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LETTERS & DIARIES

My work on the boat ended again on December the 1st. I then returned home to teach school again that winter. The following spring found me disinclined to return to steam-boating. We bought forty acres of land for four hundred dollars. This proved to be a poor investment. It was situated on a hillside and was what we called "sprouty land". That is, it would break out in springs in the springtime; there was considerable that was grubby also. But we soon succeeded in cutting over twenty acres of it with the grub hoe. This part of it was good land, and besides this we rented considerable land of my brother-in-law.

I did all the raking and plowing with a fine yoke of young oxen. We bought them as steers for fifty dollars and broke them ourselves. Occasionally we used one horse which we had to help the oxen in an extraordinary heavy bit of plowing. Our first crop yielded well. The corn produced about fifty bushels per acre, the price for it ranged from twenty to twenty-five cents per bushel. Beside our green crops, we raised several acres of sugar cane of sorghum. Some of it we sold it in the neighborhood for fifty cents per gallon. The remainder of it we sold in Galena and Warren at about the same price. Much of our pork we sold in Warren, dressed and ready for the Chicago market. At that time there were no sign of a packing house in Chicago.

At this time a great question was agitating the whole country. Abolition had stirred the nation from Maine to Florida and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. Stephen A. Douglass was running for reelection to the Senate, so when the great debate took place at Freeport, we nearly all boarded the special train which went from Galena. The passenger coaches were soon all filled and coal cars, attached to the train, were all filled with sturdy farmers filled with patriotic fervor and excitedly anticipating the great debate, which was to take place in Freeport twenty miles away - a town with about two or three thousand people at that time. At one o'clock, out on the fair ground where several thousand people waited anxiously to see and to hear the great champions debate, Lincoln and Douglass met for the debate which was to decide the fate of the nation.

LETTERS & DIARIES

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