urs
to his law books and perhaps more to comfortable chats with his host
and talkative neighbors around the stove. For diversion he had the
weekly meetings of the Lyceum, which had just been formed.[32] He owed
much to this institution, for the the debates and discussions gave him
a chance to convert the traditional leadership which fell to him as
village schoolmaster, into a real leadership of talent and ready wit.
In this Lyceum he made his first political speech, defending Andrew
Jackson and his attack upon the Bank against Josiah Lamborn, a lawyer
from Jacksonville.[33] For a young man he proved himself astonishingly
well-informed. If the chronology of his autobiography may be accepted,
he had already read the debates in the Constitutional Convention of
1787, the _Federalist_, the works of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,
and the recent debates in Congress.

Even while he was teaching school, Douglass found time to practice law
in a modest way before the justices of the peace; and when the first
of March came, he closed the schoolhouse door on his career as
pedagogue. He at once repaired to Jacksonville and presented himself
before a justice of the Supreme Court for license to practice law.
After a short examination, which could not have been very searching,
he was duly admitted to the bar of Illinois. He still lacked a month
of being twenty-one years of age.[34] Measured by the standard of
older communities in the East, he knew little law; but there were few
cases in these Western courts which required much more than
common-sense, ready speech, and acquaintance with legal procedure.
_Stare decisis_ was a maxim that did not trouble the average lawyer,
for there were few decisions to stand upon.[35] Besides, experience
would make good any deficiencies of preparation.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: There can be little doubt that he supplied the data for
the sketch in Wheeler's Biographical and Political History of
Congress.]

[Footnote 2: See Transactions of the Illinois State Historical
Society, 1901, pp. 113-114.]

[Footnote 3: Vermont Historical Gazetteer, III, p. 457.]

[Footnote 4: Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society,
1901, p. 115.]

[Footnote 5: Mr. B.F. Field in the _Vermonter_, January, 1897.]

[Footnote 6: For many facts relating to Douglas's life, I am indebted
to an unpublished autobiographical sketch in the possession of his
son, Judge R.M