SURVEY OF A SECTION OF LAND BY LINCOLN.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original, in the possession of Z. A. Enos, Springfield, Illinois. “The Sangamon River runs through this section,” says Mr. Enos, himself a veteran surveyor, “and the section lines in the government survey were not extended across, but closed on the river, without any connection being made between the opposite marginal corners or lines; and though shown on the government plats as being continuous straight east or west lines across the river, they were, in fact, surveyed by the government surveyor as represented by Mr. Lincoln’s plat.” This plat is also interesting as “showing,” as Mr. Enos says, “how Illinois lands were valued at that date, as indicated by the value of the several lots in the school section, as determined by the trustees, and marked by them on each tract, and at those estimated values the lots were then subject to purchase.” ]
The Assembly which he entered was composed of eighty-one members—twenty-six senators and fifty-five representatives. As a rule, these men were of Kentucky, Tennessee, or Virginia origin, with here and there a Frenchman. There were but few Eastern men, for there was still a strong prejudice in the State against Yankees. The close bargains and superior airs of the emigrants from New England contrasted so unpleasantly with the open-handed hospitality and the easy ways of the Southerners and French, that a pioneer’s prospects were blasted at the start if he acted like a Yankee. A history of Illinois in 1837, published, evidently, to “boom” the State, cautioned the emigrant that if he began his life in Illinois by “affecting superior intelligence and virtue, and catechizing the people for their habits of plainness and simplicity, and their apparent want of those things which he imagines indispensable to comfort,” he must expect to be forever, marked as “a Yankee,” and to have his prospects correspondingly defeated. A “hard-shell” Baptist preacher of this date showed the feeling of the people when he said, in preaching of the richness of the grace of the Lord: “It tuks in the isles of the sea and the uttermust part of the yeth. It embraces the Esquimaux and the Hottentots, and some, my dear brethering, go so far as to suppose that it tuks in the poor benighted Yankees; but _I don’t go that fur_.” When it came to an election of legislators, many of the people “didn’t go that fur” either.