In 1858, after Abraham Lincoln gained national attention in the Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates despite losing the race, Jesse Fell stopped him as he emerged from the courthouse and invited him to his brother's law office on the second floor of the Phoenix Block, where he urged Lincoln to make his views better known so he could become a formidable candidate for the presidency. Lincoln objected that William A. Seward and Salmon P. Chase were more deserving because they had rendered greater service to the new Republican Party, but Fell argued that the party needed a man who could be elected and, from his travels as corresponding secretary of the Republican Party, believed Lincoln was the most acceptable presidential candidate. By late December 1859, Fell had persuaded Lincoln to write his first autobiography, fulfilling Fell's request with the words, "Herewith is a little sketch...there is not much of it...I suppose, that there is not much of me." Written at the site of Kersey Fell's desk in his Phoenix office, and enhanced by Jesse Fell of Bloomington and Joseph W. Lewis of Westchester, Pennsylvania, the autobiography was first published in Pennsylvania and gave the nation its first details of Lincoln's life. The Phoenix Block was also associated with Lincoln's last major speech before his nomination to the presidency, delivered to a capacity audience in Phoenix Hall on April 10, 1860, when he attacked Stephen Douglas's support of Popular Sovereignty; the next day the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph called him probably the fairest and most honest political speaker in the country. Lincoln also represented Dr. Crothers and Dr. Rogers there in the "Chicken Bone Case," named for his use of chicken bones in his plea to the jury, during which he told the plaintiff that he should get down on his knees and thank his Heavenly Father that he had any legs to stand on.