[Footnote 11:  From an unpublished letter by Joseph Gillespie, owned by Mrs. Ellen Hardin Walworth of New York City.]

[Illustration:  COURTHOUSE AT PETERSBURG, MENARD COUNTY, WHERE LINCOLN WAS NOMINATED FOR CONGRESS.]

After Hardin’s withdrawal, Lincoln went about in his characteristic way trying to soothe his and Hardin’s friends.  “Previous to General Hardin’s withdrawal,” he wrote one of his correspondents,[12] “some of his friends and some of mine had become a little warm; and I felt ... that for them now to meet face to face and converse together was the best way to efface any remnant of unpleasant feeling, if any such existed.  I did not suppose that General Hardin’s friends were in any greater need of having their feelings corrected than mine were.”

[Footnote 12:  From an unpublished letter to Judge James Berdan of Jacksonville, Illinois, dated April 26, 1846.  The original is now owned by Mrs. Mary Berdan Tiffany of Springfield, Illinois.]

In May, Lincoln was nominated.  His Democratic opponent was Peter Cartwright, the famous Methodist exhorter.  Cartwright had been in politics before, and made an energetic canvass.  His chief weapon against Lincoln was the old charges of deism and aristocracy; but they failed of effect, and in August, Lincoln was elected.

The contest over, sudden and characteristic disillusion seized him.  “Being elected to Congress, though I am grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected,” he wrote Speed.

LINCOLN GOES TO WASHINGTON.

In November, 1847, Lincoln started for Washington.  The city in 1848 was little more than the outline of the Washington of 1896.  The Capitol was without the present wings, dome, or western terrace.  The White House, the City Hall, the Treasury, the Patent Office, and the Post-Office were the only public buildings standing then which have not been rebuilt or materially changed.  The streets were unpaved, and their dust in summer and mud in winter are celebrated in every record of the period.  The parks and circles were still unplanted.  Near the White House were a few fine old homes, and Capitol Hill was partly built over.  Although there were deplorable wastes between these two points, the majority of the people lived in this part of the city, on or near Pennsylvania Avenue.  The winter that Lincoln was in Washington, Daniel Webster lived on Louisiana Avenue, near Sixth Street; Speaker Winthrop and Thomas H. Benton on C Street, near Third; John Quincy Adams and James Buchanan, the latter then Secretary of State, on F Street, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth.  Many of the senators and congressmen were in hotels, the leading ones of which were Willard’s, Coleman’s, Gadsby’s, Brown’s, Young’s, Fuller’s, and the United States.  Stephen A. Douglas, who was in Washington for his first term as senator, lived at Willard’s.  So inadequate were the hotel accommodations during the sessions that visitors to the town were frequently obliged to accept most uncomfortable makeshifts for beds.  Seward, visiting the city in 1847, tells of sleeping on “a cot between two beds occupied by strangers.”