He had little law business, but his energies were always employed in shaping his powers toward a participation in the politics of the country.

His superhuman energy was intensified by the fact that he had been deprived of an opportunity to educate himself.

It was the gadfly that drove him forward with such restless industry.

I could see that he had no patience for a detailed study of the law; that he might be ignorant of the technical steps to be taken in the collection of a promissory note, but he would know something about the resources of a treaty; that if he did not know how to settle the title to a farmer's field, he had considered ways to put at rest any claim of England to the territory of the Oregon.
Yet he had to live as a lawyer before he could flourish as a statesman.
And he had become the prosecuting attorney.

His enemies said it was by a trick; that he had had the state law changed so that the legislature could appoint him state's attorney for the district of Jacksonville.