The Capitol Dome

39 THE CAPITOL DOME tician by giving prompt attention to his constituent's needs. Letters and petitions were dutifully forwarded to the correct executive departments or committees, but Lincoln was under no illusions that his intercession would have happy results when submitted to the Democratic administra- tion of James K. Polk. In previous years Lin- coln himself had been one of those same string-pullers seeking favors at the hands of a friendly politico. One of the more ser- endipitous finds at the National Archives was an 1840 letter by Lincoln to his wife's first cousin and his own former law partner John T. Stuart, then serving in the House. Lincoln asked Stuart to intervene and insure that James Lynn, a resident of Buf- falo Heart Grove in Sangamon County, was able to secure a federal pension for his War of 1812 service (fig. 7). Always a political animal, Lincoln closed the letter with a laconic "Harrison going ahead," as an indi- cator of how the local Whig campaign was faring that election season. 18 In December 1847 one of the first items to land on the new representative's desk joined the expansionist fever raging in western states with one of Whig ideol- ogy's core pledges to provide federal sup- port for internal improvements. 19 Railroad companies were seeking to gain preemption rights to the federal lands through which they passed, thus allowing the company to market the real estate at a profit and secure return on the investment. Such "improve- ments" had the strong backing of Sidney Breese of Illinois, chairman of the Senate's Public Lands Committee and one of the original incorporators of the Great West- ern Railway Company, which sought to tie the state together with an iron ribbon stretching from Cairo to the Illinois and Michigan canal just outside Chicago. 20 e Great Western Railway Company sought to build congressional support by inundat- ing Members with appeals using tactics a modern lobbyist would recognize. Care- fully worded pre-printed petitions were produced and sent out to influential local citizens along the intended route with in- structions to gather names and send it on to their representatives in Washington. John Chatham was the first of 106 signers of one such document addressed to Lincoln, which he duly forwarded to the House Committee on Public Lands (fig. 8). 21 Although the irtieth Congress did vote on legislation fulfilling the railroad's de- sired request, it failed to pass by a narrow margin and only secured passage a year aer Lincoln le Congress. e Great Western Railway Company was soon reconfigured as the Illinois Central Railroad, which later employed Lincoln as one of its corporate lawyers, a service that earned the ex-con- gressman the largest fees of his legal career. 22 Another petition dealing with government lands arrived from Cass County, Illinois, boasting an impressive 1000 signatures of citizens asking that the poor federal prop- erty granted to their sections and townships for schools be exchanged for better land elsewhere (fig. 9). 23 e lead signature was Richard S. omas, who had recently been elected as Cass County's superintendent of Public Instruction and was known as "one of the most pushing, and live, wide-awake businessmen" in the town. He served in the Illinois legislature and founded the Cass County Times, a newspaper which later gave rousing support to Lincoln's campaign for the presidency in 1860. 24 A host of other leading citizens also affixed their names, and Lincoln included his own summary of the bulky document's contents before sending it on to the Committee on Public Lands. e thorny issue of slavery bedeviled the irtieth Congress with increasing inten- sity during Lincoln's tenure in Washington, largely provoked by the territorial windfall gained as a result of the Mexican War. is Fig. 9. One thousand signatures were attached to this petition om Cass County, Illinois, seeking an exchange of federal land grants for county use (detail).

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