rom auctioneer's clerk to district attorney was a promotion
hardly to be won in a year by a youth of qualities less than
extraordinary.

The election was in February, 1835, and Douglas held the office the
better part of two years. A justice of the supreme court had declared,
on hearing of the legislature's choice, that the stripling could not
fill the place because he was no lawyer and had no law books.
Nevertheless, he was an efficient prosecutor. No record of his service
is available, but there was a tradition in later years that not one of
his indictments was quashed. Certainly, his work in the courts of the
district increased his reputation and strengthened his hold on his own
party. In the spring of 1836, the Democrats of Morgan held a convention
to nominate candidates for the six seats in the house of representatives
to which the county was entitled. This was a novel proceeding, for the
system of conventions to nominate for office was not yet developed; the
first of the national party conventions was held in preparation for the
presidential campaign of 1832. Douglas was a leader in the movement, and
as a result of it he himself was drawn into the contest. Morgan was a
Whig county, but the solid front of the Democracy so alarmed the Whigs
that they also abandoned the old plan of letting any number of
candidates take the field and united upon a ticket with Hardin at its
head. No man on the Democratic ticket was a match for Hardin. One of the
candidates was withdrawn, therefore, and Douglas took his place, and he
and Hardin canvassed the county together in a series of joint debates.
Mainly through his championship, the convention plan was approved, and
the Democrats won the election; but Hardin's vote was greater than the
weakest Democrat's, and so the rivalry between him and Douglas was
continued in the legislature, where they took their seats in December,
1836.

In that same house of representatives were John A. McClernand, James
Shields, William A. Richardson, and other men who rose to national
distinction. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig representative from Sangamon
County, was already well known for his ungainly length of body, for his
habit of reasoning in parables which were now scriptural and now vulgar
to the point of obscenity, and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was
four years older than the new member from Morgan, and nearly two feet
taller. Douglas, many years later, declared that he was drawn to Lincoln
by