Linder, Usher F.; Gillespie, Joseph. Reminiscences of the Early Bench and Bar of Illinois . Chicago: The Chicago Legal News company, 1879. [format: book], [genre: memoir]. Permission: Northern Illinois University
Persistent link to this document: http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/file.php?file=linder.html

IN the summer of 1835, I removed to the State of Illinois with my family, which then consisted of myself and wife and little daughter and son. We landed at my father's house, on the National Road, then being constructed by the National Government from Terre Haute to Vandalia, having been finished from Fort Cumberland through Ohio and Indiana to Terre Haute, a nourishing town situated on the Wabash River, a most beautiful site, like all the other towns originally settled by the French — such as Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Peoria and others. Illinois was a vast and fertile plain, bounded on the east by the Wabash River, on the south by the Ohio, on the west by the Mississippi, and on the north by Lake Michigan and the State of Wisconsin.

When I arrived in Illinois, on the 12th of July, 1835, it looked to me like a vast wilderness of flowers, with a soil as rich and fertile as ever a crow flew over. It seemed to me as if the Lord had created it as a paradise for farmers. But when we were all laid on our backs with the chills and fever, with water unfit even for a beast to drink, I sighed when I thought of the hills, knolls, valleys and the purling fountains that gushed in coolness from the hill-side, and went

dancing and babbling to the sea. And when, in October, death snatched from our arms our darling little boy — John Calhoun Linder — Illinois seemed to have no charms left for roe, and I resolved, as soon as we were all recovered from the dreadful epidemic, which then prevailed all over the State, and which laid every member of mine and my father's family on their backs, to return to Kentucky and accept poverty as a boon, if we could only be blessed with health. But when all recovered again, and but one was lost, I began to look about to see if there was not something in Illinois for me.

The judicial system was very similar to that of Kentucky. The highest courts of general, original, chancery and common law jurisdiction were the circuit courts. There was not over seven or eight of these circuits when I came to the State. I settled in Coles county, in a little village called Greenup, named after old Col. Wm. C. Greenup, who laid it off and was one of its proprietors. He came to the State while it yet was a territory, and was the Secretary of the Constitutional Convention that was convened at Kaskaskia, and formed the first Constitution of this State.

The national road was then being constructed through Illinois. It was the only public work I remember at that time in Southern Illinois. It furnished employment for a vast number of workman and laborers, by which many a poor man and now comer earned the money wherewith to pay his taxes, doctor's bill, and to lay in a supply of food and clothing for the winter of 1835 and 1836. Charleston, the

county seat of Coles, was about twenty miles north of Greenup. It was laid out by a man from Fayette county, Ky., by the name of Charles S. Morton.

I did not travel on the circuit in 1835, on account of my health and the health of my wife, but attended court at Charleston that fall, held by Judge Grant, who had exchanged circuits with our judge, Justin Harlan. It was here I first met Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, at that time a very modest and retiring man, dressed in a plain suit of mixed jeans. He did not make any marked impression upon me, or any other member of the bar. He was on a visit to his relations in Coles, where his father and stepmother lived, and some of her children. Lincoln put up at the hotel, and there was where I saw him. Whether he was reading law at this time I cannot say. Certain it is, he had not then been admitted to the bar, although he had some celebrity, having been a captain in the Black-Hawk campaign, and served a term in the Illinois Legislature; but if he won any fame at that season I have never heard of it. He had been one of the representatives from Sangamon. If Lincoln at this time felt the divine afflatus of greatness stir within him I have never heard of it. It was rather common among us then in the West to suppose that there was no presidential timber growing in the Northwest, yet he doubtless had at that time the stuff out of which to make half a dozen presidents.

I had known his relatives in Kentucky, and he asked me about them. His uncle, Mordecai Lincoln, I had

known from my boyhood, and he was naturally a man of considerable genius; he was a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look excited in me the same disposition to laugh, and that was Artemas Ward. He was quite a storyteller, and they were generally on the smutty order, and in this Abe resembled his Uncle Mord, as we all called him. He was an honest man, as tenderhearted as a woman, and to the last degree charitable and benevolent.

No one ever took offense at Uncle Mord's stories — not even the ladies. I heard him once tell a bevy of fashionable girls that he knew a very large woman who had a husband so small that in the night she often mistook him for the baby, and that upon one occasion she had armed him with a diaper and was singing to him a soothing lullaby, when he awoke and told her that the baby was on the other side of the bed.

Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion said tome: "Linder, I have often said that Uncle Mord had run off with all the talents of the family.".

Old Mord, as we sometimes called him, had been in his younger days a very stout man, and was quite fond of playing a game of fisticuffs with any one who was noted as a champion. He told a parcel of us once of a pitched battle he had fought with one of the champions of that day. He said they fought on the side of a hill or ridge; that at the bottom there was a rut or canal, which had been cut out by the freshets. He said they soon clinched, and he threw his man and fell

on top of him. He said he always thought he had the best eyes in the world for measuring distances, and having measured the distance to the bottom of the hill, he concluded that by rolling over and over till they came to the bottom his antagonist's body would fill it, and he would be wedged in so tight that he could whip him at his leisure. So he let the fellow turn him, and over and over they went, when about the twentieth revolution brought Uncle Mord's back in contact with the bottom of the rut, "and," said he, "before hell could scorch a feather, I cried out in stentorian voice: ‘take him off!’".

I could tell many more of Uncle Mord Lincoln's stories, but these two will serve as specimens. His sons and daughters were not talented, like the old man, but were very sensible people, noted for their honesty and kindness of heart.

Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin county (now La Rue), within ten miles of the place where I first saw the light, and a little over a month ahead of me. His mother, whose maiden name was Kancy Hanks, was said to be a very strong-minded woman, and one of the most athletic women in Kentucky. In a fair wrestle, she could throw most of the men who ever put her powers to the test. A reliable gentleman told me he heard the late Jack Thomas, clerk of the Grayson Court, say he had frequently wrestled with her, and she invariably laid him on his back. Lincoln himself was a man of great physical powers — a perfect type of sinews and muscles wrapped around enormous bones.

The impression that Mr. Lincoln made upon me

when I first saw him at the hotel in Charleston, was very slight. He had the appearance of a good-natured, easy. unambitious man, of plain good sense, and unobtrusive in his manners. At that time he told me no stories and perpetrated no jokes.

I must leave Mr. Lincoln now, and take him up again when he shall make his appearance in the regular order of this history.

It is not my purpose or intention to write an autobiography, or burden tins narrative with matters personal to myself, only so far as to give to the reader an idea of the men and events of my own day and time.

In 1835, the population, as shown by the census of that year, did not exceed one hundred and fifty thousand souls. The earlier emigration to this State had been mostly from Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, which lay to the East and South of Illinois. A portion, however, were from Tennessee and the Carolinas. This made the principal part of the then population of Illinois, with the exception of the French at Kaskaskia and other French posts, with quite a German population in St. Clair County, and a few Yankees at Chicago, and some more sparsely scattered through the Northern portion of the State. The reader will perceive, from the above general view, that the weight of population lay in the Southern portion of the State. I should have stated that a colony of English farmers, gentlemen and yeomanry, at quite an early day, had settled Edwards County, which name they gave it, with their county seat at Albion, a name also bestowed by them.

At this time there were but few lawyers in the State.

The most eminent were Henry Eddy and Jefferson Gatewood, of Shawneetown; James Semple, of Alton; Stephen T. Logan, of Springfield; Thomas Ford, of Edwardsville; Sidney Breese, of Kaskaskia; Samuel McRoberts, of Danville; Jephtha Hardin, of Shawneetown; David J. Baker, of Kaskaskia; Justin Butterfield, James Collins and Giles Spring, of Chicago; A. P. Field, of Vandalia; Richard Young, of the northern portion of the State; William Wilson, Edwin B. Webb, of Carmi, and Nathaniel Pope, of Kaskaskia. There are doubtless others whom, in the lapse of time, I have forgotten or overlooked, who are entitled to a place with the foregoing eminent gentlemen of the bar, whose names shall be introduced as they occur to me, and properly inserted and noticed in some appropriate place in these memoirs. Early in the spring of 1836 I commenced attending the various courts in the fourth judicial circuit, composed of some fifteen or sixteen counties. The roads being very bad, and in many places impassable for carriages, the judge and all the lawyers traveled on horseback, which, for me, was always the most pleasant mode of traveling — the safest, and most social and democratic, except traveling on foot.

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