the first judicial district of Illinois; a man four years younger than
Lincoln--he was only twenty-one at the time; a new-comer, too, in the
State, having arrived about a year before, under no very promising
auspices either, for he had only thirty-seven cents in his pockets,
and no position in view; but a man of metal, it was easy to see, for
already he had risen so high in the district where he had settled,
that he dared contest the office of State attorney with John J.
Hardin, one of the most successful lawyers of the State. This young
man was Stephen A. Douglas. He had come to Vandalia from Morgan County
to conduct his campaign, and Lincoln met him first in the halls of
the old court-house, where he and his friends carried on with success
their contest against Hardin.

The ninth Assembly gathered in a more hopeful and ambitious mood than
any of its predecessors. Illinois was feeling well. The State was free
from debt. The Black Hawk War had stimulated the people greatly, for
it had brought a large amount of money into circulation. In fact, the
greater portion of the eight to ten million dollars the war had cost
had been circulated among the Illinois volunteers. Immigration, too,
was increasing at a bewildering rate. In 1835 the census showed a
population of 269,974. Between 1830 and 1835 two-fifths of this number
had come in. In the northeast Chicago had begun to rise. "Even for
Western towns" its growth had been unusually rapid, declared Peck's
"Gazetteer" of 1834; the harbor building there, the proposed Michigan
and Illinois canal, the rise in town lots--all promised to the State a
metropolis. To meet the rising tide of prosperity, the legislators of
1834 felt that they must devise some worthy scheme, so they chartered
a new State bank with a capital of one million five hundred thousand
dollars, and revived a bank which had broken twelve years before,
granting it a charter of three hundred thousand dollars. There was