olitical leader in his party,
fearless, dreaded, and resourceful.

Douglas had advised me to read political history. Accordingly, during
the long evenings at the farm, I had gone through Elliott's _Debates_
and the _Federalist_. My grandmother sent me De Tocqueville's _De la
Democratie en Amerique_, which I read in French.

But now I began to see that abolition sentiment was growing. Societies
were being formed and had been for about two years in the northern part
of the state. Here in Jacksonville the agitation of the slavery question
was frowned upon; but it was fermenting under the surface of southern
sentiment.

I was now treated to an American panic, and times were hard. The East
wanted a tariff to protect its manufacturers; the South wanted land and
slaves. Texas had been filling up with Americans since 1820. She seceded
from Mexico and declared her independence now; and General Houston, a
Virginian by birth, a Tennesseean by residence, had taken command of the
Texas troops, and after the Alamo massacre, had defeated the Mexicans
with terrible slaughter in the battle of San Jacinto. The New England
conscience excoriated these things and attributed them to the
machinations of the slavocracy. But while Douglas had no mastery of the
tariff question in its details, his mind shot through to the general
philosophy of it. He often said to me that books and works of art should
be admitted free of duty. He was wont to laugh at the New England
conscience which could swallow the tariff and the growing factory
system, and yet reject with such holy loathing cotton and slavery. He
could not handle statistics, but he was a master of principles.

As my grandmother was writing me regularly of affairs in England, of the
progress of events, of the building of railroads, of Charles
Wheatstone's electric telegraph, and of the new books of moment, I on my
part was attempting to keep her informed of my life, and of the swiftly
moving panorama of Illinois life. And here I insert one of my letters to
her because it covers so much of the ground of this time of my life.

"Dear Grandmama: I have before written you of my friend Mr. Douglas who
came to Illinois just a little while before I did, and who has had such
a phenomenal rise in life in this new country. He is now making ready to
go to Congress, and I am to be one of the delegates to the convention
which is expected to nominate him. Having resigned a very lucrative post
in the Land