Douglas’s first six months in the new country were marked by hardship and by a serious illness. Lack of funds drove him to teaching in a little Illinois village in place of practising law as he had hoped. Within a year, however, the penniless boy had been admitted to the Illinois bar, by what must have been a very simple examination, and was happily established in a law office in the court-house at Jacksonville, Illinois. From this time on law was subordinated to his chosen pursuit, politics, for which his ready comradeship, his acute intelligence, and his keen ambition fitted him admirably. He filled at astonishingly early ages several minor positions, working his way into the hearts of the people and into the councils of the Democratic party. He was secretary of state for Illinois at the age of twenty-seven, and in that year was also made a district judge. At thirty he was sent as a member of Congress to Washington. Reëlected twice he was promoted in 1847 to the honor of senatorship, and became immediately prominent as chairman of a leading committee. During these years he married a southern lady and removed to Chicago, with whose commercial interests he allied himself closely by investing in real estate, the promise of which he was quick to see. To Chicago and northern Illinois Douglas rendered a great service by contending for the building of the Illinois Central Railroad through the upper counties of the state to Chicago as a terminal. In this measure, whose passage he secured by making a combination plan with a southern railroad so that the proposed bill contemplated in the future a trunk line from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and thus became a national instead of a local measure, Senator Douglas showed himself more than a state and party politician. There was statesmanlike genius in a plan thus to unite the North and South industrially and socially at a time when the tendency was to separate interests and separate policies. His speech in Congress was one of the first to set forth the power of the Great Lakes and the place of the Mississippi Valley in the national well-being.