Stephen A. Douglas | Page 5

of his office and law library. In a single year
Douglass hoped to gain admission to the bar. With characteristic
energy, he began his studies. Fate ruled, however, that his career should
not be linked with the Western Reserve. Within a few days he was
prostrated by that foe which then lurked in the marshes and lowlands of
the West--foe more dreaded than the redman--malarial typhoid. For
four weary months he kept his bed, hovering between life and death,
until the heat of summer was spent and the first frosts of October came
to revive him. Urgent appeals now came to him to return home; but
pride kept him from yielding. After paying all his bills, he still had
forty dollars left. He resolved to push on farther into the interior.[18]
He was far from well when he took the canal boat from Cleveland to
Portsmouth on the Ohio river; but he was now in a reckless and
adventurous mood. He would test his luck by pressing on to Cincinnati.
He had no well-defined purpose: he was in a listless mood, which was
no doubt partly the result of physical exhaustion. From Cincinnati he
drifted on to Louisville, and then to St. Louis. His small funds were
now almost all spent. He must soon find occupation or starve. His first
endeavor was to find a law office where he could earn enough by
copying and other work to pay his expenses while he continued his law
studies. No such opening fell in his way and he had no letters of
introduction here to smooth his path. He was now convinced that he
must seek some small country town. Hearing that Jacksonville, Illinois,
was a thriving settlement, he resolved to try his luck in this quarter.
With much the same desperation with which a gambler plays his last
stake, he took passage on a river boat up the Illinois, and set foot upon
the soil of the great prairie State.[19]

A primitive stage coach plied between the river and Jacksonville. Too
fatigued to walk the intervening distance, Douglass mounted the
lumbering vehicle and ruefully paid his fare. From this point of vantage
he took in the prairie landscape. Morgan County was then but sparsely
populated. Timber fringed the creeks and the river bottoms, while the
prairie grass grew rank over soil of unsuspected fertility. Most
dwellings were rude structures made of rough-hewn logs and designed
as makeshifts. Wildcats and wolves prowled through the timber lands
in winter, and game of all sorts abounded.[20] As the stage swung
lazily along, the lad had ample time to let the first impression of the
prairie landscape sink deep. In the timber, the trees were festooned with
bitter-sweet and with vines bearing wild grapes; in the open country,
nothing but unmeasured stretches of waving grass caught the eye.[21]
To one born and bred among the hills, this broad horizon and unbroken
landscape must have been a revelation. Weak as he was, Douglass drew
in the fresh autumnal air with zest, and unconsciously borrowed from
the face of nature a sense of unbounded capacity. Years afterward,
when he was famous, he testified, "I found my mind liberalized and my
opinions enlarged, when I got on these broad prairies, with only the
heavens to bound my vision, instead of having them circumscribed by
the little ridges that surrounded the valley where I was born."[22] But
of all this he was unconscious, when he alighted from the stage in
Jacksonville. He was simply a wayworn lad, without a friend in the
town and with only one dollar and twenty-five cents in his pocket.[23]
Jacksonville was then hardly more than a crowded village of log cabins
on the outposts of civilized Illinois.[24] Comfort was not among the
first concerns of those who had come to subdue the wilderness.
Comfort implied leisure to enjoy, and leisure was like Heaven,--to be
attained only after a wearisome earthly pilgrimage. Jacksonville had
been scourged by the cholera during the summer; and those who had
escaped the disease had fled the town for fear of it.[25] By this time,
however, the epidemic had spent itself, and the refugees had returned.
All told, the town had a population of about one thousand souls, among
whom were no less than eleven lawyers, or at least those who called
themselves such.[26]

A day's lodging at the Tavern ate up the remainder of the wanderer's
funds, so that he was forced to sell a few school books that he had
brought with him. Meanwhile he left no stone unturned to find
employment to his liking. One of his first acquaintances was Murray
McConnell, a lawyer, who advised him to go to Pekin, farther up the
Illinois River, and open a law office. The young man replied that he
had no