[Footnote 117:  Letter of J.H.  Roberts, Esq., of Chicago, to the writer; see also Illinois State Register, October 2, 1840.]

CHAPTER III

LAW AND POLITICS

The years were passing rapidly during which Douglas should have laid broad and deep the foundations of his professional career, if indeed law was to be more than a convenient avocation.  These were formative years in the young man’s life; but as yet he had developed neither the inclination nor the capacity to apply himself to the study of the more intricate and abstruse phases of jurisprudence.  To be sure, he had picked up much practical information in the courts, but it was not of the sort which makes great jurists.  Besides, his law practice had been, and was always destined to be, the handmaid of his political ambition.  In such a school, a naturally ardent, impulsive temperament does not acquire judicial poise and gravity.  After all, he was only a soldier of political fortune, awaiting his turn for promotion.  A reversal in the fortunes of his party might leave him without hope of preferment, and bind him to a profession which is a jealous mistress, and to which he had been none too constant.  Happily, his party was now in power, and he was entitled to first consideration in the distribution of the spoils.  Under somewhat exceptional circumstances the office of Secretary of State fell vacant in the autumn of 1840, and the chairman of the Democratic Central Committee entered into his reward.

When Governor Carlin took office in 1838, he sent to the Senate the nomination of John A. McClernand as Secretary of State, assuming that the office had been vacated and that a new Governor might choose his advisers.[118] Precedent, it is true, militated against this theory, for Secretary Field had held office under three successive governors; but now that parties had become more sharply defined, it was deemed important that the Secretary of State should be of the same political persuasion as the Governor,—­and Field was a Whig.  The Senate refused to indorse this new theory.  Whereupon the Governor waited until the legislature adjourned, and renewed his appointment of McClernand, who promptly brought action against the tenacious Field to obtain possession of the office.  The case was argued in the Circuit Court before Judge Breese, who gave a decision in favor of McClernand.  The case was then appealed.  Among the legal talent arrayed on the side of the claimant, when the case appeared on the docket of the Supreme Court, was Douglas—­as a matter of course.  Everyone knew that this was not so much a case at law as an issue in politics.  The decision of the Supreme Court reversing the judgment of the lower court was received, therefore, as a partisan move to protect a Whig office-holder.[119]

For a time the Democrats, in control elsewhere, found themselves obliged to tolerate a dissident in their political family; but the Democratic majority in the new legislature came promptly to the aid of the Governor’s household.  Measures were set on foot to terminate Secretary Field’s tenure of office by legislative enactment.  Just at this juncture that gentleman prudently resigned; and Stephen A. Douglas was appointed to the office which he had done his best to vacate.[120]