A pleasant touch of his humor illumined this campaign.  George Forquer, once a Whig but now a Democrat and an office-holder, had lately built for himself the finest house in Springfield, and had decorated it with the first lightning-rod ever seen in the neighborhood.  One day, after Forquer had been berating Lincoln as a young man who must “be taken down,” Lincoln turned to the audience with a few words:  “It is for you, not for me, to say whether I am up or down.  The gentleman has alluded to my being a young man;[41] I am older in years than I am in the tricks and trades of politicians.  I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction as a politician; but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the day when I should have to erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.”

There are other stories of this campaign, amusing and characteristic of the region and the times, but which there is not room to repeat.  The result of it was that Sangamon County, hitherto Democratic, was now won by the Whigs, and that Lincoln had the personal satisfaction of leading the poll.  The county had in the legislature nine representatives, tall fellows all, not one of them standing less than six feet, so that they were nicknamed “the Long Nine.”  Such was their authority that one of them afterward said:  “All the bad or objectionable laws passed at that session of the legislature, and for many years afterward, were chargeable to the management and influence of ‘the Long Nine.’” This was a damning confession, for the “bad and objectionable” laws of that session were numerous.  A mania possessed the people.  The whole State was being cut up into towns and cities and house-lots, so that town-lots were said to be the only article of export.[42] A system of internal improvements at the public expense was pushed forward with incredible recklessness.  The State was to be “gridironed” with thirteen hundred miles of railroad; the courses of the rivers were to be straightened; and where nature had neglected to supply rivers, canals were to be dug.  A loan of twelve millions of dollars was authorized, and the counties not benefited thereby received gifts of cash.  The bonds were issued and sent to the bankers of New York and of Europe, and work was vigorously begun.  The terrible financial panic of 1837 ought to have administered an early check to this madness.  But it did not.  Resolutions of popular conventions instructed legislators to institute “a general system of internal improvements,” which should be “commensurate with the wants of the people;” and the lawgivers obeyed as implicitly as if each delegate was lighting his steps by an Aladdin’s lamp.