On the evening of October 19, 1858, Abraham Lincoln, visiting Rushville as the guest of William Ray, addressed a tremendous procession of excited Republicans who had paraded through town to welcome their champion against Stephen Douglas in the U.S. Senate contest, joking from a pedestal in Ray's yard that though the platform was shaky, the Republican Party had a strong foundation. The next afternoon Lincoln gave a rousing speech outside the Schuyler County Courthouse, where Democrats were also out in force; during the night someone had hung a black flag from the courthouse spire, unruly boys on the roof interrupted him until the sheriff drove them away, and young female Douglas supporters heckled him from the courthouse windows until he rebuked them for their discourtesy. Afterward, Lincoln wrote that he feared Democrats were importing Irish railroad workers from outside the county to illegally aid Douglas, and Republicans did lose Schuyler County. The courthouse Lincoln knew stood at the center of the public square, and during the 1858 campaign he spoke from a stand on its north side; as a lawyer he had handled eighteen Schuyler County cases, mostly in the 1830s and 1840s. Mormon leader Joseph Smith also knew the building, having twice stayed at the nearby Stephenson Tavern while traveling between Nauvoo and Springfield to stand trial in the winter of 1842-1843. Rushville was also connected to Lincoln through John Locke Scripps, who pressed him for autobiographical information for an 1860 presidential campaign biography; Lincoln eventually supplied a brief sketch that Scripps used for the pamphlet Life of Abraham Lincoln, an effective campaign document and an important historical source. The Scripps family was prominent in Rushville, where John spent his childhood before leaving in 1847 and eventually becoming editor of the Chicago Press & Tribune, and President Lincoln later appointed him postmaster of Chicago.