1832, partly because of his unpopular adherence to Clay and the American system, but in his own election precinct, he received nearly all the votes cast. With a friend, William Berry, he then bought a small country store, which soon failed chiefly because of the drunken habits of Berry and because Lincoln preferred to read and to tell stories—he early gained local celebrity as a story-teller—rather than sell; about this time he got hold of a set of Blackstone. In the spring of 1833 the store’s stock was sold to satisfy its creditors, and Lincoln assumed the firm’s debts, which he did not fully pay off for fifteen years. In May 1833, local friendship, disregarding politics, procured his appointment as postmaster of New Salem, but this paid him very little, and in the same year the county surveyor of Sangamon county opportunely offered to make him one of his deputies. He hastily qualified himself by study, and entered upon the practical duties of surveying farm lines, roads and town sites. “This,” to use his own words, “procured bread, and kept body and soul together.”
In 1834 Lincoln was elected (second of four successful candidates, with only 14 fewer votes than the first) a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, to which he was re-elected in 1836, 1838 and 1840, serving until 1842. In his announcement of his candidacy in 1836 he promised to vote for Hugh L. White of Tennessee (a vigorous opponent of Andrew Jackson in Tennessee politics) for president, and said: “I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females)”—a sentiment frequently quoted to prove Lincoln a believer in woman’s suffrage. In this election he led the poll in Sangamon county. In the legislature, like the other representatives of that county, who were called the “Long Nine,” because of their stature, he worked for internal improvements, for which lavish appropriations were made, and for the division of Sangamon county and the choice of Springfield as the state capital, instead of Vandalia. He and his party colleagues followed Stephen A. Douglas in adopting the convention system, to which Lincoln had been strongly opposed. In 1837 with one other representative from Sangamon county, named Dan Stone, he protested against a series of resolutions, adopted by the Illinois General Assembly, expressing disapproval of the formation of abolition societies and asserting, among other things, that “the right of property in slaves is sacred to the slave holding states under the Federal Constitution”; and Lincoln and Stone put out a paper in which they expressed their belief “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils,” “that the Congress of the United States has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different states,” “that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but that the power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of the District.” Lincoln was very popular among his fellow legislators, and in 1838 and in 1840 he received the complimentary vote of his minority colleagues for the speakership of the state House of Representatives. In 1842 he declined a renomination to the state legislature and attempted unsuccessfully to secure a nomination to Congress. In the same year he became interested in the Washingtonian temperance movement.
In 1846 he was elected a member of the National House of Representatives by a majority of 1511 over his Democratic opponent, Peter Cartwright, the Methodist preacher. Lincoln was the only Whig member of Congress elected in Illinois in 1846. In the House of Representatives on the 22nd of December 1847 he introduced the “Spot Resolutions,” which quoted statements in the president’s messages of the 11th of May 1846 and the 7th and 8th of December that Mexican troops had invaded the territory of the United States, and asked the president to tell the precise “spot” of invasion; he made a speech on these resolutions in the House on the 12th of January 1848. His attitude toward the war and especially his vote for George Ashmun’s amendment to the supply bill at this session, declaring that the Mexican War was “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President,” greatly displeased his constituents. He later introduced a bill regarding slavery in the District of Columbia, which (in accordance with his statement of 1837) was to be submitted to the vote of the District for approval, and which provided for compensated emancipation, forbade the bringing of slaves into the District of Columbia, except by government officials from slave states, and the selling of slaves away from the District, and arranged for the emancipation after a period of apprenticeship of all slave children born after the 1st of January 1850. While he was in Congress he voted repeatedly for the principle of the Wilmot Proviso. At the close of his term in 1848 he declined an appointment as governor of the newly organized Territory of Oregon and for a time worked, without success, for an appointment as Commissioner of the General Land Office. During the presidential campaign he made speeches in Illinois, and in Massachusetts he spoke before the Whig State Convention at Worcester on the 12th of September, and in the next ten days at Lowell, Dedham, Roxbury, Chelsea, Cambridge and Boston. He had become an eloquent and influential public speaker, and in 1840 and 1844 was a candidate on the Whig ticket for presidential elector.
In 1834 his political friend and colleague John Todd Stuart (1807–1885), a lawyer in full practice, had urged him to fit himself for the bar, and had lent him text-books; and Lincoln, working diligently, was admitted to the bar in September 1836. In April 1837 he quitted New Salem, and removed to Springfield, which was the county-seat and was soon to become the capital of the state, to begin practice in a partnership with Stuart, which was terminated in April 1841; from that time until September 1843 he was junior partner to Stephen Trigg Logan (1800–1880), and from 1843 until his death he was senior partner of William Henry Herndon (1818–1891). Between 1849 and 1854 he took little part in politics, devoted himself to the law and became one of the leaders of the Illinois bar. His small fees—he once charged $3.50 for collecting an account of nearly $600.00—his frequent refusals to take cases which he did not think right and his attempts to prevent unnecessary litigation have become proverbial. Judge David Davis, who knew Lincoln on the Illinois circuit and whom Lincoln made in October 1862 an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, said that he was “great both at nisi prius and before an appellate tribunal.” He was an excellent cross-examiner, whose candid friendliness of manner often succeeded in eliciting important testimony from unwilling witnesses. Among Lincoln’s most famous cases were: one (Bailey v. Cromwell, 4 Ill. 71; frequently cited) before the Illinois Supreme Court in July 1841 in which he argued against the validity of a note in payment for a negro girl, adducing the Ordinance of 1787 and other authorities; a case (tried in Chicago in September 1857) for the Rock Island railway, sued for damages by the owners of a steamboat sunk after collision with a railway bridge, a trial in which Lincoln brought to the service of his client a surveyor’s knowledge of mathematics and a riverman’s acquaintance with currents and channels, and argued that crossing a stream by bridge was as truly a common right as navigating it by boat, thus contributing to the success of Chicago and railway commerce in the contest against St Louis and river transportation; the defence (at Beardstown in May 1858) on the charge of murder of William (“Duff”) Armstrong, son of one of Lincoln’s New Salem friends, whom Lincoln freed by controverting with the help of an almanac the testimony of a crucial witness that between 10 and 11 o’clock at night he had seen by moonlight the defendant strike the murderous blow—this dramatic incident is described in Edward Eggleston’s novel, The Graysons; and the defence on the charge of murder (committed in August 1859) of “Peachy” Harrison, a grandson of Peter Cartwright, whose testimony was used with great effect.
From law, however, Lincoln was soon drawn irresistibly back into politics. The slavery question, in one form or another,
