CHAPTER XXIII LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS IN CHICAGO In the last years before the Civil War, Illinois became a political storm centre to which the eyes of the whole nation were turned. Reaching farther south than any other lake state, and bounded on the west by the Mississippi River,--the main artery of trade and travel of the south,--she was bound geographically and commercially to the south. But on the other hand she reached north to Lake Michigan, a part of the great system of inland waterways of the North. More than any other state she presented in miniature the condition of the nation, divided thus between north and south. Moreover her settlers, moving westward along the lines of latitude, had come from both sections. With a southern sentiment in those counties that were nearest to Kentucky and Missouri, she combined in her upper counties men from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania with the strongest northern principles. Seeing within her own bounds the elements of the great national conflict, she became a state whose strongest sentiment was for union, for which in the last analysis all her best political leaders stood. Into this state came Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Arnold Douglas when they were young men, Lincoln from Kentucky after a stay in Indiana, and Douglas from Vermont by way of New York State. In Illinois these two men fought out in the decade before the Civil War the great contest of the two national parties of the time. The campaign of 1858, with its famous series of joint debates between them, was opened in Chicago by speeches of Douglas and Lincoln from the balcony of the Tremont House. In Chicago the National Republican Convention nominated Lincoln for President on the 16th of May, 1860. To a royal welcome in Chicago Douglas returned in the spring of 1861 after his noble and disinterested support of his elected rival and his patriotic efforts for the preservation of the Union. Here within a few weeks he died. Before we pass to the story of these events in Chicago we must learn a little more of the condition of affairs in the lake states during the interval since the War of 1812. Of the growth of their cities and of their great prosperity we shall speak in detail in later chapters. It is sufficient to say that the movement of population, of wealth, and of power into the West had become so great that the Republicans in 1860 considered Chicago the fitting place for their national convention.