their neighbors’ cattle. Lincoln, if elected, would be expected to focus primarily on a subject of vital importance to all New Salem residents—improving the Sangamon River. Rumors of a new railroad linking Springfield and Jacksonville to the Illinois River and bypassing New Salem altogether had everyone in the village worried. Without navigational improvements to their sluggish, driftwood-choked lifeline, there would be no way for them to effectively transport goods to and from St. Louis. New Salem would die.7
With the help of Graham and fellow storekeeper John McNeil, Lincoln crafted an announcement notice for the Sangamo Journal. Acknowledging that he was “young and unknown to many of you,” Lincoln conceded that he had been born and remained “in the most humble walks of life,” with “no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me.” Besides being true, the admission was also good politics. Most of “the independent voters of this county” upon whose judgment and mercy he was throwing himself were also poor and undistinguished, and Lincoln, at the very beginning of his career, was shrewd enough to make a virtue of his—and their—unfavored upbringing. An enterprising scholar later counted no fewer than thirty-five references by Lincoln to his “humble” background before he ran for president in 1860. The heart of his announcement stressed his experience on the river. “From my peculiar circumstances,” Lincoln wrote, “it is probable that for the last twelve months I have given as particular attention to the stage of the water in this river, as any other person in the country.” He underscored his experience a few days later by helping to guide the riverboat Talisman upriver from Beardstown to Springfield and down the Sangamon to New Salem, where Rutledge’s dam had to be partially destroyed to allow the vessel to pass through it—further highlighting the need for improvements to the river.8
Lincoln’s entry into politics was interrupted as soon as it began by worrisome news from the western frontier. Chief Black Hawk, the aging leader of the Sauk and Fox Indians, had crossed back into Illinois from Iowa, where he had grudgingly removed himself and his people after signing away 50 million acres of tribal land to Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison in 1804. Citing boilerplate language in the treaty that gave the Sauks continued use of the land until it was sold by the government, Black Hawk wanted to return and plant corn again on his ancestral stamping ground. White settlers now squatting on that ground naturally disagreed, and the call went out for 1,700 Illinois miltiamen to join 340 regular army troops in putting down the uprising. Among those answering the call was Lincoln, who was motivated less by military than financial reasons. By that time, Denton Offutt had run off, literally, to join the circus, taking a position as a horse trainer for a traveling show in Georgia, but not before getting his reluctant clerk to split enough rails to pen up 1,000 hogs behind the store. With his newfound livelihood threatened, Lincoln had pressing need of the $125 salary being offered by the state of Illinois for warm-blooded volunteers.9
To his immense surprise and gratification, Lincoln was elected captain of the New Salem militia company (Jack Armstrong was his sergeant). For the next two and a half months—he reenlisted twice—Lincoln and his charges trooped through an invariable sameness of swamps, gullies, and underbrush in pursuit of Indians they never found. The closest they came was discovering the remains of five settlers who, unfortunately for them, had been more successful in finding Indians and had their scalps lifted for their troubles. The sight made an understandable impression on Lincoln, who recalled many years later: “The red light of the morning sun came streaming upon them as they lay heads towards us on the ground, and every man had a round, red spot on top of his head, and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over.” Lincoln’s company was far away when the main force of white soldiers caught up with Black Hawk’s band on the banks of the Mississippi in southwestern Wisconsin on August 2, 1832, and killed 300 of them at the Battle of Bad Axe. The “small and foolish war,” as historian Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., termed it, ended soon afterward, with Black Hawk being escorted in leg irons to Jefferson Barracks at St. Louis by a young army lieutenant named Jefferson Davis.10
Returning to New Salem on foot after his horse was stolen, Lincoln got back too late to do much campaigning before the August 6 election. Deeply suntanned from his weeks in the field, the neophyte candidate told potential voters—no doubt needlessly—that he was “almost as red as those men I have been chasing through the prairies and forests on the rivers of Illinois.” A local observer captured Lincoln during his first campaign: “He wore a mixed jeans coat, clawhammer style, short in the sleeves and bobtail—in fact it was so short in the tail he could not sit on it; flax and tow-linen pantaloons, and a straw hat.” Despite his undeniably eye-catching appearance, Lincoln failed to capture many votes, finishing eighth out of thirteen candidates, although he did receive 277 of the 300 votes cast in his hometown precinct. It would prove to be, as he never failed to remind listeners afterward, the only time he was ever beaten “on a direct vote of the people.”11
With the desertion of Offutt, Lincoln went back to looking for full-time work. Attempting to capitalize on his recent experience, he threw in with a former member of his militia company, William Berry, and opened a new grocery store. It proved to be no more successful than Offutt’s had been, even after the partners acquired a license to sell liquor on the premises. Not even the addition of wine, rum, peach brandy, and whiskey served by the dipper enabled the store to turn a profit, and it gradually “winked out,” in Lincoln’s gentle phrase. Still, his popularity in the community was such that Lincoln’s friends managed to convince government officials in Washington to appoint him village postmaster after the current officeholder, Samuel Hill, unexpectedly resigned. Lincoln made no secret of his Whig political leanings—he had voted for Henry Clay for president against Andrew Jackson in the last election—but the post was “too insignificant” in the larger scheme of things, he noted, for his own party affiliation to matter much to higher-ups. In May 1833, he began selling stamps and delivering letters, undemanding occupations that permitted him to stay in the public eye while performing useful little services for his would-be constituents. It also gave him access to all the newspapers passing through the post office, a particularly pleasant perk for a constant reader such as Lincoln. Less than a year after arriving in New Salem unceremoniously on the deck of a flatboat, the twenty-four-year-old stranger was now a valued member of the community.12
Stephen Douglas’s entry into Illinois was considerably less dramatic than Lincoln’s. He rolled into Jacksonville, the seat of Morgan County, in the middle of the night, climbing down from his stagecoach near dawn on November 2, 1833. He had less than $5 in his pocket. Not yet twenty-one, Douglas had followed Lincoln’s similarly wandering path to Illinois, but with a few important differences that reflected the not-insignificant gap in their social status. While Lincoln was the son of an illiterate backwoodsman, Douglas had been born into upper-middle-class privilege, the son of a Vermont physician with sturdy New England connections going back 200 years. His people had fought in King Philip’s War and the Revolution, acquired large landholdings in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont, and showed a natural bent for politics and public service. Douglas’s paternal grandfather, Benajah Douglass (Stephen dropped the second “s” some years later), served five terms in the Vermont General Assembly, and also held office as a selectman and justice of the peace in Brandon, Vermont, where Stephen was born on April 23, 1813. Besides the modest financial bequest that Douglas inherited from his grandfather when he died in 1829, he also inherited his stumpy legs, large head, stentorian speaking voice, and boundless self-confidence. He would, in time, put all these traits to good use.13
It was lucky for Douglas that his grandfather was so generous, genetically and financially, since his own father—through no fault of his own—was a complete void in his son’s life. He died, in fact, when Douglas was two months old, dropping dead from an apparent heart attack at the age of thirty-two while dandling his infant son on his knee near an open fire. According to family legend, an alert neighbor named John Conant scooped the baby from the flames in the nick of time. Douglas’s narrow escape coincided with an immediate drop in the family’s fortunes. His still-young mother, Sarah Fisk Douglass, with a newborn son and a one-year-old daughter to provide for, moved in with her brother, Edward Fisk, who owned the farm adjoining the widow’s land. Fisk was a bachelor—“an industrious, economical, clever old bachelor,” his nephew later wrote, with a subtle undertone of distaste—and he quickly combined the two properties into a single holding, his own. Besides acquiring his sister’s land, he also acquired the services of her son as a common laborer, not unlike Abraham Lincoln’s filial indenture to his father. Like Lincoln, Douglas came to resent both the work and the master. “I thought it a hardship that my uncle would have the use of my mother’s farm and also the benefit of my labor without any other equivalent than my boarding and clothes,” he recalled in an autobiographical sketch in 1838.14
Determined to get out from under his uncle’s control, Douglas convinced his mother to permit him to see “what I could do for myself in the wide world among strangers.” The wide world was fourteen miles away—one mile for each year of his life—and located at Middlebury, Vermont, where Douglas apprenticed himself to a local cabinetmaker with the sturdy New England name of Nahum Parker. Douglas already had learned the rudiments of woodworking from another maternal uncle, Jonathan Fisk, and he commenced helping Parker make tables, washstands, and beds. Eight months later he was back home in Brandon, having fallen out with his master over the nature of his duties (apparently, Parker wanted him to be a house servant as well as an apprentice) and his burgeoning interest in politics. The fall of 1828 was a polarizing time in American political life. Incumbent president John Quincy Adams was facing a monumental challenge from Tennessean Andrew Jackson, the same man he had narrowly defeated in 1824, when the undecided presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Charges of a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Kentucky congressman Henry Clay, who became Adams’s secretary of state, had arisen immediately after the election and subsequently had been nursed, like a festering sore, for four long years by Jackson and his supporters. They fully intended to pay back “King John the Second” for what they saw as his underhanded subversion of the popular will.15
The ensuing campaign was one of the dirtiest in American history. Jackson’s supporters railed against the “lordly purse-proud aristocracy” embodied by the patrician Adams, who lived in “kingly pomp and splendor” in his “presidential palace.” Adams’s supporters countered that Jackson, a self-made product of the southwestern frontier, was little more than a bumptious rube, “destitute of historical, political, or statistical knowledge…a man…wholly unqualified by education, habit and temper from the station of President.” But Jackson was a legitimate war hero, the destroyer of a crack British army outside New Orleans and the scourge of Native Americans everywhere. A new political party, the Democrats, took shape around Jackson and began sketching the outlines for a more representative, populist-oriented philosophy of governance centered on the needs and wishes of the working class.16
One of Jackson’s acolytes was the fifteen-year-old Stephen Douglas. As the campaign progressed, the apprentice cabinetmaker regularly stole away from work to follow the political debate on street corners and in taverns, often spending his evenings in lively discussions with other young men in the community. When ghoulishly illustrated “Coffin Handbills” began appearing on Brandon’s fences and walls, charging Jackson with murder for having executed six deserters during the Creek Indian War in 1813, Douglas and his fellows angrily tore them down. The bare-knuckles politicking captivated Douglas, who later observed: “From this moment, my politics became fixed, and all subsequent reading, reflection and observation have but confirmed my early attachment to the cause of Democracy.”17
Parting company with the Adams-favoring Parker, Douglas found a new position back in Brandon with a woodworking church deacon named Caleb Knowlton, but he soon discovered that he had lost all taste for furniture making. By this time, Douglas’s Uncle Edward, hitherto a confirmed bachelor, had surprised everyone by getting married, and Douglas, with an eye toward supporting himself, enrolled in the Brandon Academy, a college preparatory school. There he studied English, mathematics, and classical languages and indulged his newfound interest in politics by joining the school debating society. He remained at the academy until November 1830, when his mother remarried a widower from upstate New York named Gehazi Granger, whose son had married her daughter, Sarah, earlier that year. Douglas and the rest of the family moved to the Granger homestead on the shores of Lake Canandaigua in Ontario County.18
Located in the Finger Lakes country of western New York, Canandaigua was a center of social and religious ferment. Not long before the Douglases immigrated there, another transplanted Vermonter, a young mechanic in Palmyra named Joseph Smith, made a startling claim. According to Smith, he had unearthed, with the help of the angel Moroni, a set of mysterious gold tablets on which were inscribed the tenets of a new religion. Smith’s ethereally inspired 500-page Book of Mormon went on sale the same year that the family moved into the region. Meanwhile another self-anointed mystic, Charles Grandison Finney, was leading the Second Great Awakening in nearby Rochester, preaching an individualized approach to salvation that was remarkably similar to modern self-help books. A third rising national movement with roots in Ontario County was less religiously, if no less mystically, based. William Morgan, a disgruntled member of the intensely secretive Masons, had announced his intention to expose the secrets of freemasonry. Morgan subsequently was abducted from jail in Canandaigua, where he was serving time for unpaid debts, by unknown men believed to be Masons. When his badly decomposed body washed up on the shores of Lake Ontario a short time later, it ignited an Anti-Mason movement that swept the Northeast and threatened for a time to derail the presidential hopes of Stephen Douglas’s champion, Andrew Jackson, himself a Mason. The controversy was still smoldering when Douglas arrived.19
With his stepfather’s assistance, Douglas enrolled in Canandaigua Academy, where for the next two years he excelled more at student politics than formal studies. Continuing his interest in forensic debate, Douglas gave a number of spirited speeches in defense of Jackson, who nevertheless lost Canandaigua and Ontario County by a better than two-to-one margin to Anti-Masonic candidate William Wirt when he ran for reelection in 1832. Surprisingly, Douglas’s Democratic advocacy did not harm him with the town’s leading politicians, future congressman and postmaster general Gideon Granger (a cousin of his stepfather) and Congressman Mark Sibley, both of whom were staunch National Republicans and Anti-Masons. The two men befriended Douglas, as did the town’s leading Democratic attorney, Levi Hubbell, who allowed the young man to study law with him for six months in the winter and spring of 1833. The state of New York required seven years of classical education and legal study before one could become a practicing attorney, and Douglas, with no long-range hope of financial support by his family, did not want to wait that long. In June 1833, armed with letters of introduction from Gideon Granger and Mark Sibley and a $300 parting bequest from his stepfather, Douglas set out for the West to seek his fortune. When his mother asked when she would see him again, he supposedly responded, “On my way to Congress.”20
After brief stopovers in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis, Douglas arrived in Jacksonville, Illinois, in November 1833. Despite being named for his longtime hero, the town held few immediate opportunities for the boyish Douglas, who was twenty years old and looked even younger. Taking the advice of a well-meaning local attorney, Murray McConnel, who would become one of his lifelong friends, Douglas headed off for the Illinois River town of Pekin, where McConnel said there was more opportunity for a would-be attorney. Unlike New York, Illinois did not require a seven-year term of study for a law degree. Indeed, all it required was an examination by a member of the state supreme court and a certificate of good moral character. Douglas was confident that he could manage both, but first he had to wait until spring—there were no more riverboats going to Pekin until then. Marooned in the tiny village of Winchester, he somehow managed to scare up enough students to open a one-man school. He also worked part-time as an auction clerk and spent his spare hours discussing politics with the local denizens. By March 1834, he had put together enough of a nest egg to return to Jacksonville, where he soon received his law examination from Judge Samuel D. Lockwood and hung out his shingle at the county courthouse. He was on his way. Praising his adopted home as “the Paradise of the world,” Douglas informed his family in enthusiastic capital letters: “Illinois possesses more natural advantages, and is destined to possess greater artificial and acquired advantages, than any other State in the Union or on the Globe.” In a few short months, he told them, “I have become a Western man, have imbibed Western feelings principles and interests and have selected Illinois as the favorite place of my adoption.”21
Lincoln, born in the West, did not have to make a conscious transition to western values—he simply went on with his life. While continuing to serve as postmaster in New Salem, hand-delivering letters that he stuck for convenience into the headband of his hat, Lincoln also signed on as an assistant to county surveyor John Calhoun, a fellow Black Hawk War veteran and a distant relative of the fiery South Carolina politician of the same name. Scraping together enough money to buy a compass and chain and a couple reference books on trigonometry and surveying, Lincoln was soon thrashing through briar patches and river bottoms, measuring off farm lots and roadways, witnessing deeds, and mediating property disputes. The work was hard—Lincoln shrugged it off as “a poor man’s lot”—but it was necessary to “keep body and soul together.” The $2.50 he earned for each quarter section he surveyed was also necessary to begin chipping away at the mountain of debt he had incurred during his brief, inglorious business partnership with William Berry, who soon would die of chronic alcoholism and leave Lincoln alone to face their increasingly importunate creditors. Embarrassingly, the Sangamon Circuit Court sent the county sheriff to attach Lincoln’s horse, saddle, bridle, and surveying equipment and sell them at auction. In another example of his high standing in the community, Lincoln’s horse was returned to him free of charge, and a helpful neighbor, James Short, bid $120 for the surveying equipment and immediately handed it back to him as well. Although legally responsible for only half the store’s debts, Lincoln vowed to pay them all, even though it would take him several years to do so. He took to calling it, only half-jokingly, “the National Debt.”22
The wide-ranging work as a surveyor—he often had to travel as far away as 100 miles at a time—coupled with his local duties as postmaster, kept Lincoln in the public eye, and in the summer of 1834 he decided to run again for the state legislature. Party lines were beginning to harden in Illinois and across the nation, divided unevenly between those who loved Andrew Jackson (the majority) and those who hated him (an increasingly vocal minority). Lincoln counted himself among the latter. He had to walk a fine line politically—most of his neighbors in New Salem were fellow Whigs, as Jackson’s opponents were becoming known, but the farmers in rural Sangamon County were Democrats. Even his old friend and wrestling opponent Jack Armstrong was a Democrat, although it did not stop him from continuing to support Lincoln personally, or prevent his wife, Hannah, from sewing their friend a new pair of buckskin-reinforced blue jeans to wear while he was tramping through the underbrush on surveying jobs.23
As a way, perhaps, of walking the political tightrope, Lincoln in 1834 did not issue a public letter announcing his candidacy or expanding on his previously held positions. “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance,” he told his listeners from the stump. “I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected, I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.” Meanwhile, he continued delivering the mail and surveying the countryside, counting on his personal contact with voters to carry him through. It was enough. On Election Day, he tallied 64 percent of the countywide vote, more than doubling his 1832 total, and finished second in a field of thirteen candidates. It was rumored later that Armstrong’s Clary’s Grove Boys had made a deal with fellow Democrats to trade votes for Lincoln in an attempt to defeat the better-known and better-connected John Todd Stuart, a Springfield lawyer who had been Lincoln’s militia major in the Black Hawk War. If so, it didn’t work. Stuart squeaked by as the fourth and final state representative from Sangamon County, all but one of them Whigs.24
No one could say why, exactly, Lincoln had done so well in the election. Fellow Whig William Butler made a stammering effort to explain his newfound appeal, and in so doing gave as fine a capsule description of Lincoln’s ineffable political talents as anyone would ever produce. “Well, it is hard to say just why,” Butler said. “It was because of the standing he had got in the county, and especially the prominence given him by his captaincy in the Black Hawk War—because he was good fellow—because he told good stories, and remembered good jokes—because he was genial, kind, sympathetic, open-hearted—because when he was asked a question and gave an answer it was always characteristic, brief, pointed, a propos, out of the common way and manner, and yet exactly suited to the time, place and thing—because of a thousand things which cannot now be remembered or told.”25
Delighted by his victory, not least because it would mean another $250 of income, Lincoln approached a wealthy neighbor, Coleman Smoot, and asked to borrow $200 to pay down some of his debts and buy a new dress suit—his first—“to make a decent appearance in the legislature.” Smoot agreed, and Lincoln set off for the state capital in Vandalia, seventy-five miles away, on November 28, 1834. He arrived the next afternoon, after a thirty-four-hour journey by stagecoach, to find himself in the distinct minority. There were sixty Democrats and only twenty-one Whigs in the legislature. One of those Democrats (although not yet an elected official) making the rounds of the two-story brick statehouse was Stephen Douglas. Exactly when and how Lincoln and Douglas first met is unknown. Lincoln put it down vaguely in his 1856 note as having taken place “twenty-two years ago,” making it 1834. Douglas never mentioned a first meeting. They were both so young—Lincoln was twenty-five, Douglas was twenty-one—and traveled in such different social and political circles, that it is not surprising they did not initially take much notice of one another. That would soon change.26
While Lincoln was a duly elected legislator, Douglas was a one-man lobbying effort—mainly for himself. He had come to Vandalia at the behest of Jacksonville legislator John Wyatt, a fellow “whole hog” Democrat (as opposed to the more watered-down “milk and cider” Democrats who waffled in their support of Jackson and his policies). Wyatt had a personal and political score to settle with State’s Attorney John J. Hardin, a former Democrat who had turned Whig after getting appointed to the four-year post in 1832. Hardin had helped defeat a number of the same Democrats who had backed him for the position, and Wyatt was determined to get revenge for Hardin’s “ingratitude.” With Douglas’s help, he prepared a bill stripping the governor of the power to appoint state attorneys. Under the new bill, the two houses of the legislature would elect the attorneys. After a lengthy wrangle, the bill was approved over the objections of newly elected governor Joseph Duncan, another Democrat-turned-Whig. In the subsequent legislative election, Douglas defeated Hardin by four votes and was appointed state’s attorney from the First Judicial District. Lincoln voted against both the bill and Douglas, who disgruntled lawmakers called, somewhat inelegantly, “Jack Wyatt’s tomtit.”27
In winning the appointment, Douglas fell afoul of Illinois Supreme Court justice Samuel Lockwood, the judge who had examined him for his law license eleven months earlier. “What business has such a stripling with such an office?” Lockwood complained. “He is no lawyer and has no law books.” Douglas was unabashed by such criticism. “I occupy precisely the position I have long wished for Politically and Professionally,” he told his family. “I am doing as well in my ‘profession’ as could be expected of a Boy of twenty one.” He attributed his success to “the Lord, the Legislature, and General Jackson,” presumably in that order. His new duties encompassed eight western Illinois counties, including Lincoln’s bailiwick of Sangamon. It was the fastest-growing part of the state, and Douglas took the opportunity to foster valuable political connections with many leading lawyers and jurists. Again he bragged to his family. “I find myself on a new theatre of action,” he wrote, “and I may say a very important and critical one, when conducting an important trial alone, with three or four of the best lawyers in the state on the opposite side ready to take advantage of every circumstance, never asking favors nor granting them.”28
One of those lawyers on the opposite side was Lincoln’s old friend and fellow war veteran, John Stuart. As a newly elected Whig legislator and longtime supporter of the now-deposed Hardin, Stuart hoped to embarrass Douglas personally and the Democrats generally. When the young attorney made his first visit to McLean County, Stuart moved to dismiss all of Douglas’s indictments on the grounds that he had misspelled the very name of the county in which he was lawyering—he had written “McClean.” Conceding nothing, Douglas demanded that Stuart prove he was wrong. After a two-day delay while a copy of the appropriate statutes were retrieved from nearby Peoria, both men were surprised to find that the original spelling of the county name indeed was McClean. Henceforth, Douglas vowed, he would “admit nothing and require my adversary to prove everything.” It was a good lesson to learn, but it made Stuart a lifelong enemy. No doubt the story quickly got back to Lincoln.29
Douglas soon became disillusioned with the law as a profession, or at least as a moneymaking venture. “Out of the long list of Lawyers that come to this country and settle,” he told his brother-in-law, Julius Granger, in May 1835, “there is not one out of an hundred who does one half the business enough to pay his expenses the first year…practicing Law in the Sucker State will not make a man rich the first year or two.” Increasingly, his legal duties took a back seat to his political activities. The rapid influx of settlers into Illinois—the population almost tripled between 1830 and 1840—created both challenge and opportunity for would-be politicians of all stripes. The political makeup of the state was changing overnight. Its traditional ties to the South, solidified by decades of immigration into the southern part of the state, were being challenged by an increase in new arrivals like Douglas from the East and New England. The easterners, by and large, brought with them a more sophisticated approach to politics, including the convention system of nominating candidates and the need to enforce party loyalty.30
Quick to recognize the changing environment, Douglas took the lead in organizing the state’s first-ever political convention, timed to coincide with the opening of a special session of the legislature in December 1835. The subsequent convention of Illinois Democrats, although small in numbers, provoked a firestorm of protest from Whig legislators like Lincoln, who were more or less captive onlookers to the proceedings. The Whigs denounced the gathering as “anti-republican” and “danger-ous to the liberties of the people.” But Douglas, recalling his early political experience in New York, defended the system as “the only way to manage elections with success.” The Chicago Democrat concurred, advising delegates that the only proper response to Whig criticism was “pooh—pish—pashaw.” The convention voted to support the presidential bid of Jackson’s vice president, Martin Van Buren, in the upcoming election “as the man best qualified to carry on the principles which have marked, distinguished and elevated the political course of Andrew Jackson.” It also supported, somewhat contradictorily, “the rights of states, and the supremacy of the general government”—but that was a debate for another time.31
The state convention increased Douglas’s visibility, and he decided to run for the legislature in 1836. His principal opponent was a familiar enemy—John J. Hardin, the man he had deposed as state’s attorney one year earlier. The Whig-leaning Sangamo Journal, which had taken to calling Douglas “Squire Douglas” in its columns, observed of his nomination that “the Van Buren men of Morgan must not possess a very fastidious taste, if they can swallow such a dose as this.” Douglas relished the fight—“the warmer the better for I like excitement.” He had exchanged his tailored clothes for a more homespun suit of blue-denim “Kentucky jeans” and readily adopted the twangy pose of true man of the frontier. “I find no difficulty in adopting the Western mode of Electioneering by addressing the people from the Stump,” he informed his family, adding that “I live with my constituents, eat with my constituents, drink with them, lodge with them, pray with them, laugh, hunt, dance and work with them; I eat their corn dodgers and fried bacon and sleep two in a bed with them.” However suspect the authenticity of Douglas’s new image, it worked politically, and he tallied the largest number of votes in his district. In neighboring Sangamon County, Lincoln was reelected to a second term in the legislature, joining eight other members of the local delegation, each of whom was over six feet tall, as part of the so-called “Long Nine.”32
Putting the best face on things, the Sangamo Journal hailed the Tenth General Assembly for having “more talent than any legislative body ever before assembled in Illinois.” It was no exaggeration. Counting Lincoln and Douglas, the 1836–37 legislature included one future president of the United States, five future senators, seven future congressmen, a governor, and three generals. Although on opposite sides of the aisle politically, Lincoln and Douglas sometimes found themselves voting together on local issues, including the selection of a new speaker of the house, a mammoth internal improvements project, and the relocation of the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield. The latter project was one of particular interest to Lincoln, who was preparing to make a similar relocation personally. He had been spending more and more time recently in Springfield at the law office of his friend Stuart, and Stuart eventually convinced him to become a lawyer himself.33
It did not take much convincing. Lincoln had always been interested in the law, regularly attending informally conducted sessions of Pot Green’s court in New Salem, and Green sometimes allowed him to argue cases before him. Thus encouraged, Lincoln purchased a book of legal forms that enabled him to draft simple documents such as wills, deeds, and bills of sale. With books borrowed from Stuart’s law library, Lincoln managed to educate himself, reading so much and so long that concerned neighbors worried about his health. Five weeks after being reelected to the legislature, Lincoln was admitted to the Illinois bar and joined Stuart’s law firm. As soon as the legislative session was over, he returned to New Salem, said a few hasty good-byes, and moved to Springfield for good. Within another three years, New Salem would become a veritable ghost town, most of its remaining residents relocating two miles downriver to the new town of Petersburg, which Lincoln had surveyed and carved into lots. When Petersburg defeated New Salem to become the seat of newly drawn Menard County, the once-flourishing community that had welcomed the strange-looking flatboatman into its bosom six years earlier died an ignominious, unlamented death.34
One of Lincoln’s new neighbors in Springfield was Douglas. The election of Martin Van Buren as president over a trio of Whig opponents in the fall of 1836 had brought the twenty-three-year-old first-term state legislator a plum appointment as register of the Springfield Land Office. The predictably hostile Sangamo Journal greeted his appointment with a mocking broadside: “We are told the little man from Morgan, was perfectly astonished, at finding himself making money at the rate of from one to two hundred dollars per day!” The new office was indeed profitable. Douglas was permitted by law to receive $3,000 in interest and fees, while at the same time double-dipping as state’s attorney for the First Judicial District. Even more valuable, from Douglas’s point of view, was his increased exposure to potential voters.35
Thanks to intraparty backbiting and some adroit wire-pulling by Douglas, that exposure came in handy sooner than expected. A Democratic convention meeting in Peoria in November 1837 bypassed incumbent congressman William L. May, whose increasing criticism of Van Buren’s economic policies had raised hackles among the party faithful, and chose Douglas to run in his place. May complained, with some justice, to Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury that Douglas had been “engaged in a political electioneering tour through my district, getting up meetings of the voters to organize a Convention of Delegates…who are pledged against me.” When questioned by Woodbury, Douglas professed innocence, but brashly maintained his freedom “to mingle with my fellow citizens and express my opinions of men and measures (not excepting Mr. May) as I should if I have never received an Office at the hands of the Government.”36
The Whigs, who had chosen Lincoln’s law partner, Stuart, as their candidate for Congress, were quick to charge that a “corrupt bargain” had been struck between Douglas and certain unnamed Sangamon County politicos. A series of anonymous letters, signed “A Conservative,” appeared in the Sangamo Journal alleging that Douglas had been tricked into running for a seat he could not win by an older Democrat who wanted the younger man’s position in the Springfield Land Office. The trickster was thought to be John Calhoun, Lincoln’s old surveying boss. Douglas angrily denied that he had entered into any sort of bargain and demanded to know the name of the “infamous, villainous liar” and “cowardly scoundrel” who had written the letters. The villainous scoundrel was probably Lincoln, who was in the best position to know what, if anything, Calhoun had told Douglas, and who already had authored a number of anti-Democratic letters for the Journal under the various pen names “Madison,” “Citizen of Sangamon,” “John Bubberhead,” and “Sampson’s Ghost.” Lincoln, for his part, denied it. “We have adopted it as part of our policy here, to never speak of Douglas at all,” he joked. “Isn’t that the best mode of treating so small a matter?”37
The entire campaign was fought on a similarly low plane, with the diminutive Douglas, the “Peoria Bantling,” being compared endlessly to the strapping Stuart, widely reputed to be the handsomest man in Illinois. Douglas was accused falsely of being against the popular Illinois and Michigan Canal project, and when he took his campaign into the labor camps of the Irish immigrants who were engaged in gouging the canal out of the Illinois earth, he was called a “radical mobocract” and a “loco foco” by the Whigs. They charged that the candidate’s idea of democracy “means Douglas mounted on the shoulders of two Irishmen, addressing a Chicago rabble upon the glorious privilege of a free country, and the right of unnaturalized foreigners to control the elections of Illinois.” The fact that the state constitution permitted men to vote after only six months’ residence (construction on the canal had begun two years earlier) was conveniently forgotten. Douglas was not above a little demagoguery himself, telling the credulous workers that he, too, was Irish, descended from a long line of phantom McDouglasses. “I expect to get all their votes,” he whispered to a friend.38
The growing unpopularity of Van Buren, coupled with the recent downturn in the national economy, grievously hurt Douglas’s chances in the election. Nevertheless, he campaigned tirelessly, debating Stuart throughout the state. Once, when Stuart was ill, his law partner Lincoln supposedly stood in for him at Bloomington, vigorously contesting the issues with Douglas on the steps of the courthouse. (No account of the meeting exists, and it may be apocryphal.) The two also faced each other in a Springfield court a few days before the election, finding themselves on opposite sides of a sensational murder case stemming directly from Douglas’s nomination for Congress. Henry L. Truett, the son-in-law of deposed congressman William May, was on trial for murder. The facts were not in dispute: Truett had accosted fellow Democrat Jacob M. Early, Lincoln’s first captain in the Black Hawk War, at Spottswood’s Hotel in Springfield and demanded to know, at the point of a gun, if Early had written the resolutions calling for Mays’s ouster. When Early raised a chair to shield himself, Truett shot him dead. Douglas acted as second for newly elected state’s attorney Daniel Woodson, while Lincoln represented Truett. In an imaginative defense, Lincoln convinced the jury that Early, in picking up the chair, had forced Truett to fire in self-defense. The jury, to both sides’ consternation, concurred, and Truett was acquitted.39
Douglas and Stuart had a violent confrontation of their own, three days before the election, at a Springfield market. Enraged by a Douglas remark, Stuart grabbed the smaller man in a headlock and dragged him around the store. Douglas responded by biting Stuart on the thumb, leaving a scar that he carried for the rest of his life. “They both fought till exhausted,” an eyewitness reported, “grocery floor slippery with slop.” The election itself was no less hard fought. When it ended, no one was sure who had won. For weeks both sides claimed victory, and Douglas took a jaunty victory lap, riding atop a stagecoach from Chicago to Springfield, smoking a cigar and claiming to have “used up Mr. Stuart to the tune of 2,000!” The elation was premature. The final tally gave Stuart a razor-thin margin of 36 votes out of a total of 36,495 cast.40
Reports of widespread voting irregularities tainted Stuart’s triumph. Whig campaign officials had purposely misspelled Douglas’s name on some poll books, refused to record Douglas votes at other places, and, posing as Democrats, had urged voters to support “John A. Douglas” or “James A. Douglas,” with the resultant mismarked ballots being thrown out as irregular. Democratic investigators were denied access to the official records, but there was good reason to believe, as the Illinois State Register proclaimed, that “Mr. Douglas was elected by the people.” Douglas announced his intention to formally challenge the election, but backed off after the Whigs, led by Lincoln, formed a committee of their own to investigate alleged Democratic abuses among Irish canal workers. “Douglas has not been here since you left,” Lincoln crowed to Stuart, who by then had left for Washington to claim his somewhat tainted seat. “A report is in circulation…that he has abandoned the ideas of going to Washington; though the report does not come in a very authentic form…. Speaking of authenticity, you know that if we had heard Douglas say that he had abandoned the contest, it would not be very authentic.”41
As leaders of the young Whigs and Democrats in Springfield, Lincoln and Douglas continued to cross swords politically. In November 1839, the two engaged in a three-day debate in the capital over Van Buren’s opposition to a national bank, with Lincoln declaring in uncharacteristically purple prose: “I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption, in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot or living thing: while on its bosom are riding, like demons on the wave of Hell, the imps of the evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those who dare to resist its destroying course.” The quote was picked up by the National Intelligencer in Washington, giving Lincoln his first national exposure.42
Despite such overheated rhetoric, Lincoln was judged, and judged himself, to have lost the debate with Douglas. The Illinois State Register, not an impartial observer, claimed that Douglas “literally swamped his adversaries. [He] delivered one of the most powerful arguments against an United States Bank that we ever listened to. A settled gloom covered the countenances of the Whigs.” Lincoln, said the newspaper, “commenced with embarrassment and continued without making the slightest impression. He could only meet the arguments of Mr. Douglas by relating stale anecdotes and old stories, and left the stump literally whipped off of it, even in the estimation of his own friends.” One of those friends, Joseph Gillespie, reported that Lincoln “was conscious of his failure, and I never saw any man so much distressed.”43
During the ensuing presidential campaign of 1840, Lincoln and Douglas debated each other frequently, from one end of the state to the other. It was part of the famous “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign, a six-month-long orgy of singing, sloganeering, and speechifying that participants long afterward would remember as the most exciting and entertaining election of their lives. Having lost the previous three presidential elections to Andrew Jackson and his handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, the Whigs were desperate to win at any cost. In the first instance of a truly prepackaged presidential candidate, party leaders bypassed Lincoln’s political hero, Kentucky senator Henry Clay, and fixed their attention on William Henry Harrison, the previously undistinguished former territorial governor of Indiana, who had run surprisingly well in the 1836 election as part of a three-headed ticket that attempted unsuccessfully to deny Van Buren an electoral majority and throw the race into the House of Representatives.
Harrison had some political advantages, mainly a potential treasure trove of electoral votes from Indiana and his adopted home state of Ohio, but at the relatively attenuated age of sixty-seven, he was a far from ideal candidate. Despite having been a United States senator, congressman, and foreign minister to Colombia, Harrison had few concrete political achievements to which he could point. That didn’t matter to Whig bosses. Taking a page from the hated Jackson’s campaign book, they marketed Harrison, the patrician son a former Virginia governor and signer of the Declaration of Independence, as a homespun frontiersman and man of the people. They transformed Harrison’s comfortable, sixteen-room farmhouse in North Bend, Ohio, into a humble log cabin, and inflated Harrison’s somewhat suspect victory over the Shawnee-led Indian confederation at Tippecanoe Creek, Indiana, in November 1811 into a towering feat of arms comparable to Jackson’s defeat of the British at New Orleans. In truth, Harrison had been badly surprised at Tippecanoe, but a last-ditch stand had enabled him to hold off the Indians and claim technical control of the battlefield. With that distinctly unemphatic triumph in hand, “Old Tippecanoe” was put forth as the logical successor to Old Hickory in the White House.44
Playing off a Democratic jibe that the aged Harrison would be happier spending his days with a barrel of hard cider in a log cabin beside a fire, the Whigs touted their candidate as “the log cabin and hard cider” candidate. Overnight, makeshift log cabins sprang up across the country, accompanied by barrels of hard cider. The Whigs flooded the country with a deluge of Harrison campaign pins, badges, coins, medallions, handkerchiefs, water pitchers, shaving mugs, and writing paper—all festooned with their champion’s unexceptional likeness. The ever-pliable Harrison was presented as being all things to all people. To farmers, he was a farmer; to veterans, he was a veteran; to pioneers, he was a pioneer; to hero-worshipers, he was a hero. Truth was not an issue. As one leading Whig admitted later, “All we wanted was to carry the election.”45
None too creditably, Lincoln played a part in the sham. Besides helping to found a new Illinois publication, the Old Soldier, to inflate Harrison’s image, he also published a steady stream of “Lincoln Speeches and Tippecanoe Almanacs” in the Sangamo Journal, accusing Van Buren of being, among other things, “effeminate and luxury-loving.” Nor was Lincoln too scrupulous to resist playing the race card in one highly publicized debate with Douglas late in the campaign, repeating the charge that Van Buren had once voted in favor of a property requirement for New York voters. Such a requirement, Lincoln said, favored free blacks over poor whites, “even if he should be a Revolutionary War veteran.” He produced an old Van Buren campaign biography that purported to document the vote. Douglas ripped the book from Lincoln’s hands and sent it skimming into the crowd. “All lies!” he shouted. When the Alton Telegraph, a Democratic newspaper, accused the dark-complexioned Lincoln of coming “from Liberia”—meaning he was black—the Sangamo Journal shot back that Douglas was “clothed with sable furs of Guinea—whose breath smells rank with devotion to the cause of Africa’s sons—and whose trail might be followed by scattered bunches of Nigger wool.” It was that kind of campaign.46
There was an untypical meanness in much of Lincoln’s campaigning that year. In an appearance at the Sangamon County courthouse in Springfield, he tore into local attorney Jesse B. Thomas. After first declaring that he “wanted to whip” Thomas, Lincoln went on to mimic Thomas’s gestures and voice so mercilessly that the young man burst into tears. The State Register denounced the performance for its “assumed clownishness” and “buffoonery,” but there was nothing particularly funny about it. The next day, Lincoln apologized. The ad hominem attack, so out of character for the normally gracious Lincoln, may have reflected the strain in his personal life. He had recently been turned down for marriage by one Kentucky woman, Mary Owens, and had begun a halting courtship with another daughter of the Bluegrass—his friend Ninian Edwards’s plump, vivacious sister-in-law, Mary Todd, a cousin of his law partner, John Todd Stuart. In this campaign, too, Lincoln faced a challenge from Douglas, another regular visitor to the Edwards’s hilltop mansion. The bright and talkative Mary was actually more compatible with Douglas than she was with the socially awkward Lincoln, but their political differences—she was a flaming Whig, a family friend of Henry Clay—made a serious love affair impossible. Nevertheless, the two amused one another with witty drawing-room repartee and took long walks together on the streets of Springfield. Several years after the fact, Mary supposedly told her friend and confidante, White House seamstress Elizabeth Keckley, that Douglas had proposed to her but that she had turned him down, noting prophetically: “I can’t consent to be your wife. I shall become Mrs. President…but it will not be as Mrs. Douglas.” Despite such claims, their relationship never went beyond mutual flirting. “I liked him well enough, but that was all,” Mary shrugged.47
Douglas, at any rate, was too busy campaigning to do much socializing. He had resigned his post in the Springfield Land Office and, as chairman of the Democratic State Committee, had taken to the roads in behalf of Van Buren. In the course of the 1840 campaign, Douglas made 207 speeches, including one that took place at a public hanging in Carlinville (contrary to rumor, he did not shoulder aside the condemned man to address the crowd from the gallows). Besides Lincoln, he debated his old rivals Stuart and Hardin, and even took on former Illinois governor Joseph Duncan, an apostate Democrat whom he denounced for engaging in “the slang of a palace, and extravagant furniture, and a hundred other ridiculous charges” against Van Buren. After a particularly bitter exchange of words with Sangamo Journal editor Simeon Francis, Douglas met the newsman in open combat on a Springfield street. A gleeful Lincoln recounted the ensuing affray: “Douglas, having chosen to consider himself insulted by something in the ‘Journal,’ undertook to cane Francis in the street. Francis caught him by the hair and jammed him back against a marketcart, where the matter ended by Francis being pulled away from him. The whole affair was so ludicrous that Francis and everybody else (Douglas excepted) have been laughing about it ever since.”48
Douglas’s various combats, verbal and physical, paid handsome dividends on Election Day, when Illinois was one of only seven states to buck the Harrison landslide. As a reward for his services, Democratic governor Thomas Carlin appointed Douglas secretary of state in November 1840, replacing drunken Whig officeholder Alexander P. Field. At the age of twenty-seven, Douglas was the youngest secretary of state in Illinois history, but he did not remain in the post for long. Three months later, with the help of the Democratic-controlled legislature, he was named to fill one of five new seats on the state supreme court. Even among Democrats, there were some misgivings about Douglas’s youth and comparatively meager legal qualifications. State senator Adam Snyder, who had sponsored the sweeping reorganization, said bluntly that “Douglas is talented, but too young for the office,” but added somewhat backhandedly, “We could not do much better than elect him.”49
The newly chosen “baby judge” was given charge of the Fifth Judicial District, a nine-county region along the Mississippi River that was the fastest-growing area in the state. Part of the reason for its rapid growth involved one of Douglas’s old Canandaigua, New York, neighbors, Mormon religious leader Joseph Smith, who had relocated his followers to Illinois after a brief and stormy stay in Missouri. Both the Democrats and the Whigs actively courted the Mormon vote, and Douglas took care to maintain friendly relations with Smith and his coreligionists. During his brief interim as secretary of state, he had helped push through the legislature an act granting a charter to the new city of Nauvoo and giving it the power to raise its own militia, the Nauvoo Legion, that was independent of the state government and exempt from all non-church-related military duty. He also appointed Nauvoo mayor John C. Bennett, “probably the greatest scamp in the western country,” to chancery court in Hancock County. “Judge Douglas has ever proved himself friendly to this people,” Smith said afterward, in something of an understatement.50
Besides doing favors for the Mormons, Douglas traveled the Fifth Circuit’s back roads, hearing a staggering number of cases—nearly 400 in the first two months alone. He was, one lawyer observed, “a perfect steam engine in britches.” Chicago attorney Justin Butterfield, a Whig, conceded that “I thought I could handle him, but damn that little squatty Democrat—he is the very best and most acute Judge in all this Democratic State. He listens patiently, comprehends the law and grasps the facts by intuition; then decides calmly, clearly and quietly…. Douglas is the ablest man on the bench today in Illinois.” He was the certainly the most informal, propping his feet on his desk and leaving the bench frequently to sit on his friends’ knees and share cigars. “He is certainly the most democratic judge I ever knew,” one lawyer noted. Douglas proved his point by removing all Whig circuit court clerks and replacing them with Democrats.51
Despite assuring his family that “office and honors have lost their charm” and that he intended “to devote all the energies of my mind to my judicial duties and my private affairs,” Douglas could not resist the continuing lure of politics. In 1842, he successfully managed fellow supreme court judge Thomas Ford’s election as governor, and later that year he came within five votes of receiving the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate. The next year, an even better opportunity opened up when the Fifth Judicial District was included in the newly drawn Fifth Congressional District. Thanks to his wide exposure as a jurist in the district, Douglas defeated his Whig opponent, Orville H. Browning, by a narrow 461-vote margin.52
Ten years to the day after he arrived in western Illinois, a twenty-year-old stranger with less than $5 in his pocket, Douglas headed off to Congress. Behind him he would leave a bevy of friends and supporters—and an equal number of political enemies. One of the latter, Abraham Lincoln, had failed in his own bid for a congressional seat, losing the Seventh District nomination to Douglas’s old nemesis, John J. Hardin. While Hardin went to Washington with Douglas, Lincoln stayed behind in Springfield, devoting himself to his legal practice and his new wife, Hardin’s third cousin, Mary Todd, in more or less that order. Having resigned his seat in the state legislature two years earlier to concentrate on making a living, Lincoln now seemed a spent force politically, part of the soon-to-be distant past that receded, mile by mile, in the cloud of dust behind Douglas’s eastbound stage.