built. In the place of a school and university training fortune
substituted these trials, hardships, and struggles as a preparation for
the great work which he had to do. It turned out to be exactly what the
emergency required. Ten years instead at the public school and the
university certainly never could have fitted this man for the unique work
which was to be thrown upon him. Some other Moses would have had to lead
us to our Jordan, to the sight of our promised land of liberty.

At the age of twenty-five he became a member of the Legislature of
Illinois, and so continued for eight years, and, in the meantime,
qualified himself by reading such law books as he could borrow at
random--for he was too poor to buy any to be called to the Bar. For his
second quarter of a century--during which a single term in Congress
introduced him into the arena of national questions--he gave himself up
to law and politics. In spite of his soaring ambition, his two years in
Congress gave him no premonition of the great destiny that awaited
him,--and at its close, in 1849, we find him an unsuccessful applicant to
the President for appointment as Commissioner of the General Land
Office--a purely administrative bureau; a fortunate escape for himself
and for his country. Year by year his knowledge and power, his
experience and reputation extended, and his mental faculties seemed to
grow by what they fed on. His power of persuasion, which had always been
marked, was developed to an extraordinary degree, now that he became
engaged in congenial questions and subjects. Little by little he rose to
prominence at the Bar, and became the most effective public speaker in
the West. Not that he possessed any of the graces of the orator; but his
logic was invincible, and his clearness and force of statement impressed
upon his hearers the convictions of his honest mind, while his broad
sympathies and sparkling and genial humor made him a universal favorite
as far and as fast as his acquaintance extended.