During the 14 years the Lincolns lived in Indiana, the region became more thickly settled, mostly by people from the south. Superstition were prevalent; social functions consisted of such utilitarian amusement as corn shucking and house raising; religion was dogmatic and emotional. Abe, growing tall and strong, won a reputation as the best local athlete. but his father kept him busy at hard labor, hiring him out to neighbors when work at home slackened.

Abe's meager education had aroused his desire to learn, and he traveled over the countryside to borrow books. Young Lincoln worked for a while as a ferryman on the Ohio River, and at 19 helped take a flatboat cargo to New Orleans. Soon after he returned, his father decided to move to Illinois, where a relative, John Hanks, had preceded him. On March 1,1830, the family set out with all their possessions loaded on on three wagons. Their new home was located on the north bank of the Sangamon River, west of Decatur.

In the autumn all the Lincoln family came down with fever and ague. In the spring the family backtracked eastward to Coles County, Illinois. But this time Abraham did not accompany them, for during the winter he, his stepbrother John D. Johnston, and his cousin John Hanks had agreed to take another cargo to New Orleans for a trader, Denton Offutt. A new life was opening for young Lincoln. Henceforth, he could make his own way.

Supposedly it was on this second trip to New Orleans that young Lincoln, watching a slave auction, declared: "If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit hard." Lincoln at this period of his life could scarcely have believed himself to be a man of destiny, and John Hanks, who originated the story, was not with Lincoln, having left his fellow crewmen at St. Louis. Near the outset of this voyage, at the little village of New Salem on the Sangamon River, Lincoln had impressed Offutt by his ingenuity in moving the flatboat over a milldam. Offutt impressed likewise by the prospects of the village , arranged to open a store and rent the mill. On Lincoln's return from New Orleans, Offutt engaged him as clerk and handyman.

By late July 1831, when Lincoln came back, New Salem was enjoying what proved to be a short- lived boom based on a local conviction that the Sangamon River would be made navigable for steamboats. Among its residents were two physicians, a black smith a cooper, a shoemaker, and other craftsman common to a pioneer settleman. The people were mostly from the South, though a number of Yankees had also drifted in. His kindness, honesty, and effort as self-betterment so impressed the more reputable people of the community that they, too, soon came to respect him. He became a member of the debating society, studied grammar with the aid of a local school master, and acquired a lasting fondness for the writing of Shakespeare and Robert Burns from the village philosopher and fisherman.

Lincoln enlisted and was elected captain of his volunteer company. When his term expired, he reenlisted, serving about 80 days in all. He experienced some some hardships, but no fighting.

Returning to New Salem, Lincoln sought election to the state legislature. He won almost the votes in his own community, but lost the election because he was not known throughout the county. In partnership with William F. Berry, he bought a store on credit, but it soon failed, leaving him deeply in debt. He then got a job as deputy surveyor, was appointed postmaster, and pieced out his income with odd jobs, but he did have a short-lived love affair with Mary Owens.

In 1834, Lincoln was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. Twice Lincoln was his party's candidate for speaker, and when defeated, he served as its floor leader. His greatest achievement in the legislature,when he was a consistent supporter of conservative business interests, was to bring about the removal of the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield, by means of adroit logrolling

Lincoln and a colleague, Dan Stone, defined their position by a written declaration that slavery was "founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate it's evils". An internal improvement project that Lincoln promoted in the legislature turned out to be impractical and almost bankrupted the state. On national issues. Lincoln favored the United States bank and opposed the presidential policies of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. His friend, Stuart, had encouraged him to study law, and he obtained a license on September 9, 1836. By this time, New Salem was in decline and would soon be a ghost town. It has been restored as a state park. On April 15,1837, Lincoln moved to Springfield to become Stuart's partner. His conscientious efforts to pay off his debt had earned him the nickname Honest Abe. He was so poor that he arrived in Springfield on a borrowed horse with all his personal property his saddle bag. With the court in Springfield in session only a few weeks during the year lawyers were obliged to travel the circuit in order to make a living. Lincoln followed the judge from county to county over the 12,000 square miles of the 8th circuit. In 1841, Stuart developed a firm, and Lincoln formed a new partnership with Stephen Tlogan, who taught him the value of careful preparation and clear, succinct reasoning as opposed to mere cleverness and oratory. This partnership was in turn dissolved in 1844, when Lincoln took young William H. Herndon,. later to be his biographer, as a partner.

Meanwhile,on November 4, 1842, after a somewhat tumultuous courtship, Lincoln married Mary Todd. Brought up in Lexington ,Kentucky, she was a high-spirited, quick-tempered girl of excellent education and cultural background. Of all their children died except Robert Todd Lincoln. Upset after her husband's death, Mrs. Lincoln became so unbalanced at one time that her son Robert had her committed to an institution.

After reaching a position of leadership in state politics and working hard for the Whig ticket in the presidential election of 1840, Lincoln aspired to go to Congress. So Lincoln stepped aside for a moment, first for Hardin, then for Baker, under a sort of understanding that they would "take a turn about". When Lincoln's turn came in 1846, however, Hardin wished to serve again, and Lincoln had to maneuver skillfully to obtain the nomination. His district was so predominantly Whig that this amounted to election, and he won handily over his Democratic opponent. Lincoln worked very hard as a freshman congressman, but was unable to gain disinction. He went along with the Whig leaders in blaming the Polk administration for bringing on war with Mexico. His opposition to the war was unpopular in his district, however. When the annexations of territory from Mexico brought up the question of the status of slavery in the new lands, Lincoln voted for the Wilmot Proviso and other measures designed to confine the institution to the states where it ready existed.

In the campaign of 1848, Lincoln labored strenuously for the nomination and election of Gen. Zachary Taylor. He served on the Whig National Committee, attended the national convention Philadelphia, and made campaign speeches. With the Whig national ticket victorious, he hoped to share withBbaker the control of federal patronage in his home state. The juiciest plum that had been promised to Illinois was the position of commissioner of the General Land Office in Washington. After trying vainly to reconcile two rival candidates for this office, Lincoln tried to obtain it for himself. The most that it would offer him was the governorship or secretaryship of the Oregon territory. Never one to repine, however, Lincoln now devoted himself to becoming a better lawyer and more enlightened man. Pitching into his law books with greater zest, he also resumed his study of Shakespeare and mastered the first six books of Euclid as a mental discipline. Law practice was changing as the country developed, especially with the advent of railroads and the growth of corporations. Lincoln, conscientiously keeping pace, became one of the state's outstanding lawyers, with a steadily increasing practice, not only on the circuit but also in the state supreme court and the federal courts. Outwardly, however, Lincoln remained unchanged in his simple, somewhat rustic ways.

Lincoln took only a perfunctory part in the presidential campaign of 1852, and was rapidly losing interest in politics. Two years later, however, an event occurred that roused him, he declared, as never before. The status of slavery in the national territories, which had been virtually settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, now came to the fore in 1854. Stephen A. Douglas, whom Lincoln had known as young lawyer and legislator and who was now a Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate, brought about the repeal of a crucial section of the Missouri Compromise that had prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36 degrees 30. The Kansas- Nebraska Act so disrupted old party lines that when the Illinois legislature met to elect a U.S. senator to succeed Douglas' colleague, James Shields, it was evident that the Anti-Nebraska group drawn from both parties had the votes to win if the antislavery Whigs and antislavery Democrats could unite on a candidate. As their stubbornness threatened to result in the election of a pro slavery Democrat, Lincoln instructed his own backers to vote for Trumbull, thus assuring the latter's election.

Lincoln stayed aloof at the beginning, fearing that it would be dominated by the radical rather than the moderate antislavery element. Also, he hoped for a resurgence of the Whig party, in which he had attained a position of the state leadership. But as the presidential campaign of 1856 approached, he cast his lot with the new party. In the national convention, which nominated John C. Fremont for president, Lincoln received 110 ballots for the vice-presidential nomination, which went eventually to William L. Dayton of New Jersey. Though Lincoln had favored Justice John McLean, he worked faithfully for Fremont, who showed surprising strength, notwithstanding his defeat by the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan. With Senator Douglas running for reelection in 1858, Lincoln was recognized in Illinois as the strongest man to oppose him. Endorsed by Republican meetings all over the state and by the Republican State Convention, he opened his campaign with the famous declaration: " 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of seven joint debates, and these became the most spectacular feature of the campaign. Douglas refused to take a position on the rightfulness or wrongfulness of slavery, and offered his "popular sovereignty" doctrine as the solution of the problem. Lincoln, on the other hand, insisted that slavery was primarily a moral issue and offered as his solution a return to the principles of the Founding Father, which tolerated slavery where it existed but looked to its ultimate extinction by preventing its spread. The republicans polled the larger number of votes in the election, but an outdated apportionment of seats in the legislature permitted Douglas to win the senatorship.

Friends began to urge Lincoln to run for president. He held back, but did extend his range of speechmaking beyond Illinois. On Feb. 27, 1860, at Cooper Union, in New York City, he delivered an address on the need for restricting slavery that put him in the forefront of Republican leadership. The enthusiasm evoked by this speech and others overcome Lincoln's reluctance. On May 9 and 10, the Illinois Republican convention, meeting in Decatur, instructed the state's delegates to the national convention to vote as a unit for him.