How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [51]
The legislation creating the Illinois Territory stipulated its boundaries to be the land east of the Mississippi River and west of both the Wabash River “and a direct line drawn from the said Wabash River and Post Vincennes due north to the territorial line between the United States and Canada.” Thus the original Illinois included all of present-day Wisconsin and sections of present-day Michigan and Minnesota, though the legislation noted that these boundaries were only for the purposes of temporary government. Consequently, maps of Illinois prior to statehood anticipated the future state’s northern border to be that established in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, a line due west from the southernmost point of Lake Michigan.
Illinois’s southern connections
Under the Northwest Ordinance, the introduction of slavery was prohibited in Illinois, as it was in the entire Northwest Territory. Not all residents of Illinois were happy about that fact. Illinois extended more deeply south than any other part of the Northwest Territory, and many of its original settlers were Southerners. Its connection to the South was strengthened by the fact that virtually all of its rivers flow into the Mississippi.
When, in 1816, Pope ran for Congress as the territory’s nonvoting delegate, slavery was not yet a campaign issue. Statehood too was not a campaign issue, despite the fact that Illinois sought statehood only one year later. Pope was elected instead on a platform that emphasized road construction and education. The issue of slavery, however, was bubbling just beneath the territorial surface, and the skillful attorney in Pope understood that, when that surface turned into a state, a case could then be made to allow slavery based on a phrase in the same legislation that had prohibited it.
The Northwest Ordinance not only had proposed boundaries for future states in the Northwest Territory and banned the introduction of slavery, it also had stipulated the requirements for becoming a state. Critical in the case of Illinois were two elements in the clause that stated, “whenever any of the said states shall have sixty thousand free inhabitants therein, such state shall be admitted, by its delegates, into the Congress of the United States, on an equal footing with the original states in all respects.” The phrase that caught Pope’s legal-eyed attention was “on an equal footing with the original states.” The original states had determined for themselves whether or not to permit slavery. Since, upon becoming a state, Illinois would exist on an equal footing with those states, it could attempt to claim the right to determine for itself whether or not to permit slavery.
The significance of this phrase helps explain Pope’s reaction when, as a delegate to Congress, he unexpectedly received a resolution passed by Illinois’s territorial legislature instructing him to propose a bill for statehood. To one congressional colleague he confided that he could not “suppress my regret that the application was made at this time.”2 The other element in the Northwest Ordinance that was problematic to Illinois’s bid for statehood was the population requirement. Illinois was not yet sufficiently populated, and what population it did have resided primarily in its southern end, where proslavery sympathies predominated. “The only difficulty I have to overcome,” Pope half-truthfully wrote in a letter to the Illinois Intelligencer, “is whether we have the population supposed by the legislature, no enumeration of the inhabitants having lately been taken.… If it were certain that we had even thirty-five thousand inhabitants, no objection I think would be made to our admission.” While 35,000 is considerably less than 60,000, the number stipulated in the Northwest Ordinance, Pope knew of political tap dances that could step around that legal detail. But he also knew they wouldn’t be easy.
A glimpse of Pope’s anger at this unexpected task can be found in a letter he sent to Illinois’s territorial governor, Ninian Edwards, under whom he had served when secretary