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
no surplus money in the State to supply the capital; there were no
trained bankers to guide the concern; there was no clear notion of
how it was all to be done; but a banking capital of one million eight
hundred thousand dollars would be a good thing in the State, they were
sure; and if the East could be made to believe in Illinois as much as
her legislators believed in her, the stocks would go, and so the banks
were chartered.

But even more important to the State than banks was a highway. For
thirteen years plans of the Illinois and Michigan canal had been
constantly before the Assembly. Surveys had been ordered, estimates
reported, the advantages extolled, but nothing had been done. Now,
however, the Assembly, flushed by the first thrill of the coming
"boom," decided to authorize a loan of a half-million on the credit of
the State. Lincoln favored both these measures. He did not, however,
do anything especially noteworthy for either