To William Butler1Jump to section
Your letter enclosing one to Mr. Baker, was received on yesterday evening.2Jump to section There is no necessity for any bad feeling between Baker & yourself. Your first letter to him was written while you were in a state of high excitement, and therefore ought not to have been construed as an emination of deliberate malice. Unfortunately however it reached Baker while he was writhing under a severe tooth-ache, and therefore he at that time was incapable of exercising that patience and reflection which the case required. The note he sent you was written while in that state of feeling, and for that reason I think you ought not to pay any serious regard to it. It is always magnanamous to recant whatever we may have said in passion; and when you and Baker shall have done this, I am sure there will no difficulty be left between you. I write this without Bakers knowledge; and I do it because nothing would be more painful to me than to see a difficulty between two of my most particular friends.
About your dissatisfaction in relation to the South East county I will now say that I all the while laboured under a mistake. When I wrote to Frink & Murphy3Jump to section that I would go for their county, I only meant that I would go for giving them a county as against Springfield & the old county; and it never occurred to me that I was pledging myself to one party of the new-county men against another, for I did not then know they were divided into parties. When I consented for the lines to approach Springfield nearer than the petition asked, I really thought I was confering a favour upon the new-county. And, by the way, if you will compare Frink's petition with the lines as they now stand, you will see that there is but three quarters of a township more taken from Sangamon county than the petition asked for; and as to the part from Montgomery, I have before told you we could not control that.
No news here now. Your friend as ever A. LINCOLN