“Illinois: From Territory to State” presented by David W. Scott at the March 16, 2010 meeting of the Sangamon County Historical Society (Maps referred to in his talk appear at the end of this section).
This presentation will follow Illinois’s progress from unexplored
wilderness to territory to statehood in 1818.
The Northwest Territory was created in 1787 when the Continental Congress
passed the Northwest Ordinance. Covered under this Ordinance of 1787 was the
vast stretch of land north of the Ohio River, west of Pennsylvania, east of the
Mississippi River and south of Canada and the Great Lakes. This territory was
truly the northwest part of the United State as Spain, then France, controlled
the area west of the Mississippi until 1803, when France sold it to the United
States.
An early key event ultimately leading to statehood for Illinois was
France’s ceding its North American claims to Great Britain in the 1763 peace
treaty that concluded the French and Indian War.
As a colony of Great Britain, this northwest area remained largely
unknown to Europeans and to the
colonists living along the Atlantic seaboard. It was populated mostly by Indian
tribes. Otherwise it was sparsely settled and governmentally unorganized.
Early in the long process leading to Illinois statehood were the inroads
made by Virginia into what was coming to be called the Illinois Country. In the
colonial period Virginia claimed
vast western tracts north of the Ohio River.
In 1778, the state of Virginia created the county of Illinois. “Wedged
between the Ohio and Mississippi, the County of Illinois ran north to some
undetermined boundary, a boundary made fuzzy by British and Indian power.”
(Davis, page 77). At this time, Virginia Governor Patrick Henry commissioned
George Rogers Clark to capture British forts in the northwest. His
success, notably at the forts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes, enabled America
to control almost of all the northwest, and it laid the grounds for Great
Britain to cede the northwest in the 1783 treaty that secured for America its
independence. Following this treaty,
Virginia and other states agreed to relinquish their western land claims and
ceded them to the United States government. There was general agreement that
this new national territory would not remain in colonial status, but the
national government would allow some day the creation of states, equal in all
regards to the original thirteen. Under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson,
Congress enacted a resolution in 1784 that created a process leading to
statehood and established the boundaries for eight states north of the Ohio, the
boundaries being in the form of rectangles. If this scheme had been
carried out, the land of today’s Illinois would be part of three states.
The crucial next step towards the creation of states in the northwest was
the Land Act of 1785. As soon
as the Indian tribes relinquished their claims to land and were forced westward,
territory was to be surveyed into a series of townships to provide for the
orderly sale of land and the basis for secure titles to land - all important in
encouraging people from the East to want to settle in the northwest. It created
the well-known six-miles-by-six-miles township with each township divided into
one-mile-by-one-mile sections, or 36 sections per township. These survey
townships have tended to shape the boundaries of civic townships, the unit of
local government.
The
Northwest Ordinance
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which replaced the resolution passed in
1784, included Monroe’s boundaries.
The Ordinance created a system of law and order that would provide for
orderly westward expansion. Congress wanted people to move into the territory to
generate revenue from the sale of land. Soldiers from the Revolutionary War were
still owed payment for their
service. Revolutionary War officers
had a significant role in developing plans for the orderly migration of people
into the territory.
It was generally agreed that peace and stability in the territory
depended on the ability of Congress to make whites as well as Indians living
there respect the supreme authority of the national government. Anglo-American
frontiersmen were viewed as crude, unruly and ignorant. The Ordinance was, thus,
an effort by Congress to use its power to insure that the territories would
become states only when their laws and institutions clearly reflected the values
and structure of civilized society as existing in the states along the Atlantic
seaboard.
The Ordinance created a centralized government for the territory made up
of a strong governor, a secretary, and three judges, all appointed by and
responsible to the national government. The Governor and judges served as a
legislature; they were to make the laws, drawing on existing ones from the
original thirteen states as well as on the provisions of the Ordinance. The
Governor was to create counties and appoint their officials “for the
preservation of the peace and good order”. The first governor was Arthur St.
Clair; the first county he created in the Illinois Country he named after
himself. See 1790 county map.
The next step to statehood occurred when a territory had 5,000 free white
male inhabitants at least 21 years of age. Then a territorial legislature was to
be formed. The legislature could make laws, establish counties and appoint a
person to represent it in Congress who could debate, but not vote. Still the
Governor remained dominant.
Once a territory had reached a population of 60,000 free inhabitants, it
would be eligible for statehood, “on
an equal footing with the original states in all respects whatever”. But it
must have formed a constitution and government that “shall be Republican”
(that is, be a representative democracy).
The Ordinance included the right to be compensated for property or for
services of an individual, taken for public use and the right to make private
contracts with which the government may not interfere. The guaranteeing of such
rights was considered crucial for the Ordinance to achieve its social purpose of
encouraging the migration into the territory of solid and entrepreneurial
citizens who would buy land, develop farms, establish churches, schools and
local governments, and participate in the growing system of national and
international commerce.
Addressed for the first time in a major national document was slavery. It
was outlawed. The Ordinance stated that “there shall be neither Slavery nor
involuntary Servitude in the territory, otherwise than in the punishment of a
crime, whereof the Party shall have been duly convicted.”
The first division of the Northwest Territory was associated with
statehood for Ohio and is shown in Maps 8 and 9. In deciding finally to create
Ohio’s northern border along the east-west line crossing the tip of Lake
Michigan, Congress was moving in the direction of the five-state option. At the
same time, Congress created the Indiana Territory, which consisted of the rest
of the Northwest Territory. Vincennes
became the capital. It did not take long for further division to take place with
the creation in 1805 of the Michigan
Territory, which was taken from the Indiana Territory. See map 10. Indiana’s
size was further reduced—to about its current size—with the creation of the
Illinois Territory in 1809, which included what became Wisconsin as shown in Map
11. The Illinois Territory was
created when Indiana was in the second stage on the road to statehood—that is,
it had an elected legislature with a representative in Congress. Illinois
interests—that is, those west of the Wabash River seeking separation from
Indiana—made a deal with the representative, Jesse Thomas, who got Congress to
carve out from the Indiana Territory, the Illinois Territory. Kaskaskia was made
the capital. The laws adopted for
the Illinois Territory were drawn mostly from laws in the southern states,
notably Kentucky.
The Governor during the entire period of territorial status for Illinois
was Ninian Edwards. Like most residents of Illinois in the early decades of
Illinois history, he was of southern origin. Most immigrants had come from
Kentucky and Virginia and had settled in the southern third of Illinois. Thus,
there was considerable sympathy for slavery among many of the early Illinois
settlers.
It did not take long for Congress to respond to
demands from Illinois that its residents elect their own representative, and in
1812 it allowed second stage status. By 1817 interest was growing to achieve
statehood, and this cause was ably carried forward by Illinois’ representative
in Congress, Nathanial Pope, another of Illinois’s “Founding Fathers”. The
case for statehood was that it would attract settlers, foster economic
development, and raise land prices. It would also strengthen representative
democracy by ending the strong control held by the territorial governor over the
legislative body under provisions of the Northwest Ordinance.
But certain problems clouded the statehood question stemming from other
provisions of the Ordinance,
notably a population considerably lower than the 60,000 minimum, ambiguities
associated with the prohibition of slavery, and the northern boundary. As
indicated, according to the Ordinance, a fourth and a fifth state could be
created north of a east-west line drawn at the southern tip of Lake Michigan.
This line was followed in creating the Michigan Territory as shown in Map 10.
However, Congress waived that provision in authorizing statehood for Indiana.
It set the boundary 10 miles farther north, giving Indiana 45 miles of
Lake Michigan shoreline. Initially Pope got Congress to give Illinois 10
additional miles northward, but he finally got Congress to move the boundary 41
miles north of the tip of Lake Michigan as shown in Map 12.
The core of Pope’s interest in the 41 miles was his desire, and that of
others, for Illinois to control the route of a proposed canal connecting Lake
Michigan and the Illinois River, thus linking the two great North American
waterway systems, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. At one point, only
seven miles separates the Des Plaines River—which with the Kankakee River
forms the Illinois River, which flows into the Mississippi—and the swampy
origins of the south branch of the Chicago River, which flowed into Lake
Michigan. Thus, an Illinois without the 41 miles of shoreline would have had as
its northernmost cities, Rock Island and Joliet. The transportation, commercial
and industrial center that many saw as likely to develop on the southwestern
shores of Lake Michigan would be not be Illinois. That is, Chicago would be in
Wisconsin.
The expanded boundaries would move Illinois away from its predominantly
southern orientation that existed at the time of statehood. An Illinois with
Great Lakes ports would provide an alternative to the existing commercial
orientation to the Mississippi River and New Orleans. At least partly by
intention and certainly by results,
the expanded boundaries would increase the number of immigrants coming to
Illinois from the northeast, thus insuring that Illinois in the long run would
be a free state. Pope argued that
with both a southern and northern orientation, Illinois as a state would help
diffuse tendencies toward disunion.
The proposed Constitution put forward to Congress by the Illinois
Constitutional Convention did allow the continuation of some slavery, notably
allowing the entry into the state of slaves to work the salt mine at Shawneetown.
Still, slavery was limited enough
not to cause a majority of members of Congress to oppose granting statehood to
Illinois. Also Congress was willing to waive the 60,000 population requirement
and Illinois came into the Union claiming 40,000, but actually having fewer than
that. Congress approved the statehood bill and with
President Monroe’s signature on December 3, 1818, Illinois became a
state.
With the new state constitution came a reversal of the
roles of the governor and the legislature, making the General Assembly dominant
and the governor weak: he had no
veto. For example, the creation of
counties was now firmly in the hands of the legislature. The
1818 map shows the counties at the time Illinois became a state. Shortly after
statehood, the General Assembly formed Sangamon County in 1821; the map of that
year shows that it originally covered a substantial portion of the central part
of the state. The 1839 map shows the final boundaries of Sangamon County
following several reductions in its territory by the legislature.
According to the 1818 Constitution, representation in the General
Assembly was based on the counties. Each had one senator and the more populous
counties had more than one representative. The
Constitution provided for the voters in the counties to choose the sheriff, the
coroner and the three-member county commission.
In summary, with statehood the Northwest Ordinance was no longer in
effect. The newly created state of Illinois would now determine the offices and
roles of the general government and of its counties.
Biles, Roger, Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People, DeKalb, Northern Illinois
University Press, 2005.
Davis, James E., Frontier Illinois,
Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1998.
Howard, Robert P, Illinois: A History of
the Prairie State, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972.
Onuf, Peter S., Statehood and Union: A
History of the Northwest Ordinance, Bloomington
and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1987.
Taylor, Robert M. Jr., editor,
The Northwest Ordinance 1787: A Bicentennial Handbook, Indianapolis, Indiana
Historical Society, 1987.
