Lincoln's Ladder to the Presidency: The Eighth Judicial Circuit

1. A New Country

9 1. A New Country z Abraham Lincoln and the Illinois Eighth Judicial Circuit experienced parallel transformations. Between March 1830, when he arrived in Macon County, soon to be part of the circuit, and February 1861, when he departed for Washington, Lincoln spent virtually his entire adult life in the Eighth Circuit. The crude, untrained politician and attorney surfaced in the mid1830s on the primitive frontier. It would have been far more difficult for him to advance himself and he would have had far less opportunity to do so in a more developed social and political structure. By the same token, it would have been more difficult for him to grow personally and expand his talents and intellect in a less-dynamic and less-changing environment.1 His exceptional capacity for self-improvement and adaptation to change was perfectly suited to the explosive growth and taming of this time. As central Illinois evolved, so did Lincoln. The Illinois legislature organized the courts into circuits, each a combination of counties united by a common presiding judge and state’s attorney and by consecutive circuit court sessions in each of its counties twice a year. From its creation in 1839 until 1860, the Eighth Judicial Circuit was the center of Lincoln’s law practice. There he became one of the leading lawyers in Illinois. There he learned the art of politics that transformed him from a merely clever politician to one of the greatest statesmen democracy has ever produced. He was a product of the place and its people. An understanding of Lincoln’s growth and development requires an understanding of the dynamic vitality of the area of the Eighth Judicial Circuit 10 Lincoln and the Circuit during his years in it. The Eighth, at its geographic largest, from 1845 to 1853, covered fifteen, then fourteen, counties. The population of these counties in 1840 was 69,100 (Cook County, which includes the City of Chicago, had a population of only 10,200); in 1850, it was 107,000 (Cook, 43,400); and in 1860, 232,700 (Cook, 145,000). Because reapportionment historically trails population shifts, the disparity of influence was even greater in the Illinois legislature. Under the 1848 apportionment, seventeen members in the legislature served from the counties of the circuit; three served from Cook County. That same disparity remained even after the reapportionment of 1854.2 The Eighth Judicial Circuit included many of the finest legal minds in the state, talented and aggressive entrepreneurs and developers, and most of its influential politicians. All the institutions of state government—the governor, the legislature, and the supreme court—were (and still are) in Springfield; the only federal court in the state was in Springfield until the establishment of another in Chicago in 1849. The circuit’s land, over ten thousand square miles, more than twice the size of Connecticut, was almost entirely prairie, a vast sea of tall grass stretching as far as the eye could see. This grass consisted mostly of Big Blue Stem and Indian Grass, growing as high as a horse’s shoulder and full of an incredible variety of wildflowers that came and went through the seasons. The Eighth, which stretched from the Illinois River to the Indiana state line, cradled a substantial portion of Illinois’ twenty-two million acres of prairie, which glaciers had flattened and filled relatively level but for the striking ridges, or moraines. A crystalline network of streams and rivers flowed through this vast ocean of grass, broken only by prairie groves, large islands of hardwoods, oaks and hickories that provided occasional shelter from the elements. The ride around the fourteen counties covered four hundred to five hundred miles. Illinois became the twenty-first state in 1818 with the smallest population of any state ever admitted into the Union, just 34,620. That population had settled primarily in a triangle formed in the bottom fifth of the state, the tip of the state at the southern corner, Kaskaskia on the Mississippi River as the northwest corner, and Shawneetown on the Ohio River as the northeast corner. Little was known, by the early settlers, of the interior of the state north of this triangle. At the time of statehood, no settlement had occurred in most of the area that would be the Eighth Circuit. Only three future counties had even one settler at that time. 11 A New Country Illinois’ population grew to...