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In a brief autobiography written in 1860, Lincoln recounted that his father moved the family to Indiana “partly on account of slavery.” His main reason, however, Lincoln quickly added, was “land titles.” Land surveys in Kentucky were notoriously unreliable and landownership often precarious. To purchase land in Kentucky, according to a visitor in the 1790s, was to buy a lawsuit. During Lincoln’s boyhood, his father Thomas Lincoln owned three farms but lost two of them because of faulty titles. In Indiana, however, thanks to the federal land ordinances of the 1780s, the national government surveyed land prior to settlement and then sold it through the General Land Office, providing secure titles. When the War of 1812 destroyed Indians’ power in much of the Old Northwest, their land, appropriated by the United States, became available for sale. Thousands of settlers from the Border South, among them Lincoln’s family, moved across the Ohio River to occupy farms. “Kentucky,” the saying went, “took Indiana without firing a shot.”5

In Indiana and Illinois, where Lincoln lived from ages seven to fifty-one, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery. Throughout the pre–Civil War decades, intrepid slaves tried to make their way across the Ohio River in search of liberty. Nonetheless, the Ohio did not mark a hard and fast dividing line between North and South, slavery and freedom. For many years it was far easier for people and goods to travel between Kentucky and southern Indiana and Illinois than to the northern parts of these states. Slave-catchers, too, frequently crossed the river, searching for fugitives.

Before the War of 1812, the Old Northwest was a kind of borderland, a meeting-ground of Native Americans and various people of English, French, and American descent where geographical and cultural boundaries remained unstable. The defeat of the British and their ally Tecumseh, who had tried to organize pan-Indian resistance to American rule, erased any doubt over who would henceforth control the region. But a new borderland quickly emerged. When Lincoln lived there, the southern counties of Indiana and Illinois formed part of a large area that encompassed the lower parts of the free states and the northernmost slave states. This region retained much of the cultural flavor of the Upper South. Its food, speech, settlement patterns, architecture, family ties, and economic relations had much more in common with Kentucky and Tennessee than with the northern counties of their own states, soon to be settled by New Englanders. The large concentration of people of southern ancestry made Indiana and Illinois key battlegrounds in northern politics as the slavery controversy developed. Here, a distinctive politics of moderation developed. On the eve of the Civil War, a writer in far-off Maine described the southern Northwest as “a sort of belt or break-water between the extremes of the North and South.”6

In the decade before the Civil War, the population exploded in northern Illinois. But because they had been settled first, the southern counties long shaped the state’s public life. Of the first seven governors, six had been born in a slave state. In 1848, more members of the Illinois legislature and constitutional convention hailed from Kentucky than from any other state. As late as 1858, during his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln made a point of affirming his geographical roots to voters in southern Illinois: “I was raised just a little east of here. I am a part of this people.” By then, however, the southern counties had been eclipsed politically and economically by northern Illinois.7

Many pioneer settlers in Indiana and Illinois, like the Lincoln family, carried with them an aversion to slavery. Richard Yates, the Kentucky-born Civil War governor of Illinois, spoke of his view of slavery in words much like Lincoln’s: “The earliest impressions of my boyhood were that the institution of slavery was a grievous wrong.” Peter Cartwright, a Methodist preacher and