Word: lincoln
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Boyle was sure the Dixiecrats could be brought into line. Said he: "Recognition is a politician's meat & drink. If they don't get it, they are nothing. I quoted Abraham Lincoln in my speech: 'I will go along with a man as long as he is going in my direction.' That's an invitation for sinners to march down the aisle. Those who don't march will be suffocated, as far as the National Committee is concerned...
...When Lincoln got off the stagecoach in November 1834, for his first session in the state legislature, Vandalia was 15 years old, still mainly logs and mud. That winter, and the next as well, his principal achievement was to make himself known as a wit in the candlelit House chamber where the legislators drank and argued in the evenings...
...however, Lincoln had become the leader of the Sangamon County delegation of nine Whigs-"the Long Nine" whose aggregate height was exactly 54 feet. Everybody knew that Vandalia's days were numbered as the state capital; it was too far south. In 1837 a new capital would be chosen, and the Long Nine were out to put across Springfield, in Sangamon County, as the new site. An "internal improvements" bill, calling for the expenditure of $10 million or $12 million on railroads and waterways, gave them their chance to logroll. Lincoln became "an amiable, entertaining apostle of adequate transportation...
Meanwhile, a bill came up calling for the creation of a new county carved from Sangamon and Morgan Counties. This posed a dilemma for Lincoln: because of pressure from home, he would have to vote for the new county, but the new county would mean the end of Sangamon's staunch Long Nine-possibly the end of Springfield as a capital. His solution: a referendum that tossed the county-division bill back to the voters while the Long Nine logrolled the Springfield bill to a quick decision...
...turned out to be quite a good solution. Springfield was chosen (though on one ballot a disgusted vote was cast for Purgatory), the voters got their new county, and Representative Lincoln got reelected. He moved to Springfield himself and set up shop as a lawyer, with something of a reputation...