was still a strong prejudice in the State against Yankees. The
close bargains and superior airs of the emigrants from New England
contrasted so unpleasantly with the open-handed hospitality and the
easy ways of the Southerners and French, that a pioneer's prospects
were blasted at the start if he acted like a Yankee. A history of
Illinois in 1837, published evidently to "boom" the State, cautioned
the emigrant that if he began his life in Illinois by "affecting
superior intelligence and virtue, and catechizing the people for their
habits of plainness and simplicity and their apparent want of those
things which he imagines indispensable to comfort," he must expect
to be forever marked as "a Yankee," and to have his prospects
correspondingly defeated. A "hard-shell" Baptist preacher of about
this date showed the feeling of the people when he said, in preaching
of the richness of the grace of the Lord: "It tuks in the isles of the
sea and the uttermust part of the yeth. It embraces the Esquimaux and
the Hottentots, and some, my dear brethering, go so far as to suppose
that it tuks in the poor benighted Yankees, but _I don't go that
fur_." When it came to an election of legislators, many of the people
"didn't go that fur" either.

There was a preponderance of jean suits like Lincoln's in the
Assembly, and there were coonskin caps and buckskin trousers.
Nevertheless, more than one member showed a studied garb and a courtly
manner. Some of the best blood of the South went into the making of
Illinois, and it showed itself from the first in the Assembly. The
surroundings of the legislators were quite as simple as the attire
of the plainest of them. The court-house, in good old Colonial style,
with square pillars and belfry, was finished with wooden desks and
benches. The State furnished her law-makers no superfluities--three
dollars a day, a cork inkstand, a certain number of quills, and a