Abraham Lincoln Jumped Out Of A Window To Avoid Quorum

HNN, History News Network, George Washington University, 2/24/11.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin are waging battle armed with the weapons of parliamentary procedure. Fourteen Democratic state senators have fled the state for neighboring Illinois. Their choice of refuge is eminently appropriate, for Abraham Lincoln himself famously tried to deny his political opponents quorum through a very unorthodox method of departure in 1840.

Lincoln, then a young Whig state congressman, was a major backer of Illinois’s State Bank. The bank had been authorized to suspend its specie payments (payments in coin) until the end of the legislative session in December. Lincoln and his fellow Whigs, then in the minority, naturally sought to extend the session indefinitely and hence delay the resumption of specie payments.

So Lincoln jumped out the window.

Here’s how Lincoln biographer David H. Donald described the scene:

The only way the Whigs could keep the legislature in session was by absenting themselves, so that there was no quorum. They left Lincoln, together with one or two of his trusted lieutenants, to watch the proceedings and to demand roll calls when the Democrats tried to adjourn. The session dragged on into the evening… Several Democrats rose from their sickbeds to help form a quorum. Rattled, Lincoln and his aides lost their heads and voted on the next roll call. Then, still hoping to block adjournment, they unsuccessfully tried to get out of the locked door. When the sergeant at arms rebuffed them, they jumped out the first-story window.

The Democrats of his day defeated Lincoln's attempts taking a page out of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's book—by recording Lincoln as "presenting and voting" even after he had fled.. As for Lincoln, he became the butt of jokes from his political rivals for a long while after the spectacle. Mocking his height (Lincoln was tall even by modern standards), Democrats declared he suffered no injuries because “‘his legs reached nearly from the window to the ground!’”

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/136982