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1 Introduction z Abraham Lincoln and Eighth Judicial Circuit Judge David Davis rode their horses from Sullivan, the seat of Moultrie County, where they had just completed one circuit court session, toward the hamlet of Decatur in Macon County, where they needed to be in the morning for the next session. In-between the towns runs the Sangamon River, which Lincoln and Davis had to cross without benefit of bridge or boat and which was swollen with rain. The two friends had traveled between the two towns before, but on this occasion, night had fallen by the time they reached the river. Lincoln hesitated to cross the river in the dark, but Davis, without a word, plunged his horse into the two-hundred-foot-wide river. Unable to find a landing place on the other side, he returned and rode downstream, where he urged his horse into the water and this time found a place to climb out on the other side. He built a fire to signal where Lincoln should cross. The next morning, the judge and the lawyer were in court on schedule.1 As the two men practiced law in the familiar circuit courtroom, having recovered from their dangerous horseback swim, neither of them could have dreamed what their shared future held. Within a decade, the contacts Lincoln and Davis made in central Illinois would be of vital importance to their later careers: the judge would be the architect of one of the great upsets in American political history, and the winner in that upset would be the man the judge had guided across the river. Nor could they anticipate that Decatur would transform into a booming city, the host of the 1860 state convention of the Illinois Republican Party, not yet even founded. The 2 Introduction Decatur Convention’s unanimous support of Lincoln’s candidacy would put him in a solid position in the national convention, held in Chicago a week later. Judge Davis and a group of lawyers from the Eighth Judicial Circuit would go to Chicago to engineer the Republican Party nomination of their colleague Lincoln for president. Two years later and under intense pressure from the same group of lawyers, Lincoln appointed his former circuit judge to the Supreme Court of the United States. Twice a year from 1848 to 1860, Lincoln and Davis rode together as part of a cavalcade of lawyers who traveled through dynamic central Illinois from county seat to county seat of the Eighth Judicial Circuit to hold court. The Eighth was one of the nine circuits the Illinois state legislature formed in 1839 to hold consecutive court sessions within groups of contiguous counties each spring and fall. By 1860, the number grew to twenty-six due to the growth of the state’s population.2 At its largest, the Eighth Judicial Circuit encompassed as many as fifteen counties, including Lincoln’s home county, Sangamon. Lincoln spent almost as much time every year on the trip around the circuit as he did in Springfield. During this period, the population and influence of the Eighth Judicial Circuit exceeded that of the late-blooming Chicago. Lincoln’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate and his election six months later culminated his rise. How did this man of such humble beginnings reach this pinnacle? The answer lies in a combination of the remarkable gifts with which he was endowed and the place where he chose to use those gifts. As Don E. Fehrenbacher states, the answer can “begin simply enough with Lincoln’s good fortune in his place of residence. The same man living in Wisconsin or Iowa, for example, would have been unlikely to rise so high but Illinois was a pivotal state in the national politics of the 1850s, and its leaders were objects of unusual interest as a consequence .” He quotes Joshua Giddings, a delegate: “Lincoln was selected on account of his location.”3 Lincoln’s growth and rise are viewed in the context of the forces of great change in central Illinois and his capacity to adapt to change. The population of the frontier exploded during his twenty-three years as a lawyer. The arrival of railroads to the circuit in the early 1850s transformed it seemingly overnight. That transformation coincided with Lincoln’s reentry into politics and his arrival at the pinnacle of his profession. The economy boomed, driven also by the immigration of talented, daring, and resourceful [18.216.94.152] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

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