Lincoln Wins His Case

During Livingston County’s first regular term of circuit court, held on this site on May 18 and 19, 1840, in Henry Weed’s log cabin, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas appeared as opposing attorneys in the first lawsuit filed in the county. Lincoln represented William Popejoy, Jr., who sought $2,000 in damages for defamation after Isaac Wilson publicly accused him of stealing meat from Sarah McDowell, while Douglas represented Wilson. Lincoln won the case, though the damages were greatly reduced on appeal. The judge and attorneys, including twenty-five-year-old David Davis of Bloomington, had crossed the prairie in buggies and on horseback, and Lincoln arrived drenched by a late spring shower. The jury deliberated on a pile of saw-logs on the riverbank, and afterward Lincoln, then thirty-one, and Douglas, twenty-seven, stood on a dry goods box and debated the political issues of the day before an attentive audience. Court met in a twenty-two by twenty-foot room on the upper floor of the Weed cabin, the first cabin in Pontiac Township, built in 1833 by Weed and his brothers-in-law, Lucius and Seth Young, for their families. After Livingston became a county in 1837, the Youngs and Weed, as town proprietors, promised a courthouse and other improvements if Pontiac became the county seat, and the cabin served county purposes until the first courthouse opened on July 23, 1842. Before leaving the county in 1839, Weed contracted with John Foster to build the first courthouse; after the Young brothers died in 1837, Foster leased the cabin to the county and later operated the first hotel on this site for the judge, attorneys, juries, and litigants. Foster often hosted Lincoln and Douglas as they traveled the circuit with Judge David Davis. The hotel was plain, with lawyers sleeping two to a bed and two or three beds in a room, while Davis slept alone because of his weight; on one night his bed collapsed and he had to be rescued from the wreckage. During one term of court, Lincoln paid his hotel bill by handling a suit involving Foster.

Pontiac, Illinois · United States