The courts which were held in these log huts were as rude as might be
expected; yet there is evidence that although there was no superfluity
of law or of learning, justice was substantially administered. The
lawyers came mostly from Kentucky, though an occasional New Englander
confronted and lived down the general prejudice against his region and
obtained preferment. The profits of the profession were inconceivably
small. One early State's Attorney describes his first circuit as a
tour of shifts and privations not unlike the wanderings of a mendicant
friar. In his first county he received a fee of five dollars for
prosecuting the parties to a sanguinary affray. In the next he was
equally successful, but barely escaped drowning in Spoon River. In the
third there were but two families at the county-seat, and no cases on
the docket. Thence he journeyed across a trackless prairie sixty
miles, and at Quincy had one case and gained five dollars. In Pike
County our much-enduring jurist took no cash, but found a generous
sheriff who entertained him without charge. "He was one of nature's
noblemen, from Massachusetts," writes the grateful prosecutor. The
lawyers in what was called good practice earned less than a street-
sweeper to-day. It is related that the famous Stephen A. Douglas once
traveled from Springfield to Bloomington and made an extravagant
speech, and having gained his case received a fee of five dollars. In
such a state of things it was not to be wondered at that the
technicalities of law were held in somewhat less veneration than what
the pioneer regarded as the essential claims of justice. The
infirmities of the jury system gave them less annoyance than they give
us. Governor Ford mentions a case where a gang of horse-thieves
succeeded in placing one of their confederates upon a jury which was
to try them; but he was soon brought to reason by his eleven
colleagues making preparations to hang him to the rafters of the jury
room. The judges were less hampered by the limitations of their legal