Early Career:


Lincoln began his political career in 1832 at the age of 23 with a campaign for the Illinois General Assembly as a member of the Whig Party. The centerpiece of his platform was the undertaking of navigational improvements on the Sangamon River in the hopes of attracting steamboat traffic to the river, which would allow sparsely populated, poor areas along and near the river to grow and prosper. He served as a captain in a company of the Illinois militia drawn from New Salem during the Black Hawk War, although he never saw combat. He wrote after being elected by his peers that he had not had "any such success in life which gave him so much satisfaction."

He later tried and failed at several small business ventures. He held an Illinois state liquor license and sold whiskey. Finally, after coming across the second volume of Sir William Blackstone's four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England, he taught himself law and was admitted to the Illinois State Bar Association in 1837. That same year, he moved to Springfield, Illinois, and began to practice law with Stephen T. Logan. He became one of the most respected and successful lawyers in the prairie state and grew steadily more prosperous.

Lincoln served four successive terms in the Illinois House of Representatives, as a representative from Sangamon County, beginning in 1834. He became a leader of the Whig party in the legislature. In 1837, he made his first protest against slavery in the Illinois House, stating that the institution was "founded on both injustice and bad policy". [1]

In 1841, Lincoln entered law practice with William Herndon, a fellow Whig. In 1856, both men joined the fledgling Republican Party. Following Lincoln's assassination, Herndon began collecting stories about Lincoln from those who knew him in central Illinois. He eventually published a book called Herndon's Lincoln. Lincoln never joined an antislavery society and denied he supported the abolitionists. He married into a prominent slave-owning family from Kentucky and allowed his children to spend time there surrounded by slaves. Several of his in-laws became Confederate officers. He greatly admired the science that flourished in New England and was perhaps the only father in Illinois at the time to send a son to an elite eastern school. (Lincoln sent Robert Todd Lincoln to Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College).

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