The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [7]
Since the eighteenth century, slavery had existed in the region. And despite the Northwest Ordinance, its death was long in coming. In Indiana, the territorial governor William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, led an unsuccessful drive to have Congress suspend its ban on slavery, arguing that only in this way could the area’s future economic growth be ensured. But antislavery settlers, organized as the Popular party and claiming to defend the interests of small farmers against “Virginia aristocrats,” won control of the territorial legislature and foiled Harrison’s plans. When Indiana drafted a constitution in 1816, the year the Lincoln family moved into the state, it prohibited slavery.9
Even though slavery was theoretically illegal in Illinois under the Northwest Ordinance, Ninian Edwards, the territorial governor between 1809 and 1816 (whose son became Lincoln’s brother-in-law), advertised for sale twenty-two slaves, along with “a full blooded horse” and “a very large English bull.” The Illinois constitution of 1818 prohibited slaves from being “hereafter…introduced” but did not declare free those already living in the state. As late as 1840, the census counted 331 slaves in Illinois. Illinois allowed slaveowners to sign supposedly voluntary indentures with black laborers brought in from other states, effectively keeping them in bondage. For many years, newspapers carried notices for the buying and selling of these “servants.”10
In 1818, the Virginian Edward Coles brought his slaves to Illinois, freed them, and settled each family on 160 acres of land. Coles was elected governor of Illinois in 1822 and fought a determined battle against efforts to amend the state constitution to introduce slavery. After an electoral campaign in 1824, in which debate centered on the relative benefits of free and slave labor and charges that proslavery forces wished to substitute aristocracy for democracy, the voters of Illinois turned down a proposal for a new constitutional convention. Lincoln was not yet a resident of the state. But one thing that he concluded from this history was that direct political action against slavery, not simply an unfavorable soil or climate, had been necessary to keep the institution out of the Old Northwest.11
Hostility to slavery did not preclude deep prejudices against blacks. The early settlers wanted Indiana and Illinois to be free of any black presence. John Woods, an English farmer who settled in Illinois, wrote in 1819 of his neighbors: “Though now living in a free state, they retain many of the prejudices they imbibed in infancy, and still hold negroes in the utmost contempt.” Like Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois did everything they could to discourage the growth of a free black population. The constitutions under which they entered the Union offered liberal voting rights to whites but barred blacks from suffrage. Laws in both states prohibited blacks from marrying whites or testifying in court against them, and made it a crime to harbor a fugitive slave or servant or to bring black persons into the state with the intent of freeing them, as Governor Coles had done. The public schools excluded black children.12
Before the Civil War, Illinois was notorious for its harsh Black Laws, “repugnant to our political institutions,” said Governor Coles, who tried unsuccessfully to have the legislature modify them. One law declared that young apprentices must be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic “except when such apprentice is a negro or mulatto.” Another required any black person who entered Illinois to post a $1,000 bond. “In consequence of these salutary arrangements,” a periodical devoted to attracting investment