How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [53]
Diversion of waterways in Illinois
The land needed for these proposed canals was already included in the bill, by virtue of the northern border having been relocated ten miles north of the southern end of Lake Michigan. The amendment Pope proposed sought to relocate that border even further north—nearly sixty miles north of the tip of Lake Michigan. What, other than land, would Illinois gain?
It would gain people (step five). Pope needed all the people he could get to satisfy the population requirement for statehood—a figure that, as seen six months later in the Annals of Congress, he had managed to bargain down by the time Illinois had completed its statehood convention and submitted its proposed constitution to Congress for approval and admission as a state:
MR. SPENCER, of New York, inquired whether it appeared from any documents … that [Illinois] had the number of inhabitants required by the law.…
MR. ANDERSON, of Kentucky, said that the committee had no information on that subject before them.… He had … himself seen in the newspapers evidence sufficient to satisfy him of the fact that the population did amount to forty thousand souls, the number required.
But Pope needed those people for more than just statehood. Statehood, as he well knew, would enable Illinois to challenge its federally mandated prohibition of slavery, based on the “equal footing” clause in the Northwest Ordinance. Pope was opposed to slavery. He knew he could reduce the risk of Illinois’s seeking to permit slavery with the additional voters living in the swath of land he sought to lasso into the state—particularly if this swath became connected, via canals, to Northern commerce.5
It didn’t take a genius to foresee these events. Even at the time Congress voted on Illinois statehood, the handwriting was on the wall—or, more specifically, on Illinois’s proposed constitution. New York Congressman James Tallmadge Jr. objected to the fact that the proposed constitution permitted the renting of slaves from residents of other states. The clause was subsequently deleted and, on December 3, 1818, Illinois became a state.
But four years later, Illinois residents sought to amend the state’s constitution to permit slavery. Then as now, Illinois’s constitution could only be amended if, by referendum, a majority of voters opted to have a constitutional convention. The referendum took place in September 1824, with the whole nation watching. Philadelphia’s National Gazette soon reported, “Our readers will recollect that … the people of Illinois were to determine whether they would have a convention for amending their state constitution, or in other words, whether they would introduce slavery into that free state. The question has been settled.” The proposed convention garnered 1,410 votes in favor; 2,593 opposed. At that time, the population of the region Pope had added to Illinois was approximately 1,000. Their predominantly antislavery votes were indeed needed.
Nathaniel Pope was by then Judge Pope, having been appointed to the U.S. District Court for Illinois in 1819. He served in that capacity for the rest of his life. Twenty years into that service, he saw the northern border of Illinois back in the news. “We had a fine breeze in the House of Representatives on Tuesday last, growing out of the introduction of the Wisconsin resolutions … to settle and ascertain the line between Illinois and Wisconsin,” the Milwaukee Sentinel reported in February 1840. Wisconsin’s nonvoting delegate had argued “that no change could take place [in the Northwest Ordinance boundary] without the mutual consent of [Wisconsin].… Consequently, the northeast corner of the state of Illinois is at the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan.” To say the border “is at,” rather than “should be at,” reflected the location of the newspaper. Congress, being located elsewhere, referred the question to the Judiciary Committee, which never responded—this being one of