canals were beginning to be built, with promise of closer relations
between the villages and settlements theretofore lost in the
solitudes.

Finding no employment at Jacksonville, he sold his few books to
keep off hunger and walked to Winchester. On the morning after
his arrival he found a crowd assembled on the street where a public
sale was about to open. Delay was occasioned by the want of a
competent clerk and he was hired for two dollars a day to keep the
record of the sale. He was then employed to teach a private school
in the town at a salary of forty dollars a month. Besides teaching
he found time to read a few borrowed law books and try an occasional
case before the village justice.

Having been admitted to the bar in March, 1834, he opened a law
office at Jacksonville. His professional career, though successful,
was so completely eclipsed by the brilliancy of his political
achievements that it need not detain us. The readiness and agility
of his mind; the adaptability of his convictions to the demands
of the hour; his self-confident energy, were such that he speedily
developed into a good trial lawyer and won high standing at the
bar. That the profession was not then as lucrative as it has since
become, is evidenced by the fact that he traveled from Springfield
to Bloomington and argued a case for a fee of five dollars.

But his time and energy were devoted to politics rather than law.
The strategy of parties interested him more than Coke or Justinian.
Jacksonville was a conservative, religious town, whose population
consisted chiefly of New England Puritans and Whigs. But the
prairies were settled by a race of thoroughly Democratic pioneers