New Orleans Early Growth

The new settlement superseded Biloxi in 1723 as the capital of the vast Colonial empire of Louisiana. Eighteen miles of levee were constructed above and below the town, government buildings erected, and efforts made to drain the land. As part of the ‘Mississippi Bubble,’ John Law’s grandiose real-estate project, New Orleans enjoyed an early increase in population, although the majority of immigrants coming to Louisiana in quest of the easy living advertised in Europe chose to settle along the river outside of the small town. Beside the civil and military officials, the population consisted of slaves, soldiers, trappers, and merchants. Classes of slaves included (1) Negroes imported directly from Africa or from the French possessions in the West Indies; (2) esclaves naturels, Indian prisoners of war; and (3) ‘redemptioners,’ impoverished Europeans, most of whom were Germans, who had bound themselves to serve for a period of three years in payment of their passage and were ’sold’ to the planters by ship captains. Because of the rapid increase in slaves, the French practice of populating Louisiana with convict labor soon came to a stop, resulting in an improvement in the type of colonist settling in and about New Orleans.

Under the Company of the Indies, a John Law enterprise, the government of the Colony was vested in a Superior Council consisting of the directors of the trading company with a commandant-general, in place of a governor, at its head. Lower courts were established for the administration of justice, and a right of appeal to the Superior Council was granted. In 1724, the Code Noir, a compilation drawn up for the regulation of Negroes on the island of Santo Domingo, was promulgated in Louisiana by Governor Bienville. Among its additional provisions were those having to do with the expulsion of Jews from the province, under penalty of confiscation of property and imprisonment, and the establishment of the Catholic religion as the State faith. For more than a century it formed the basis of white treatment of enslaved Negroes.

The religious administration of the Colony was divided among three religious orders. The Jesuits were given charge of all territory north of the Ohio, the Capuchins were assigned to the territory west of the Mississippi River, and the Carmelite Fathers were placed in charge of the settlement east of the river with headquarters at Mobile. The Carmelites failed to fill their assignment and the Capuchins were given charge, while the Jesuits were allowed to do missionary work among the Indians in the Capuchin territory, with the understanding that there would be no interference with Capuchin activities. Both orders were under the supervision of the Bishop of Quebec.

Care for the sick and education for girls were provided for with the arrival in 1727 of six Ursuline nuns, who founded the Ursuline Convent. Equally important, however, was the importation during the following years of young French women (called filles à la cassette because of the chests of clothes and linen given them as dowries by the French Government) to supply wives for the colonists.

In 1731 the Company of the Indies relinquished its charter and Louisiana once more became a province of the Crown. A governor, appointed by the King as his representative, regulated the simple affairs of the Colony, and in his executive capacity exercised military and administrative authority, enforced by the soldiery of which he was the head. His dictatorial power also embraced judicial and legislative activity, limited to a great extent, however, by the fact that all ordinances and royal edicts emanated from France. The Superior Council was reorganized to consist of the intendant, procureur-général (King’s attorney), registrar of the province, and six prominent citizens. In conjunction with the Governor and a commissaire ordonnateur (agent of the King in charge of commerce and Crown property) the Council discharged the executive, legislative, and judicial affairs of the Colony. Justice was administered, without trial by jury, by inferior courts subject to the appellate jurisdiction of the Superior Council. The Custom of Paris, a codification of ancient French law, formed the basis of Colonial law from the beginning.
Early in its history the town took on a gay and light-hearted appearance. Under the governorship of the Marquis de Vaudreuil ( 1743-53) the social life of the town was modeled after Versailles, and citizens sought to outdo each other in the splendor of their social affairs.
The capital of one third of the present area of the United States grew slowly. At first only that manufacturing which had to do with supplying the immediate needs of the Colony was undertaken. Sawmills were in operation soon after the town was founded, and by 1729 brick, pottery, and tiling were being sold in New Orleans. Shipbuilding, especially the construction of pirogues, brigantines, and other small craft, developed as an industry to meet the demands of growing commerce on the Mississippi.

Never fully realizing her importance as the port of the Mississippi Valley, New Orleans lay dormant during the first half of the eighteenth century. Trade restrictions prohibited commerce with any but the mother country, and illegal trade with England, Spain, Mexico, Florida, and the West Indies had to be resorted to. With merchants and officials conniving with smugglers and pirates, smuggling grew to such an extent that in 1763 the illicit traffic was estimated to represent one sixth of the official trade total. The bulk of cargoes, shipped in exchange for slaves and European merchandise, consisted of lumber, pitch, tar, wax from the wax myrtle, brick, rice, indigo, sugar cane, cotton, sassafras, and fur pelts. As settlers crossed the Allegheny Mountains and developed the Middle West, New Orleans began to grow as a commercial port. The extent to which the river traffic had grown by 1750 may be seen in the frequent requests of Colonial officials for sailors to man the boats used on the river. By 1763 exports totaled $304,000; indigo accounted for $100,000, skins and furs $80,000, and lumber $50,000.

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New Orleans History: Americans Develop the City

After American annexation numerous Americans, aware of the fortunes to be made in a city so advantageously situated, began to settle in New Orleans. Because of the antipathy of the Creoles, who pictured all Americans as boorish rowdies, the newcomers settled in the Faubourg Ste. Marie on the upstream side of the town in what is now the business section of New Orleans. Here they developed a town quite distinct from the old New Orleans. As time passed and the city began to benefit from unrestricted trade with other States of the Mississippi Valley the two elements merged, and though the Creoles held themselves aloof socially, common civic interests and the leveling effect of commercial intercourse tended to unite the inhabitants.

New Orleans was incorporated February 17, 1805, and the city limits defined. The municipal government consisted of a mayor, a recorder, a treasurer, and fourteen aldermen. The latter formed a council whose function it was ‘to make and pass all by-laws and ordinances for the better government of the affairs of the city corporation.’ Free white males, residents of New Orleans for a year, either owners of real estate of five hundred dollars’ value or renters paying one hundred dollars a year, were qualified to vote. James Pitot, builder of one of the first cotton presses in New Orleans (corner of Toulouse and Burgundy Streets) succeeded Étienne de Boré as mayor, and on March 4, 1805, the townspeople first exercised their franchise in an election of aldermen.

In the same year the Legislature provided for the establishment of New Orleans’first higher institution of learning, the College of Orleans. Schools in the Colony had been scarce. The Ursuline nuns offered instructions to seventy or eighty young girls and maintained a schoolhouse near the convent where ‘female children appeared at certain hours to be gratuitously instructed in writing, reading, and arithmetic.’ No mention is made of similar schools for boys; they had to rely, possibly, upon private schools such as that conducted by the Reverend Philander Chase on Tchoupitoulas Street, or that opened at 29 Bienville Street by Francis Hacket, teacher of English, arithmetic, geography, and history. The College of Orleans, which was finally opened in 1811 through a government appropriation of $15,000, had a president and four professors and a curriculum which included Latin, Greek, English, French, Spanish, philosophy, literature, and the sciences. From 1822 to 1825 the college was under the direction of Joseph Lakanal, prominent for his work in reorganizing the French school system under the Directory and Napoleon.

The New Orleans Library Society was incorporated April 19, 1805, when an unlimited number of twenty-five-dollar shares were sold and the first library in New Orleans was established. During the same year, after a vote of the Protestants in the city favored an Episcopal clergyman, the first Protestant church was organized.

Many improvements were made in the town during the next few years. A waterworks carrying water from the Mississippi in wooden conduits laid a foot and a half below the banquettes was installed by Louis Gleise; a Negro chain gang was employed in filling in the streets; sidewalks were built and crossing bridges constructed; and meat markets, notoriously unclean, had their water closets torn down.

As the center of Aaron Burr’s filibustering schemes, New Orleans was thrown into a panic in the winter of 1806 when a large flotilla with Burr as its leader was reported descending the Mississippi to use the city as a base in furthering his intention of separating the Western country from the United States or, failing in that, to wrest Mexico from Spain. The banks were to be plundered of $2,000,000 and Louisiana revolutionized.

Great efforts were made to fortify the city against what was said to be a formidable force. The Chamber of Commerce met to consider ways and means of defense, money was subscribed, orders given for organization of the Battalion of Orleans, and volunteers and the militia cavalry ordered out. In the meantime, Burr with sixty to eighty men kept ahead of orders for his arrest until he was stopped at Natchez and held for trial, at news of which the hysteria in New Orleans subsided as quickly as it had been aroused.

The first steamboat to descend the Mississippi River arrived in New Orleans amid great enthusiasm on January 10, 1812. Propulsion by steam solved the problem of upstream navigation, and was the greatest single factor in the rapid growth of New Orleans to a major North American port.

Louisiana was admitted to the Union April 30, 1812. New Orleans, then the capital of the State, had a population of 24,552 in 1810, having more than doubled its population in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This increase was caused largely by the immigration of refugees from Santo Domingo; almost six thousand arrived in two months in 1809. The city, hard pressed at first to find room for the immigrants, absorbed them in the course of time. Gay and luxury-loving, they infused a new spirit into the town and tended to offset the American influence then beginning to be felt.

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First existing records of white men in Illinois

The first existing records of white men in Illinois were made by Father Jacques Marquette. On May 17, 1673, he and Louis Jolliet, with five voyageurs, left Mackinac, paddled over parts of Lakes Huron and Michigan into Green Bay, thence up the Fox River, crossed at the portage, and went down the Wisconsin. On June 17 they entered the Mississippi. On the west side of the river, in what is now Iowa, they encountered and exchanged friendly greetings with the Kaskaskia tribe of Illinois Indians. The adventurers passed the mouth of the Missouri, saw the famous Piasa or Thunder Bird painted on the cliffs near the present city of Alton, and reached the mouths of the Ohio and Arkansas Rivers. There, having determined that the Mississippi flowed not into some western ocean, but into the Gulf of Mexico, and fearing Spaniards and hostile Indians, the Marquette party turned back late in July 1673.

They returned by way of the Illinois River, which Marquette described in his Journal: “We have seen nothing like this river for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, ducks, parrots, and even beaver.” And Jolliet later reported that the valley was “the most beautiful and most suitable for settlement.”

Near Starved Rock they encountered the same tribe of Kaskaskia, now returned to their ancestral village site (about nine miles below the town of Ottawa), and their friendliness so won Father Marquette that he promised to return and set up a mission among them. From the Desplaines River they took the ancient portage trail to the Chicago River, thence to Lake Michigan, and up to Green Bay. Here Marquette, ill from the hardships of the voyage, was left behind, and Jolliet went on alone to Montreal where, almost in sight of the town, his canoe overturned and his carefully kept Journal was lost. Nevertheless he gave enthusiastic verbal descriptions of the new country, of its fertility, and ease of cultivation; he spoke of its marvelous transportation facilities, and showed how, with a canal built through “but half a league of prairie,” a boat could sail from Lake Erie down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

On October 25, 1674, with two voyageurs as companions, Father Marquette set out from Green Bay to keep his promise to the Kaskaskia. The voyage proved a hard one, and not until December 4 did the party reach the mouth of the Chicago River. Because of the severe cold and the recurrence of his old illness, Marquette stopped “two leagues” above the mouth of the river for the winter. With the spring his strength returned, and in Easter week, 1675, he established the first mission in the Illinois country at the Great Village of the Illinois, calling it the Mission of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. But then, weakened again by illness, he decided to return to St. Ignace (Mackinac). He was canoed up the eastern shore of Lake Michigan by his two faithful companions; finally, when he was unable to go farther, they landed near the river named for him in the present State of Michigan. There, on May 18, 1675, he died.

Robert René Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the French explorer, came later to the Illinois country. In 1679, after the sinking of his Griffon on Lake Erie, he erected a fort at the mouth of the St. Joseph River, ascended that river, portaged to the Kankakee, and canoed up the Illinois River to Lake Peoria, where he made friends with the Peoria tribe of the Illinois. About two miles below the lake, on the south side of the river, he built Fort Crèvecoeur in January 1680. In his absence the men mutinied and plundered the fort, and raiding Iroquois burned the Peoria village. Upon his return to the Illinois Country in 1682, La Salle, with Tonti, built Fort St. Louis at Starved Rock as a key to the vast empire of forts and commerce he had conceived. But his enemies at court prevailed, and he was soon recalled. Returning to France, he received permission from the king to establish a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi; on March 20, 1687, on a branch of the Trinity River, he was shot from ambush.

Tonti, La Salle’s lieutenant, obtained in 1690 the privileges previously granted La Salle. In 1691-92 he moved Fort St. Louis from Starved Rock to Pimitoui, on Peoria Lake. For ten years he devoted himself to bringing in settlers, missionaries, and trade supplies. When he died in 1704, a chain of forts stretched from Montreal to Mobile. Tonti had at last succeeded where his chief, La Salle, had failed.

The Mission of the Holy Family was established at Cahokia in 1699 by priests of the Seminary of Foreign Missions. In 1703 the Jesuits moved the Mission of the Immaculate Conception to the Indian village of Kaskaskia, sixty miles below Cahokia, a short distance from the mouth of the Kaskaskia River. These two towns on the American Bottom, Cahokia and Kaskaskia, soon became the centers of French life in the Illinois country. In 1720, after the collapse of the Mississippi Bubble, the commandant of the Illinois country completed Fort de Chartres, 17 miles north of Kaskaskia. The name Illinois was first officially used when the seventh civil and military district of the French province of Louisiana was so designated.

Meanwhile British colonists were advancing on French territory. New York fur traders reached the Great Lakes by way of the Mohawk Valley; Carolina frontiersmen pushed around the southern end of the Appalachians into the lower Mississippi Valley; the English continued their Hudson Bay fur trade. Land speculation grew among the English colonists.

In 1747 the Ohio Land Company was organized, and in 1749 was granted 200,000 acres of land near the forks of the Ohio on condition that the territory be fortified and a hundred families settled on the land within seven years. Thus began the struggle which, at the end of the French and Indian War, found England in possession of all French territory on the North American continent.

The English occupation of the Illinois country did not begin at once. Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa, rose against the British in 1763, and captured all but three of the newly acquired forts in the Lakes Region. He was not defeated until the following year, and it was not until October 10, 1765, that the French flag was lowered and the British raised at Fort de Chartres. Here, on December 6, 1768, was held the first court under English jurisdiction in the Illinois country.

By this time the British colonists were moving into the land beyond the Alleghenies. Speculators in Virginia, Connecticut, and New York were organizing colonies, and colonial firms engaged in extensive trading operations. But few if any American settlers were attracted to Illinois, and the British showed no capacity for dealing with the French inhabitants. Chaos prevailed, and the population diminished.

Thus there was widespread sympathy in Illinois for the Colonial cause in the American Revolution. In 1776-77 powder purchased from the French and Spaniards was run up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from New Orleans to Wheeling, West Virginia. As the war progressed, the strategic position of the Illinois country as a link with Spanish and French allies, and as a base for attack on the British at Detroit, became apparent.

The task of winning this country was undertaken by George Rogers Clark in 1778. Authorized by the Governor of Virginia, he floated down the Ohio River with a band of 175 men. From Fort Massac he set out overland for Kaskaskia. On July 4, 1778, while Rocheblave, the expatriate Frenchman in command for the British, was penning another of his whining letters to England, Clark entered the village, and was greeted warmly by the inhabitants. Father Gibault, at Clark’s request, traveled to Vincennes, won the allegiance of the people there, and persuaded them to sign the Oath of Vincennes. Hearing of Clark’s successes, the Virginia Assembly decreed on December 9, 1778, that Illinois was to be a county of Virginia. But six days later Vincennes was lost to the British under the command of Governor Hamilton of Detroit.

Seeing the entire territory threatened, Clark set out for Vincennes with 170 men. It was February; the rivers and bottom-lands were flooded; for miles the men waded in water up to their waists on one of the most courageous marches in American history. At Vincennes Clark succeeded in detaching the townspeople from the garrison, and on February 25, 1779, Hamilton capitulated. Later that year Clark planned a campaign against the British at Detroit, but it was not carried out. The next year, when the British attacked the Illinois towns, Clark came to the aid of Cahokia and helped beat them off. As the war drew to a close, military operations ceased except for periodic Indian raids at the instigation of the British.

To organize the vast territory which Clark’s conquest had secured for the United States, the Ordinance of 1787 was passed. It created the Northwest Territory as a Federal territory to consist of the present States of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin; slavery here was prohibited, except as a punishment for crime; a territorial government with limited suffrage was set up; provision was made that any area with sixty thousand persons could organize as a State and apply for admission to the Union.

Despite the Treaty of Paris in 1783, trouble with the British and their Indian allies continued. In 1794 American forces defeated the Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and by the Treaty of Greenville of the next year the Indians ceded small tracts of land at every important post and portage throughout the territory, including the site of the future Fort Dearborn, one at Peoria, and another at the mouth of the Illinois River. The United States then adopted an Indian policy which by 1809 had obtained from the Indians practically all of Ohio, eastern Michigan, southern Indiana, and most of western and southern Illinois.

Against this growing threat of the white man rose Tecumseh, and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet. They organized the Indians of the Northwest Territory, ordered white men barred from Indian villages, and forbade the selling of any more land to them. The Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811, though a victory for the whites, had deterred Tecumseh little, and the Indians in the conspiracy remained active throughout the War of 1812, aiding the British in gaining possession of most of the Northwest Territory. Detroit was captured; the garrison and inhabitants of Fort Dearborn were massacred by the Indians a few miles from the fort as they attempted to flee on August 15, 1812. The end of the war brought the Northwest Territory back to the American republic, but the problem of the Indians continued down to the Black Hawk War of 1832.

Illinois remained part of the Northwest Territory until 1800. In that year, by an Act of Congress approved May 7 but not effective until July 4, 1801, it became part of Indiana Territory. In 1809, by an Act approved February 3, the Territory of Illinois was created, which included within its bounds the present State of Wisconsin. Illinois became a territory of the second class on May 21, 1812; during all of this territorial period Illinois was governed by Ninian Edwards. Finally, on December 3, 1818, shorn of the Wisconsin Territory, it was admitted as a State of the Union, although its population was only 40,258, far short of the 60,000 stipulated by the Ordinance of 1787.

A State constitution was ratified without being submitted to the people, and Shadrach Bond, elected without opposition, became the first State governor of Illinois. The first capital was Kaskaskia; two years later Vandalia succeeded it. Through the efforts of Nathaniel Pope, territorial delegate from Illinois, the northern boundary of the State, fixed by the Ordinance of 1787 at an east-west line placed at the tip of Lake Michigan, was moved 51 miles north, to a line along the longitude 42° 30′, and as a result Illinois obtained a shoreline on the Great Lakes. The reason given was that “additional security for the perpetuation of the union” would be afforded if Illinois were identified with the northern States. Today this added territory contains 55 per cent of the population of the State.

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Illinois: The railroads had a revolutionary effect on the life of the State

Illinois entered the transition stage during which Chicago developed from a mud-rutted town of 29,963 in 1850 to a city of 296,977 in 1870, probably the swiftest growth of a metropolis in history. The State boasted ten incorporated cities in 1850: Chicago, Alton, Springfield, Beardstown, Pekin, Quincy, Peoria, Bloomington, Galena, and Rock Island. Their difficulties were many: houses were scarce, rents high, the streets so bad they became quagmires in rainy weather; according to a contemporary newspaper, the gutters were filled with “manure’ discarded clothing, and all kinds of trash, threatening the public health with their noxious fluvia.” One of the issues of the day was the hog nuisance; the streets, squares, and parks were public hog-pens. “Urbana had a record of more hogs in the community than people, and the porker had an equal right with the citizens to the streets.” Nor were there public utilities until the middle fifties, when the more progressive communities began to install water systems and gas for street lighting.

Twenty years after the rush to the lead mines at Galena in the late 1820’s, at which time a group of tent-cities containing more than 10,000 people had sprung up, the gold rush to California swept through Illinois. In 1849 more than 15,000 men and boys left the State for the western fields. The exodus subsided in 1850 as a result of discouraging letters and editorial warnings, but in 1852, with new stories of gold discoveries, the rush was revived. With the opening of the fertile lands of Kansas and Nebraska to settlement in 1854, still another migration took place. In the gold rush to Pike’s Peak in 1859, additional thousands left the State. The whole of the fifties was characterized by this draining of Illinoisans to the West.

In their place came new families from the East and South. In 1849 there appeared in the Boston Post a poem which began:

Westward the of Empire Moves:

Come leave the fields of childhood,
Worn out by long employ,
And travel west and settle
In the State of Illinois.

The Yankees settled in the northern area, the Southerners in the “Egypt” delta and the southern region. The sharp division of Illinois into “upstate” and “downstate,” reflected in habits, politics, and culture, persisted for years.

In even greater numbers immigrants arrived from Europe. French Icarians under Cabet set up a communistic colony at Nauvoo, the old Mormon city, in 1849. Portugese came to Springfield and Jacksonville; Scandinavians to Chicago, Rockford, Galesburg, Victoria, Andover, and Moline. The Bishop Hill colony was settled by Swedish Janssonists in 1846. But by far the most numerous were the Germans, fleeing their country after the defeat of their Revolution in 1848, and the Irish, driven out by potato famines and British oppression. By 1860 there were 130,804 Germans in Illinois, living chiefly in Chicago, Belleville, Galena, Quincy, Alton, Peoria, and Peru, perpetuating their rich culture in music societies, literary clubs, and Turnvereine. Many of the Irish were brought to Illinois to work on the canals and the railroads under the infamous system of contract labor; herded like cattle from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to further Illinois internal improvements, they found, not the promised land of newspaper advertisements, but bad housing, improper diet, and unsanitary conditions, which took a large toll in illness and death.

Nowhere in the United States did the railroad fever of the fifties rage more than in Illinois. Farms were mortgaged, counties and municipalities subscribed to stock, Eastern capitalists poured millions into the enterprises. Many of the politicians in the State, from Governor French and Senator Douglas to township officials, speculated in land and railroad stock, and became wealthy. Charges and countercharges of corruption were hurled; the Illinois State Register declared in 1853 that the railroad bills “were prepared in New York and first canvassed by Wall Street men before they were sent to Springfield to secure legislative endorsement.” Senator Douglas persuaded Congress to grant 2,707,200 acres of land, scattered over 47 counties, for the long-awaited Illinois Central Railroad, and in 1851 articles of incorporation were granted by the legislature to a group of Eastern financiers, headed by Robert Rantoul of Massachusetts, on condition that the State be paid 7 per cent of the gross receipts annually. In September 1856 the railroad was completed. Seven other roads were constructed in this period, and one, the Galena and Chicago, was able to pay dividends of 20 per cent after the first year of operation.

The railroads had a revolutionary effect on the life of the State. Most of the early settlements had been near rivers. Now the rich fertile prairie lands of the vast interior were opened to farming and mining, to become soon one of the greatest corn-producing and coalmining areas in the world. The coming of the railroads brought a wave of prosperity; by 1860 farm values had risen 50 per cent over those of 1850; farm and city, raw materials and markets, were brought together. Towns sprang miraculously out of the prairies. Communities off the railroads faded away.

In the struggle that split the Union and led to the Civil War, Illinois furnished the two opposing national leaders, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The State itself was soon as divided as the Nation. As early as 1796 and again in 1802, memorials from the Illinois country had been addressed to Congress asking for repeal of the prohibition against slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1824 a movement to amend the State constitution to allow the introduction of slavery was defeated. The kidnapping of free Negro residents in the State was countenanced for two generations, and the “black laws” of 1819 were still in effect. In 1837 the State legislature, excited by the spread of Garrison’s abolitionism, passed a resolution excluding abolition papers from the State and making the circulation of abolition petitions to Congress illegal. In the same year, November 8, the valiant abolitionist newspaper editor of the Alton Observer, Elijah P. Lovejoy, while defending his fourth press from destruction by Alton mobs, was shot dead. Lovejoy’s fight was continued by such men as Benjamin Lundy and his Genius of Universal Emancipation at Hennepin. Antislavery societies grew. In 1840 the Liberty Party was formed in Illinois, and by 1846 it had gained a majority in 13 northern counties.

Yet in 1853 an act drawn by John A. Logan providing that free Negroes who entered the State could be sold into servitude was passed by the legislature. This bill aroused the anger of Democrats and Whigs alike. Even so, the Democrats might have maintained their power in the State if Douglas had not in 1854 sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska bill enabling settlers in the new territories to choose between free soil and slavery, with an amendment thereto repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which had prohibited slavery forever in the Louisiana purchase above the line of 36° 30′. From the opposition to this bill, in the form of a coalition of disapproving Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers, came the germ of the Republican Party in Illinois. After a mass meeting in Rockford on March 18, 1854, and another at Ottawa on August 1, a State Republican convention was held in Springfield on October 4 and 5. In the elections of 1854 the State was almost equally divided; the northern or Yankee half voted solidly anti-Nebraska, while the southern or downstate half voted with the solid South. Looking now toward the national elections, the Republican Party of Illinois was organized at a convention in Bloomington, May 29, 1856, with some leaders in the Democratic Party of the State taking active parts. The first Republican governor, William H. Bissell, was elected that year.

The Dred Scott decision hastened the coming of the Civil War. When the United States Supreme Court in 1857, held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that Congress had no power to pass a law forbidding a master from carrying slaves into the territories, it posed a serious question. Could slavery be excluded from the territories by any means? Douglas contended that it could, because the people could withhold the protective local legislation essential to its existence. Yet even this doctrine had its faults, for soon he found himself at odds with President Buchanan and the slavery Democrats over popular sovereignty as manifested in the case of Kansas, then seeking admission to the Union. At the same time Douglas was losing ground. The senatorial contest in 1858 between Lincoln and Douglas was fought on the issue of free soil or popular sovereignty.

On the evening of his nomination for the senatorship by the Republican convention, at Springfield, Lincoln declared: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.” Forecasting another decision like that in the Dred Scott case, but applying to the States as well as territories, he said, “Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the states.” The famous LincolnDouglas debates at Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charlestown, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton carried on the controversy. In the last debate, at Alton, on October 15, 1858, Lincoln summed up his position in memorable words: “That is the issue . . . It is the eternal struggle between two principles–right and wrong–throughout the world. . . . The one is the common right of humanity, the other is the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’” Douglas won the election in 1858; Lincoln won the presidency two years later.

With Lincoln in the White House and war declared, southern Illinois was spotted with sympathy for the Confederacy. At meetings such as that held at Marion in Williamson County, there was wild talk of setting up “Egypt” as a separate State aligned with the South. Douglas rushed back to Illinois from Washington to bring his followers to the support of the Government. But his strength sapped by years of political battles, he died on June 3, 1861, striving valiantly to turn back the flood he had helped to unloose. Discontent with Lincoln was soon manifest, and in the fall of 1861 at the elections to the constitutional convention, the Democrats outnumbered the Republicans more than two to one. The Emancipation Proclamation and the arbitrary arrests for disloyal utterances during the war were responsible for the existence of a strong party of protest. But on the whole loyalty to the Union was strong in all parts of the State. In four years Illinois contributed more than a quarter of a million men to the Union forces, and her soldiers died bravely on many battlefields. In 1864 Lincoln received a 30,736 majority vote in Illinois; and at his untimely death his most savage critics in the State paused to pay homage to him; the Chicago Times, suppressed once for disloyalty during the Civil War, declared that the public had come to “realize something of the magnitude of the concerns involved in his lease of existence.”

The war over, Illinois began to take stock: it had contributed heavily in money and men; 5,857 had been killed in action; 3,051 had died of wounds, and 19,934 of disease. Now, with its railroads and fertile farm lands, its factories and mines, its people from all over the world, the State settled down to the problem of construction. The Civil War had released the forces of industrialism and swung the balance away from agriculture throughout the Nation with the emancipation of slave labor, the beginnings of mechanization of farm work, and the gradual closing of the frontier.

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