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HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ILLINOIS.
acts were committed, but the organization, having been exposed and defeated in its objects, disbanded in 1865. (See Camp Douglas Conspiracy.) SELBY, Paul, editor, was born in Pickaway County, Ohio, July 20, 1825; removed with his parents, in 1837, to Van Buren County, Iowa, but, at the age of 19, went to Southern Illinois, where he spent four years teaching, chiefly in Madison County. In 1848 he entered the preparatory department of Illinois College at Jacksonville, but left the institution during his junior year to assume the editorship of ''The Morgan Journal," .at Jacksonville, with which he remained until the fall of 1858, covering the period of the organization of the Republican party, in which "The Journal" took an active part. He was a member of the Anti-Nebraska (afterwards known as Republican) State Convention, which met at Springfield, in October, 1854 (the first ever held in the State), and, on Feb. 22, 1856, attended and presided over a conference of Anti-Nebraska editors of the State at Decatur, called to devise a line of policy for the newly organizing Republican party. (See Anti-Nebraska Editorial Convention.) This body appointed the first Republican State Central Committee and designated the date of the Bloomington Convention of May 29, following, which put in nomination the first Republican State ticket ever named in Illinois, which ticket was elected in the following November. (See Bloomington Convention.) In 1859 he prepared a pamphlet giving a history of the celebrated Canal scrip fraud, which was widely circulated. (See Canal Scrip Fraud.) Going South in the fall of 1859, he was engaged in teaching in the State of Louisiana until the last of June, 1861. Just two weeks before the fall of Fort Sumter he was denounced to his Southern neighbors as an "abolitionist" and falsely charged with having been connected with the "underground railroad," in letters from secession sympathizers in the North, whose personal and political enmity he had incurred while conducting a Republican paper in Illinois, some of whom referred to Jefferson Davis, Senator Slidell, of Louisiana, and other Southern leaders .as vouchers for their characters. He at once invited an investigation by the Board of Trustees of the institution, of which he was the Principal, when that body-although composed, for the most part, of Sout
