Kersey Fell Law Office

If you walk directly south of what today is the McLean County Museum of History, you'll be staring at what rightfully might be called the beginning of my end.

Only two parts of the Phoenix block of buildings that existed during my time in Bloomington still stand: the one here at 106 West Washington Street, and the one next to it at 108. Down the block a bit, at 110, was the Phoenix Hall where, they say, I delivered my last long political speech in Bloomington.

The next day, April 11, 1860, the Pantagraph said I was probably the fairest and most honest politician in the country. And this museum building back across the street hadn't even been thought of during those days when I was riding the Eighth Judicial Circuit twice a year through Bloomington.

The ground in the middle of town was occupied by little more than a two-story brick building with a cupola on top, and surrounded by a rail fence. Some said it looked like a big coffee grinder without the handle. That was the courthouse in McLean County, where I tried to eke out a living as a lawyer.

Now, it was from that courthouse that I was emerging in the early darkness of a late December afternoon in 1858 that my friend, Jesse Fell, espied me and made me come with him into his brother's law office across Washington Street to the south for a conversation.

Jesse and I had been friends since 1834 when I attended my first session of the Illinois legislature in Vandalia, representing the people of New Salem. Now, Jesse was a Whig by nature, but his interest in electoral politics was limited to what he could do to promote the election of men he believed better suited to hold the jobs that could improve the lives of those of us who lived here at the frontier of the United States. And I never missed an opportunity to join him in conversation.

So it was in that office of Kersey Fell that Jesse Fell suggested that I could be a successful candidate for the United States presidency. Now, some historians might argue with force that my ascendancy began with this speech or that one, or by my debates with Judge Douglas, or maybe even my first success as an elected captain of volunteers during the Black Hawk War of 1832. But hearing this idea of an Abraham Lincoln presidency emerging from the lips of my good friend, I was flabbergasted, and I immediately scoffed at the idea.

"Jesse," I said, "I, I admit the force of much that you say, and I admit that I am ambitious and would like to be president. I am not insensible to the compliment you pay me and the interest you manifest in the matter. But there is no such good luck in store for me as the presidency of these United States.

Besides," I added, "there is nothing in my early history that would interest you or anybody else, and as Judge Davis says, 'It won't pay.'" With that, I bid him a good night. But Jesse had planted a seed, and that seed sprouted, and that sprout grew. Now, some would say it grew into a flower.

Others would hasten to say it grew into a weed. But no matter how you look at it, we all know that I did get elected president, and I was able to keep our union together (fiddle music) through those dark and murderous years of the rebellion.

And we all know that just as that rebellion was coming to a close, a bullet in the back of my brain brought an end to what began in that building just across Washington Street from the old brick courthouse in Bloomington.