All three men prepared for public life by embracing the profession that has always, in this country, proved the surest avenue to preferment--the law. But, whereas Cass arrived at maturity just in time to have an active part in the War of 1812, and in this way to make himself the most logical selection for the governorship of the newly organized Michigan Territory, Douglas saw no military service, and Lincoln only a few weeks of service during the Black Hawk War, and both were obliged to seek fame and fortune along the thorny road of politics. Following admission to the bar at Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834, Douglas was elected public prosecutor of the first judicial circuit in 1835; elected to the state Legislature in 1836; appointed by President Van Buren registrar of the land office at Springfield in 1837; made a judge of the supreme court of the State in 1841; and elected to the national House of Representatives in 1843. Resourceful, skilled in debate, intensely patriotic, and favored with many winning personal qualities, he drew to himself men of both Northern and Southern proclivities and became an influential exponent of broad and enduring nationalism.
Meanwhile, after a first defeat, Lincoln was elected to the Illinois Legislature in 1834, and again in 1836. When he gathered all of his worldly belongings in a pair of saddle-bags and fared forth to the new capital, Springfield, to settle himself to the practice of law, he had more than a local reputation for oratorical power; and events were to prove that he had not only facility in debate and familiarity with public questions, but incomparable devotion to lofty principles. In the subsequent unfolding of the careers of Lincoln and Douglas--especially in the turn of events that brought to each a nomination for the presidency by a great party in 1860--there was no small amount of good luck and sheer accident. But it is equally true that by prodigious effort Kentuckian and Vermonter alike hewed out their own ways to greatness.
It was the glory of the Northwest to offer a competence to the needy, the baffled, the discouraged, the tormented of the eastern States and of Europe. The bulk of its fast-growing population consisted, it is true, of ordinary folk who could have lived on in fair comfort in the older sections, yet who were ambitious to own more land, to make more money, and to secure larger advantages for their children. But nowhere else was the road for talent so wide open, entirely irrespective of inheritance, possessions, education, environment. Nowhere outside of the trans-Alleghany country would the rise of a Lincoln have been possible.