Word: vandalia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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LINCOLN'S VANDALIA (141 pp.]-William E. Baringer-Rutgers University...
Still exploring minor veins in the Lincoln lode, historical pickmen sometimes hit upon a passable grade of ore. This book is an example of the work of a noted Lincoln scholar, digging up minutiae of value. It was at the old Illinois capital of Vandalia that 27-year-old Abraham Lincoln solved a tricky problem in practical politics, and it is useful to know not only that he did it, as the biographies attest, but precisely...
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...
...overalls and shooting jacket "went straight" for the first 68 clay birds, muffed the 69th, finished out his 100 shots without another miss. Then curly-haired Jimmy Rasmussen, 17, went back to his job as scorekeeper for other contestants, to help pay his way to the meet at Vandalia, Ohio...