nois Legislature, that being the Second General Assembly, over which he presided as Speaker of the House during the latter half of Shadrack Bond's administration. During that session the question came up of establishing a state bank with authority to emit or issue bills of credit or its own money, paying a nominal annual interest. The part taken by John McLean in that controversy is told as follows by Davidson and Stuve in their History of Illinois:

"The legislature were not unadvised of their infatuation. John McLean, subsequently a senator in Congress, was speaker of the house. He was opposed to the measure, and his power as a forcible debater was justly dreaded by the bank men. It is rulable to debate all important bills in committee of the whole, that the speaker may participate. To avoid an arraignment of their bantling by him, the bank majority resorted to the trick of refusing to go into committee of the whole. Burning with indignation at such treatment, he promptly resigned the speakership, and taking the floor, denounced in scathing terms the expensive folly of the scheme, presaged the injurious results which must inevitably flow from its passage, involving creditors in ruin and the State in bankruptcy. But it was pre-determined to pass the bill, which was done over the veto by the requisite majority. The issues of the bank did not long remain at par; as their worthlessness became apparent, good money was driven out of circulation. This was particularly so with small coins, and it became so difficult to make change that bills had to be cut in two. By various steps, they depreciated to 25 cents on the

dollar; and with this worthless State currency were the people cursed for a period exceeding four years. By the year 1824, the depreciation had the effect to almost impede the wheels of government."

When Ninian Edwards resigned as United States Senator in 1824 to accept an appointment as Minister to Mexico, John McLean was elected to fill the unexpired term, taking his seat in the Senate on December 20, 1824. Elias Kent Kane of Kaskaskia was elected to succeed Edwards, taking his seat in the Nineteenth Congress for the term beginning March 4, 1825.

In 1826 the political power of Daniel P. Cook was broken, he being beaten in that year for reelection to Congress by Joseph Duncan, of Jackson County, with whom my father had served in Blackhawk's War and who later became Governor of the State. In his palmy days Cook had defeated the strongest men in public life, including John McLean, Elias Kent Kane and Shadrack Bond, but he had, by 1826, entered a physical and political decline which, combined, resulted in his death about a year after his defeat by Duncan. Illustrating how little our average citizen knows about the history of our state, I will venture the assertion that not more than one out of a hundred of our people know that it was for Daniel P. Cook that our great County of Cook, in which Chicago is situated, was named.

In the 1826 election in which Cook went down

to defeat Ninian Edwards, who had resigned as Minister to Mexico on account of a quarrel with the Secretary of the Treasury, was elected Governor, and John McLean was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, over which he again presided as Speaker. He was again elected in 1828, and again selected as Speaker; but during this term he was elected to the United States Senate for the six-year term beginning March 4, 1829, but died in office on October 14, 1830. His tomb may be seen today in the old Westwood Cemetery in Shawneetown, the inscription on the marble slab reading as follows:

"IN

MEMORY OF

JOHN MCLEAN

BORN IN N. CAROLINA, FEB. 4, 1791,
HE WAS RAISED AND EDUCATED IN
KENTUCKY

WHENCE HE IMMIGRATED TO ILLINOIS
IN 1815, WHERE HE HELD A CONSPICUOUS
STAND AT THE BAR AND IN SOCIETY
FOR TALENTS AND A GENEROUS AND
AMIABLE NATURE.

A REPRESENTATIVE AND SENATOR
IN THE CONGRESS OF THE U. S.
FROM ILLINOIS, HE DIED WHILE IN
THE LATTER OFFICE, OCT. 14, 1830
LAMENTED BY ALL."

Alexander Parrish, in his Historic Illinois, The Romance of the Earlier Days, has the following to say of John McLean:

"John McLean, of Shawneetown, elected to the Senate in 1824, to succeed Edwards, was in many respects the most gifted man of his period in Illinois. Born in North Carolina in 1791, he came to Shawneetown as a young lawyer of twenty-three, and was soon prominent both at the bar and in political life. Three years later, he was elected to Congress after a campaign strangely marked by courtesy between himself and his opponent, Daniel P. Cook. Hitherto frontier politics had been fought with bitter personalities. He was also frequently a member of the legislature, and once Speaker of the House, but never forgot to remain a gentleman, even on the "stump." McLean was a born orator, a large man, finely proportioned, with light complexion, and frank, open face. Men instinctively felt confidence in him, while his eloquence swayed them at his will. His death, which occurred in the very prime of his manhood, at thirty-nine, was considered a great public loss, and the legislature, in memory of his signal services, named a county of the State in his honor."

Thus did McLean, the banner agricultural county of Illinois, get its name. In addition to being the banner agricultural county in Illinois and third in the United States, with its products approximating thirteen million dollars in value per annum, its chief city, Bloomington, is the seat of the Northern Illinois Normal. The name also is perpetuated in McLeansboro, the county

seat of Hamilton County, but a few miles to the east of our old homestead located in Franklin County.

Besides the things heretofore mentioned in this chapter, John McLean participated in most of the history-making events of his time. He was a member of the State Legislature when, in 1820, the capital was removed from old Kaskaskia to Vandalia, where it was to remain for twenty years. On the occasion of the removal of the capital, all the archives of the state government were moved from Kaskaskia to Vandalia in one wagon. Imagine, if you can, and contrast the job of removing our state capital now, and the attending confusion.

The removal of the capital upstate a distance of ninety or a hundred miles was a significant indication of the trend of settlement and civilization toward the prairie lands of central and northern Illinois. That the removal was but an incident in a general movement was shown in 1826, when the first steamboat on the Illinois River made its appearance, thus heralding the extension of commerce into the country which had been for so many years stubbornly held by the Indians against the increasing encroachment of the whites.

Hard following upon the admission of Illinois into the Union, the old French settlements in southern Illinois along the Mississippi fell into