its noteworthy features, according to
Peck's "Gazetteer" of Illinois for 1834, being a brick court-house, a
two-story brick edifice "used by State officers," "a neat framed house
of worship for the Presbyterian Society, with a cupola and bell,"
"a framed meeting-house for the Methodist Society," three taverns,
several stores, five lawyers, four physicians, a land office, and two
newspapers. It was a much larger town than Lincoln had ever lived in
before, though he was familiar with Springfield, then twice as large
as Vandalia, and he had seen the cities of the Mississippi.

The Assembly which he entered was composed of eighty-one
members,--twenty-six senators, fifty-five representatives. As a rule,
these men were of Kentucky, Tennessee, or Virginia origin, with here
and there a Frenchman. There were but few Eastern men, for there
was still a strong prejudice in the State against Yankees. The
close bargains and superior airs of the emigrants from New England
contrasted so unpleasantly with the open-handed hospitality and the
easy ways of the Southerners and French, that a pioneer's prospects
were blasted at the start if he acted like a Yankee. A history of
Illinois in 1837, published evidently to "boom" the State, cautioned
the emigrant that if he began his life in Illinois by "affecting
superior intelligence and virtue, and catechizing the people for their
habits of plainness and simplicity and their apparent want of those
things which he imagines indispensable to comfort," he must expect
to be forever marked as "a Yankee," and to have his prospects
correspondingly defeated. A "hard-shell" Baptist preacher of about
this date showed the feeling of the people when he said, in preaching
of the richness of the grace of the Lord: "It tuks in the isles of the
sea and the uttermust part of the yeth. It embraces the Esquimaux and
the Hottentots, and some, my dear brethering, go so far as to suppose
that it tuks in the poor benighted Yankees, but _I don't go that
fur_." When it came to an election of legislators, many of the people
"didn't go that fur" either.

There was a preponderance of jean suits like Lincoln's in the
Assembly, and there were coonskin caps and buckskin trousers.
Nevertheless, more than one member showed a studied garb and a courtly
manner. Some of the best blood of the South went into the making of
Illinois, and it showed itself from the first in the Assembly. The
surroundings of the legislators were quite