The Long Nine and the Capital Move

Springfield won the right to become Illinois's state capital in eighteen thirty-seven, and the man most responsible for that outcome was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer from New Salem named Abraham Lincoln. Illinois had been searching for a permanent capital for years. Vandalia, a small town in the southern part of the state, held the title but lacked the central location and growth potential the legislature was looking for.

In eighteen thirty-six and eighteen thirty-seven, a coalition of representatives from Sangamon County, Lincoln's district, maneuvered the capital move through the Illinois General Assembly. The Sangamon delegation was known as the Long Nine, a nickname earned because all nine of them were notably tall, and their combined height was estimated at fifty-four feet. Lincoln, at six foot four, was the tallest.

He was also the most effective negotiator. He traded votes, built coalitions, and used every procedural tool available to assemble a majority. The move was authorized in February eighteen thirty-seven.

Springfield would become the new seat of government. The town at the time had perhaps fifteen hundred residents, a handful of stores, and aspirations considerably larger than its infrastructure. Lincoln himself moved to Springfield two months later, in April eighteen thirty-seven.

He arrived on a borrowed horse with almost nothing, owed money, and slept in the back room above a store on the town square owned by a merchant named Joshua Speed. Speed later recalled that Lincoln spread out his saddlebags, looked around the small room, and said that the furniture would do. He stayed for twenty-four years.