Douglas had advised me to read political history.  Accordingly, during the long evenings at the farm, I had gone through Elliott’s Debates and the Federalist.  My grandmother sent me De Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique, which I read in French.

But now I began to see that abolition sentiment was growing.  Societies were being formed and had been for about two years in the northern part of the state.  Here in Jacksonville the agitation of the slavery question was frowned upon; but it was fermenting under the surface of southern sentiment.

I was now treated to an American panic, and times were hard.  The East wanted a tariff to protect its manufacturers; the South wanted land and slaves.  Texas had been filling up with Americans since 1820.  She seceded from Mexico and declared her independence now; and General Houston, a Virginian by birth, a Tennesseean by residence, had taken command of the Texas troops, and after the Alamo massacre, had defeated the Mexicans with terrible slaughter in the battle of San Jacinto.  The New England conscience excoriated these things and attributed them to the machinations of the slavocracy.  But while Douglas had no mastery of the tariff question in its details, his mind shot through to the general philosophy of it.  He often said to me that books and works of art should be admitted free of duty.  He was wont to laugh at the New England conscience which could swallow the tariff and the growing factory system, and yet reject with such holy loathing cotton and slavery.  He could not handle statistics, but he was a master of principles.

As my grandmother was writing me regularly of affairs in England, of the progress of events, of the building of railroads, of Charles Wheatstone’s electric telegraph, and of the new books of moment, I on my part was attempting to keep her informed of my life, and of the swiftly moving panorama of Illinois life.  And here I insert one of my letters to her because it covers so much of the ground of this time of my life.

“Dear Grandmama:  I have before written you of my friend Mr. Douglas who came to Illinois just a little while before I did, and who has had such a phenomenal rise in life in this new country.  He is now making ready to go to Congress, and I am to be one of the delegates to the convention which is expected to nominate him.  Having resigned a very lucrative post in the Land Office, he has gone into the practice of law and the pursuit of politics.  For the latter he has a positive genius, as his whole mind is taken up with visions and plans for the development of the country, and for the aggrandizement of the United States.  He is honest and outspoken, courageous even to audacity; but he is sometimes accused of devious ways, and of taking up anything that has a stomach in it.  But no one can say that he changes his principles; rather he avails himself of opportune conditions, which are many, to advance himself and