When I first published versions of this article in two magazines back around 2008, I relied on scant and inaccurate accounts.  Thanks to a recent two-part article by John T. Pregler in the Iowa History Journal (“Locating Lincoln:  Research confirms rumored trip to Dubuque in 1859,” March/April and May/June, 2021), I have been able to update, correct and vastly improve my version.  Many thanks to Mr. Pregler.

            Just a year and a half before he would be elected president, Abraham Lincoln visited Dubuque, Iowa, in first-class style.  The one-time prairie lawyer had undergone an impressive transformation, mirroring the growth of his home state of Illinois.

            The man who had grown up in log cabins was a big noise in the Republican Party by this time, having run for U.S. Senate in 1858 against perennial presidential contender Stephen A. Douglas.  Lincoln carried the popular vote, but the incumbent Douglas won, because the state’s legislative districts were not proportionally balanced at the time.  Democrats won a majority in the legislature, and prior to 1914 it was state legislatures that chose U.S. senators.

            The senatorial race received nationwide coverage, which largely focused on the seven debates between the two held from August through October.  Lincoln’s debate oratory put him on the road to the White House, although he wasn’t seriously considered as a presidential candidate until after his Cooper Union speech in New York in February, 1860. 

At the time of his Dubuque visit in 1859, Lincoln was a popular political speaker on a mainly regional basis who still needed to work his day job to provide for his family.  As he said of his public speaking in a letter to Hawkins Taylor of Keokuk later in the year, “I am constantly receiving invitations which I am compelled to decline.” He couldn’t afford to accept them.  “It is bad to be poor–” he stated somewhat exaggeratedly, “I shall go to the wall for bread and meat if I neglect my business this year as well as last.”

            His business was lawyering, and he had for several years been in the front rank of that profession in Illinois.  Lincoln continued to take on local cases riding circuit in the state’s Eighth Judicial District until the year he was elected president, 1860. However, he was by now a highly respected attorney frequently in the hire of the railroad companies, which deserve much of the credit both for Lincoln’s relative prosperity and for the phenomenal growth in Illinois’s population and economy.   Lincoln received an annual $250 retainer and a free railroad pass from the Illinois Central Railroad, which kept employing him even after he sued them to collect a then-enormous $5,000 fee for its case against McLean County, Illinois. 

            This is a story I will recount in oppressive detail after I’m done talking about Lincoln’s Iowa connections and run a series on Lincoln’s legal career.  For now, here is a briefer version to explain what Lincoln was doing in Dubuque.   McLean County (home of Bloomington) attempted in 1853 to assess for taxation the ICRR property within its boundaries.  The railroad pointed to its charter from the state, which set a level of state tax that it must eventually pay but also said it would be exempt from local property taxes.  The county said that the legislature couldn’t void the county’s right, established in the Illinois constitution, to tax all property.

            Lincoln and ICRR attorney James Joy tried the case all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court.  The case was so complicated that it was in fact tried there twice.  The high court finally ruled in the railroad’s favor in 1856.  But when Lincoln presented his bill for $2000, the railroad balked.  Lincoln felt he had saved the railroad at least $500,000, considering that other counties would have followed McLean’s lead had it succeeded, so he doubled down, in a manner of speaking.  Actually he doubled-and-a-half down, raising his fee to $5000 and taking his employer to court in 1857.  At first Lincoln feared that his retainer was at an end, but ICRR officials reconsidered their position and decided not to contest the suit.  Why?  The railroad men realized they were facing related litigation from the state, and didn’t think they could afford to have a lawyer who had familiarized himself with their finances from the inside for three years representing their new opponent.  Explaining it later to the company president, the railroad’s chief attorney said, “We can now look back & in some degree estimate the narrow escape we have made.”

            The problem had switched from county taxes to state taxes, from which the railroad had a six-year exemption written into its charter.  But the six years had passed, and the railroad still couldn’t afford to pay the tax based on the valuation that State Auditor of Public Accounts Jesse Dubois had fixed on the ICRR’s property.  Once back at the controls, Lincoln masterfully manipulated a number of levers over the next two years and won for the railroad everything it desired.  In July of 1859 Auditor Dubois (a close political ally of Lincoln’s, in case anyone thinks that mattered (it did)) undertook the annual visual assessment of the railroad’s entire property, including all 705 miles of rail.  Given that Dubois’s method of assessment was in dispute by the railway, the ICRR organized a nine-day journey in which Dubois was accompanied by state officials, a member of the railroad board of directors, and legal counsel for both sides.  Lincoln was there as attorney for the railroad, while Stephen Logan advised the state.  Logan had been the second prominent attorney to make Lincoln a partner, back in 1841.

            This official tour took on the aspect of a pleasure excursion as the party was filled out with wives and children of several of the travelers.  Dubois, Lincoln and Logan were accompanied by their families, as was former state auditor Thomas Campbell.  The railroad furnished a locomotive and a private car for the group, which left Springfield on July 14 in weather that often exceeded 100 degrees.  After two days of viewing rails, rolling stock and buildings, they reached the northern terminus of the Illinois Central line in Dunleith, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi.  The reason for their next travel leg is open to speculation.  What we know for sure is that the party then boarded a ferry bound for Dubuque, Iowa.

            There was no bridge at that time between Dubuque and Dunleith, which is now known as East Dubuque, but a proposal for one existed, because the Illinois Central had plans to connect up with Dubuque and lay track to the next intervening ocean.  By 1859, the Dubuque & Pacific Railroad, which had been incorporated in 1853 by officials of ICRR, was building the line between Dubuque and Dyersville.  Roswell B. Mason, who had been engineer-in-chief of the ICRR, moved to Dubuque to be chief engineer of the D&PRR.  He was also slated to be the engineer for the Dunleith to Dubuque bridge, which was delayed by the Panic of 1857.  This economic downturn forced a number of railroads into bankruptcy, and then the Civil War intervened, so that the bridge was not completed until 1869.

            Meanwhile, Mason left his chief engineer positions to partner in a local firm, Mason, Bishop and Co., that contracted with the railroad to build the line to Dyersville.  It is likely that Lincoln crossed the Mississippi to confer with Mason and with Benjamin Provoost, who had succeeded Mason as chief engineer of the Dubuque & Pacific. The two-day sojourn in Dubuque was the longest stop on the trip.

            The group took lodgings in the recently expanded and modernized Julien House hotel, which stood four blocks from the Julien Theatre, a building housing offices for both Mason, Bishop and Co. and the Dubuque & Pacific Railroad.  Lincoln was quite familiar with Mason.  Remember Lincoln’s 1857 trial, Hurd v. Rock Island Bridge Company, concerning the steamboat that collided with the Rock Island-to-Davenport bridge?  Mason was on the stand for two days in that trial, testifying for the defense about his experience in designing this bridge and others to take river currents into account for safe steamboat navigation.  More to the point, Mason would be one of three key witnesses that Lincoln would call to testify four months after the visit to Dubuque in People v. Illinois Central Railroad, where the Illinois Supreme Court would disagree with Jesse Dubois’s taxable valuation of the property and side with the railroad.

            It would be reasonable to assume that Lincoln wished to strategize with Mason and Provoost on the complex issues relating to the railroad’s taxes.  (Another court case, relating to back taxes, would not be resolved until early 1860.)  But it seems odd that state officials would be along for the ride, traveling in the same ICRR train, staying in the same Dubuque hotel, all palsy-walsy with the railroad folks they were suing.  As I said earlier, I will describe this case in greater depth in another context, but until then I will let you ruminate on the fact that fellow travelers attorney Logan, State Auditor Dubois, Secretary of State Ozias Hatch and State Treasurer William Butler were all personal friends and political supporters of Lincoln, the attorney for the company they were suing.

            Lincoln’s presence in Dubuque did not go unnoticed. His leadership role in Republican politics made him a noteworthy visitor, and the Dubuque Herald reported on July 19, “Hon. Abram Lincoln, of Illinois, is in town and is stopping at the Julien House.”  Story to follow?  No, that was all of it.  Although the newspaper didn’t seem particularly excited, some local Republicans were.  Young attorney William Boyd Allison, who was a few years from beginning his career as one of Iowa’s most prominent and longest serving U.S. representatives and senators, joined some other Republican enthusiasts in traipsing over to the Julien House to hopefully catch sight of Senator Douglas’s noted antagonist.  Allison later said, “When I heard he was in town, I went to the hotel to see him.  However, I didn’t feel important enough to make his acquaintance.”  The two would become acquainted later when Allison was elected to Congress in 1862.

            On the morning of the 18^th the crowd from Illinois ferried back to Dunleith and again boarded the special train and headed to Chicago, where the Chicago Tribune was a bit less mysterious about Lincoln’s comings and goings.  An article in the July 20 edition entitled “Assessment of the Illinois Central Road” identified Auditor Dubois’s bounden duty and elaborated on his traveling companions.  He was “accompanied by Hon. O.M. Hatch, Secretary of State, Hon. A. Lincoln, W.H. Butler, Esq., T.H. Campbell, late Auditor, Hon. S.T. Logan, together with several ladies,” and they were “en route from Dunleith to Cairo” in far southern Illinois.  “A car and locomotive were put at the disposal of the party at Springfield, and they are making a pleasant but rather warm trip.”

            The group arrived back in Springfield late on July 22.  The case went to trial in November, the judge found for the railroad, the case for the back taxes came up in January, Lincoln won again, the railroad paid him $500.  There are details, perhaps very telling details, that I am not aware of that explain why he fought for $5000 from the railroad in Illinois Central RR v. McLean County and accepted only $500 in People v. Illinois Central Railroad, a case of similar length and complexity.  I am left in doubt and perplexity.

            Let’s end with postscripts that we can provide more definitively.  Roswell Mason, engineer-in-chief for multiple railroad and bridge projects and Dubuque resident at the time of Lincoln’s visit there, moved to Chicago in 1865 to help engineer the cattywampusing of the Chicago River so that it would flow away from instead of into Lake Michigan.  In 1869 Mason was elected mayor of Chicago.  The Great Fire of 1871 took place near the end of his term, and he was credited with swift steps that helped Chicago rise from the ashes to become America’s Second City.  The Illinois Central eventually expanded into Iowa, leasing the Dubuque and Sioux City road from Dubuque to Iowa Falls in 1867, and reaching Sioux City in 1870.  The Julien House was expanded again after the Civil War, but the building burned down in 1913.  The present Julien Inn stands on the same site at Second and Main Streets.