Illinois State Register

When the seat of government left Vandalia in 1839, the former capital;s Democratic newspaper---the Illinois State Register---followed. Its offices were here on the north side of Adams Street. Register editors William Walters and George Weber (and later, George Walker and Charles Lanphier) lived in a time when editors defended their views with their fists. The sheriff once horse-whipped Weber for printing unflattering words; Weber's brother then knifed the sheriff (Stephen Douglas won his acquittal). another time Walker and Lanphier got into a street fight with Lincoln's friend, Whig editor Simeon Francis. They employed walking sticks and pitch forks. During the Civil War, the Register rallied in defense of the Union, but bitterly opposed Lincoln's war politics. In 1864 a riot broke out when a mob (including soldiers) broke all the Register office windows. Unbowed, the paper declared that "a vote for Abraham Lincoln is a vote for war, for murder, for the impoverishment of our people...because he will not abate one jot of his determination...to wipe out slavery.

Charles H. Lanphier edited the Register for 18 years. He grew up in Washington, D.C., where his family ran a boarding house in the shadow of Andrew Jackson's White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. At age 16 he came to Illinois to work as a newspaper printer; by age 26 he was sole owner of the Register. From his Springfield editor's chair Lanphier became one of the most powerful Democrats in Illinois. Along with most Democrats, he believed abolitionists were traitors and their sentiments "atrocious." He strongly condemned President Lincoln, charging him with turning the Civil War into a violent social revolution that "the civilized world will denounce as an ineffaceable disgrace to the American name." In later years he championed Springfield's public schools.