The two shared a law office in Edwardsville, and Forquer aided Ford in his early years as a lawyer and judge.
While in the state senate, Forquer proposed a loan of half a million dollars for the Illinois and Michigan Canal.
Forquer is chiefly remembered for an 1836 speech in the Springfield Court House that backfired on him, soon after he had changed his party affiliation from Whig to Democrat.
Literary scholar Robert Bray has characterized Lincoln's famous rebuttal as a "withering put-down...as figuratively brilliant as it was cruelly ad hominem".
[1] "The gentleman has seen fit to allude to my being a young man; but he forgets that I am older in years than I am in the tricks and trades of politicians.