Resourceful, skilled in debate, intensely patriotic, and favored
with many winning personal qualities, he drew to himself men of
both Northern and Southern proclivities and became an influential
exponent of broad and enduring nationalism.
Meanwhile, after a first defeat, Lincoln was elected to the
Illinois Legislature in 1834, and again in 1836. When he gathered
all of his worldly belongings in a pair of saddlebags and fared
forth to the new capital, Springfield, to settle himself to the
practice of law, he had more than a local reputation for
oratorical power; and events were to prove that he had not only
facility in debate and familiarity with public questions, but
incomparable devotion to lofty principles. In the subsequent
unfolding of the careers of Lincoln and Douglas--especially in
the turn of events that brought to each a nomination for the
presidency by a great party in 1860--there was no small amount of
good luck and sheer accident. But it is equally true that by
prodigious effort Kentuckian and Vermonter alike hewed out their
own ways to greatness.
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