Springfield, Illinois

“ The capital was established at Springfield in 1837, an attractive city of about thirty thousand inhabitants, built on a prairie a few miles south of Sangamon River, a tributary of the Illinois, and from its floral development and the adornment of its gardens and shade trees, Springfield is popularly known as the "Flower City." There is a magnificent State Capitol with high surmounting dome, patterned 411 somewhat after the Federal Capitol at Washington. Springfield has coal-mines which add to its prosperity, but its great fame is connected with Abraham Lincoln. ”

“ Besides the usual county buildings, Springfield contains four churches, and two insurance offices. It is a thriving seat of manufactures, and in the division of the town called Chickapee village, there are four large cotton factories, and a bleaching establishment. Three of the factories give employment to six hundred persons. In this village there are also iron works. Population of Springfield, eleven thousand and thirteen.
Springfield, the capital of Illinois, near the centre of the State, and on the border of a beautiful prairie, is the most important town in the interior. ”

“ Springfield, Illinois. Seventy thousand strangers poured into the prairie city. They came from Indiana, Iowa, and the lakes. Thousands came from Chicago. Men came in wagons, bringing their wives and children. They brought tents, camp-kettles, and coffee-pots. Says a graphic writer who saw the scene:
"Every road leading to the city is crowded for twenty miles with vehicles. The weather is fine, and a little overwarm. Girls can dress in white, and bare their arms and necks without danger; the women can bring their children. Everything that was ever done at any other mass-meeting is done here. ”

“ At Springfield, Illinois, they illustrated the growth of the city by telling me that in 1856 a lunatic preacher applied to Mr. Lincoln for his aid to open the legislative chamber for a series of meetings to announce that the Lord was coming at once. Mr. Lincoln refused, saying, 'If the Lord knew Springfield as well as I do, he wouldn't come within a thousand miles of it.' But now the legislative halls are open, and every good finds welcome in that city. The world grows better—cities are not worse. The nation has not gone backward, and all the good deeds did not cease in 1865. ”

“ I read the newspapers and then tick off the names of the stations on the printed time-table of the B. and O. folder and patiently await the city and its bard. A four-hour journey in a slow train in England would seem intolerable, but America has a different sense of time and space, and a long time is not thought so long. At last, in the late dusk, behold Springfield, Illinois, and the unmistakable marble of the [10] poet’s face under a small black felt—“waitin’ for me, prayin’ for me,” and certainly not really believing in the act of faith which can bring the mountain to Mahomet. ”

“ But there I pick up the poet. That is where he [5] haunts—“where Lincoln dreamed in Illinois.” The poet thinks that the world could be regenerated from a centre in Illinois—this beautiful state upon which Chicago has thought fit to rear its awful form.
Some one of Illinois, not the poet, wrote to me, “What do you think of Springfield as a centre of world thought?” Now I know the craze of “Boost your home town” can be, and often is, carried to excess, and little Springfield is not even on a main line from New York. But neither is Bethlehem nor the human heart. ”

“ Mr. Ashman also had the honor to convey the formal notice of the nomination to Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois.
Dr. J. G. Holland lived in Springfield, where all of his prose works first made their appearance, in the columns of the Springfield Republican.
No spot in Springfield is more interesting to those fortunate enough to see it than the United States Arsenal.
Springfield Armory was established by act of Congress, April, 1794, its site having been accepted by Washington in 1789. ”

“ Men of either wealth or position were still too few to fill its ranks. Energy, ambition talent, were necessarily the standard of admission; and Lincoln, though poor as a church mouse, was as welcome as those who could wear ruffled shirts and carry gold watches. The meetings of the legislature at Springfield then first brought together that splendid group of young men of genius whose phenomenal careers and distinguished services have given Illinois fame in the history of the nation. ”

“ It is the fifth state capitol of Illinois and the second erected in Springfield. Other prominent buildings are the Supreme Court building, the county court house (the old state capitol, finished in 1853) , the city-hall, the state arsenal, the high school and the public library. In Oak Ridge cemetery, adjacent to the city, is the Lincoln monument, erected over Abraham Lincoln's grave with funds raised throughout the country by a Lincoln Monument Association. ”

“ Belleflower Village When the Gilman, Clinton & Springfield Railroad was built, in 1871, the township of Belleflower voted $30,000 in twenty-year ten per cent bonds, and the road established the station of Belleflower near the center of the township, where the railroad crosses the county road which runs through the county on the half section-line before spoken of, on Section 21, forty miles from Gilman, and seventy-one from Springfield. ”

“ But a new clan has come up from Cairo, Illinois, led by Black Hawk Boone. Many of their young girls look more like young Indian maids from a government reservation school, than people of Caucasian stock. But, for all that, they have their own original ways of delicate manner and address, most disconcerting to the fixed limits of Springfield’s conventionality. They are rather short and heavy-set. ”

“ Thomas Cox was the third of the trio of the resident proprietors of Springfield. He had signed a petition for the division of Randolph county in 1812, represented [pg 207] Union county as a senator in the first general assembly of Illinois, and in 1820 was appointed register of the land-office at Vandalia. In 1823 he came to Springfield as register of the land-office at that place. Col. Cox was six feet tall, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, and was a drunkard within a short time after the founding of Springfield. ”

“ In the warm, moonlit atmosphere of June nights when the streets of Springfield were quiet, the great plain of Illinois bathed for hundreds of miles from north to south in a sweet effulgence and the rurals slumbering in their simple homes, he sat conferring with his lawyers and legislative agents.
Pity in such a crisis the poor country-jake legislator torn between his desire for a justifiable and expedient gain and his fear lest he should be assailed as a betrayer of the people’s interests. ”

“ Of origin, doubtful if not unknown; "poor, without the means of hiding his poverty," he represented yet another importation from Kentucky which is significantly comprehended by the term, "the poor whites." Springfield, containing between one and two thousand people, was near the northern line of settlement in Illinois. Still it was the center of a limited area of wealth and refinement. Its citizens were imbued with the spirit of push and enterprise. Lincoln therefore could not have been thrown into a better or more appreciative community. ”

“ In common with almost every delegation, they had been instructed by their constituents to adopt a scheme of internal improvements complete enough to give every budding town in Illinois easy communication with the world. This for the State in general; for Sangamon County in particular, they had been directed to secure the capital. The change in the State's centre of population made it advisable to move the seat of government northward from Vandalia, and Springfield was anxious to secure it. To Lincoln was entrusted the work of putting through the bill to remove the capital. ”

“ The Indian barrier was being pushed back, and the Sangamon country, with its land-office at Springfield, was a favorite place for settlement. The rapid increase in the amount of land sold is also striking. As the third decade of the century closed Indiana was the favorite place for frontier settlement. The sales of public lands in Ohio were diminishing. A prophetic glance would have seen that as the ever-shifting frontier passed westward Illinois was to overtake and then to far surpass Indiana in number of settlers. ”

“ The citizens of Springfield cleansed their city and I never knew it to be as healthy as it was last year.
Illinois is more prosperous than perhaps at any former period; the influence of the operation of the railroad has given a different aspect to things in the surrounding country, in the way of lumber especially. ”

“ It had a population of 1500. The county contained nearly 18,000 souls, of whom 78 were free negroes, 20 registered indentured servants, and six slaves. Scarcely a perceptible trace of color, one would say, yet we find in the Springfield paper a leading article beginning with the startling announcement, "Our State is threatened to be overrun with free negroes." The county was one of the richest in Illinois, possessed of a soil of inexhaustible fertility, and divided to the best advantage between prairie and forest. ”

“ LINCOLN THE LAWYER Two years after Lincoln entered the Illinois Parliament, its meetings, which had been held at Vandalia, were transferred to Springfield. In Springfield Lincoln lived for the next five-and-twenty years, until he left it to go to Washington as President of the United States. Springfield was a country town, which thought itself rather important. The people paid a good deal of attention to dress; they gave evening parties of a quiet sort, where they played cards and talked politics. The business of the most prominent persons in the town was law. ”

“ The city council was to consist of a mayor, four aldermen and nine councilors. The election was to take place on the first Monday in February, 1841.
A Liberal Charter The charter of the city was one of most liberal powers. It was all—yes, even more—than the Saints, so long harassed by mobs, had hoped to receive. It contained twenty-eight sections and was bounded in its limitations only by the Constitution of the United States and that of the state of Illinois. All the powers “conferred on the city council of the city of Springfield” were granted to the city of Nauvoo. ”

“ Springfield, 1, capital (34) of Illinois, situated in a flourishing coal district, 185 m. SW. of Chicago; has an arsenal, two colleges, and a handsome marble capitol; coal-mining, foundries, and flour, cotton, and paper mills are the chief industries; the burial-place of Abraham Lincoln. 2, A nicely laid out and flourishing city (62) of Massachusetts, capital of Hampden County, on the Connecticut River (spanned here by five bridges) , 99 m. ”

“ In a towering wrath Lincoln exclaimed: "I'll have that negro back soon, or I'll have a twenty years' excitement in Illinois until the governor does have a legal and constitutional right to do something in the premises!"
He had both. He and his partner sent to New Orleans the necessary money by which the boy was released and restored to his mother. The twenty years' excitement came later.
CHAPTER X. SOCIAL LIFE AND MARRIAGE. Springfield was largely settled by people born and educated in older and more cultured communities. From the first it developed a social life of its own. ”

“ To win among his fellows in the Senate a leadership such as he had readily won among his fellows at school, at Jacksonville, at Springfield, in the legislature and the Democratic organization of Illinois, and such as he was rising to in the lower house when he left it, and then to find and establish the right policy with slavery, and particularly with slavery in the Territories—there lay his path. ”

“ The commissioners decided that the rival settlement was inaccessible. Iles was twice state senator, major in the Winnebago war, and captain in the Black Hawk war, in which he served with Zachary Taylor, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, John T. Stuart, Robt. Anderson, of Fort Sumter fame, and others. Iles was also a large stock dealer, selling hogs and cattle in St. Louis and mules in Kentucky, until 1838, in which year he lost ten thousand dollars on hogs packed at Alton. In 1838-9 he built the American House in Springfield. ”

“ They are not on the map, but that matters little. We ought to be thankful that the dullness of the guide-book makers and topographists has still left us here and there serene bits of nature.
Springfield had a church, and a school, and a post office, and a tavern. It was a scattered sort of place, and a week of it would have proved the death of a city lady, accustomed to life only as it glows with color, or sparkles with the champagne of passion. ”

“ Beginning in a public highway at Peoria and running along such highway in a general southerly and southeasterly direction to Pana, affording Peoria, Pekin, Green Valley, Mason City, Greenview, Athens, Springfield, Pana and the intervening communities reasonable connections with each other. ”

“ The voices of the children will be as noble as the discourses of the prairie winds that catch our tree boughs at sunset. Every house will be as delicate and subtle as the ferny hollows of the Sangamon. The convert will name many birds that will come at his call and he will feed them crumbs of this Blessed Bread in friendship.
“When Springfield has partaken of this manna for a generation, all things will become new. Leavening thoughts will come from all the street corners. Novel fancies will come from the coffee houses. ”