How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [52]
Despite his misgivings, Pope pursued his assignment “with that candor and good faith becoming my station.” Step one was to write a resolution enabling Illinois to hold a statehood convention. Pope included in that resolution a requirement that a census be taken. But what if the population turned out to be less than 60,000? The resolution stated that Illinois could become a state only if “it shall appear from the enumeration … that there are within the proposed state, not less than.… thousand inhabitants.” Evidently, Pope was still working on this.
Step two was to do nothing. Pope simply sat and listened as Congress took up the topic of “internal improvements.” It was an issue that, strange as it may seem today, was a hot topic in 1818. It also set the stage for Pope’s next step. The debate on the floor regarded whether or not the federal government should provide funds to build internal improvements such as roads and canals. Unless amended, the Constitution prohibited almost all such expenditures. But the nation had doubled in size since the signing of the Constitution. New states were being created from the Northwest Territory and the Louisiana Purchase. Roads and canals (and soon railroads) could help strengthen the bonds of unity between these new states and the rest of the nation. The risk, however, was that Congress could favor certain states over other states—such as, say, Northern states over Southern states.
After his colleagues had talked themselves out, unable to reach agreement, Pope stood back up with his Illinois bill, to which he now, step three, urged a brilliantly crafted, perfectly timed amendment regarding its northern border. As originally proposed, the bill called for a northern border that was “an east and west line, drawn through a point ten miles north of the southern extreme of Lake Michigan.” Though this boundary differed from that stipulated in the Northwest Ordinance (a line extending from the southernmost point of Lake Michigan), it was identical to the northern border Congress had recently created for neighboring Indiana. Why had Congress made this change? Why were ten miles of frontage on Lake Michigan more important in 1818 (or, in Indiana’s case, 1816) than in 1787?
They were more important because, in 1817, New York had begun construction of the Erie Canal. In offering his amendment to a bill he himself had written, Pope addressed the issue that Congress had just debated—slavery:
If [Illinois’s] commerce is to be confined to … the Mississippi … there is a possibility that her commercial relations with the South may become so connected that, in the event of an attempted dismemberment of the Union, Illinois will cast her lot with the southern states. On the other hand, to fix the northern boundary of Illinois upon such a parallel of latitude as would give to the state the territorial jurisdiction over the southern shores of Lake Michigan, would be to unite [Illinois] … to Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. By the adoption of such a [boundary] line, Illinois may become, at some future time, the keystone to the perpetuity of the Union.4
Though access via the Great Lakes to the Erie Canal, which would further bind Illinois to the Union, was the primary reason Pope sought to relocate Illinois’s northern border, he went on to discuss another canal. This was step four. He spoke of creating a canal that would connect Lake Michigan and the Illinois River. Combined with other canals being discussed in Illinois, the northern half of the state’s waterways could be diverted from the Mississippi River and the South to the Erie Canal and the North. A potential harbor