Stephen A. Douglas | Page 5

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 license to practice law and no law books. He was assured that a license was a matter of no consequence, since anyone could practice before a justice of the peace, and he could procure one at his leisure. As for books, McConnell, with true Western generosity, offered to loan such as would be of immediate use. So again Douglass took up his travels. At Meredosia, the nearest landing on the river, he waited a week for the boat upstream. There was no other available route to Pekin. Then came the exasperating intelligence, that the only boat which plied between these points had blown up at Alton. After settling accounts with the tavern-keeper, he found that