This written and printed address gives us an accurate measure of the man and the time.  When he wrote this document he was twenty-three years old.  He had been in the town and county only about nine months of actual time.  As Sangamon County covered an estimated area of twenty-one hundred and sixty square miles, he could know but little of either it or its people.  How dared a “friendless, uneducated boy, working on a flatboat at twelve dollars a month,” with “no wealthy or popular friends to recommend” him, aspire to the honors and responsibilities of a legislator?  The only answer is that he was prompted by that intuition of genius, that consciousness of powers which justify their claims by their achievements.  When we scan the circumstances more closely, we find distinct evidence of some reason for his confidence.  Relatively speaking, he was neither uneducated nor friendless.  His acquirements were already far beyond the simple elements of reading, writing, and ciphering.  He wrote a good, clear, serviceable hand; he could talk well and reason cogently.  The simple, manly style of his printed address fully equals in literary ability that of the average collegian in the twenties.  His migration from Indiana to Illinois and his two voyages to New Orleans had given him a glimpse of the outside world.  His natural logic readily grasped the significance of the railroad as a new factor in transportation, although the first American locomotive had been built only one year, and ten to fifteen years were yet to elapse before the first railroad train was to run in Illinois.

One other motive probably had its influence.  He tells us that Offutt’s business was failing, and his quick judgment warned him that he would soon be out of a job as clerk.  This, however, could be only a secondary reason for announcing himself as a candidate, for the election was not to occur till August, and even if he were elected there would be neither service nor salary till the coming winter.  His venture into politics must therefore be ascribed to the feeling which he so frankly announced in his letter, his ambition to become useful to his fellow-men—­the impulse that throughout history has singled out the great leaders of mankind.

In this particular instance a crisis was also at hand, calculated to develop and utilize the impulse.  Just about a month after the publication of Lincoln’s announcement the “Sangamo Journal” of April 19 printed an official call from Governor Reynolds, directed to General Neale of the Illinois militia, to organize six hundred volunteers of his brigade for military service in a campaign against the Indians under Black Hawk, the war chief of the Sacs, who, in defiance of treaties and promises, had formed a combination with other tribes during the winter, and had now crossed back from the west to the east side of the Mississippi River with the determination to reoccupy their old homes in the Rock River country toward the northern end of the State.