USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > Historical review of Chicago and Cook county and selected biography, Volume I > Part 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47
February 27, 1837, the act "to establish and maintain a general
21
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
system of internal improvement" was approved by Governor Duncan. This act appropriated $10,200,000, of which $400,000 was "toward" the improvement of the Great Wabash, Illinois, Rock, Kaskaskia and Little Wabash rivers; $200,000 to counties through which no road or improvements were projected, and $9,650,000 for railroads. At the meeting of the legislature in 1839, Governor Duncan in his final message declared the internal improvement system by the state im- politic, and that the mistake already made must be corrected or dis- aster would surely follow. The incoming governor, Thomas Carlin, in his inaugural message, said: "The signal success which has at- tended our sister states in the construction of their extensive systems of improvements can leave no doubt of the wise policy and utility of
such works. * In the principles and policy of this plan contrasted with that of joint stock companies and private corpora- tions, I entirely concur." The new legislature made, for internal im- provements, specific appropriations amounting to about $1,000,000. The governor was also authorized to negotiate a loan of $4,000,000 to carry on the work on the canal, while the committee on internal improvements reported that in its opinion-"It is inexpedient for the legislature to authorize corporations or individuals to construct rail- roads or canals calculated to come in competition with similar works now in course of construction under the state system of internal improvements."
For an undeveloped state, the population of which then was about 250,000, the appropriations were enormous and the undertaking most injudicious. Only the projected road from Meredosia on the Illinois river to Springfield was completed. The actual construction of this road cost the state $1,000,000. It did not pay running expenses and after having been operated for five years at a loss, was in 1847 sold by the state for $21,000. By December, 1839, Governor Carlin had seen a great light, and on the ninth day of that month, by his order, the legislature was convened in special session, he having ascertained that the debt of the state already amounted to $14,000,000, and unless it halted in its career, the state would soon be confronted with a debt of over $21,000,000, the interest upon which would annually amount to more than $1,300,000, while its yearly revenue did not exceed $200,000. The truthfulness of the statement made by the governor was apparent, and the legislature, largely composed of the same per-
22
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
sons that, with unbounded confidence in the wisdom of the system of state creation and ownership, by a vote in the house of 81 to 25, inaugurated in 1837, in 1840 repealed the act of 1837. Alas! that acknowledgement and repentance of folly does not terminate its effect.
The vast system of internal improvement paid no revenue; it was for a time impossible for the state to discharge its obligations, and it became a defaulter. The state banks in which it held a controlling interest failed. Nevertheless there was never a time in which the majority of the people favored repudiation and as soon as possible payment was resumed and in time the entire debt paid off. The finan- cial difficulties, the loss and ruin caused by the embarking by the state in the business of transportation and banking, could not and did not fail to affect private business in Chicago. With the bonds of the state selling, as for a time they did, at fourteen cents on the dollar, capitalists were unwilling to invest in any Illinois enterprise. Gov- ernor Ford, who succeeded Governor Carlin, afterward said, "It is my solemn belief that when I came into office I had the power to make Illinois a repudiating state."
Undoubtedly the influence of Governor Ford was potent for hon- est and full payment in accordance with the letter and spirit of the state bonds, and it might have been equally powerful if exerted in the opposite direction. But the people, disappointed as they were by the utter failure of the state internal improvement undertaking, and weighted with a debt incurred therefor equal, relatively, to $500,000,- 000 at the present time, neither lost hope nor integrity.
The men in control at Chicago from 1837 to 1848, the Ogdens, Kinzies, Hamilton, Scammon, Dole, Caton, Knight, King, Manierre,
CITY BUILDERS. Rumsey, Stone, Bronson, Temple, Dyer, Fullerton, Eagan, Turner, Foster, Carpenter, Collins, Boone, Butterfield, Burley, Jones, Hoynes, Smith, Eastman, Peck, Gooding, Pearsons, Gale, Hogan, Calhoun, Bates, Blodgett, Brown, Balestier, Wentworth, Kingsbury, Stewart and others, who understood and felt the honor involved in a promise to pay whether given by a state or an individual, the confidence re- posed in the integrity of a promisor, and the dishonor of a breach of plighted faith, had never a thought of repudiation. The incom- ing tide to the northern and middle counties was composed of men
-3
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
and women and families seeking for land on which to build homes, lands to till, farms to own, an honest, God-loving, high-minded, up- right community in which to dwell; desiring schools in which their children should be taught, churches at which they might gather for worship; demanding a reign of law, the preservation of order, pro- tection of life and property, the fulfillment of obligations, peace and security ; Illinois rose, like a giant refreshed by sleep, lifted the bur- dens folly had gathered, and paid to the uttermost farthing the debt delusion had incurred.
Before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, ere Euphrates heard the plaintive song of Israel, when the foundation stones of the pyramids were in their native beds, the wild bird flew, the red deer fed undis- turbed by the hunter's rifle and the green grass grew on the prairies untouched by the iron plow that was in time to rend its sward; the western world was young, as 'twill never be again, but it was no longer unknown. They were coming, coming, not the devouring hordes of Alaric or devastating Huns, but a mighty host of Christian men, women and children, to turn wild lands into fruitful fields.
When the great migration from the east began there were no railroads leading into Illinois or any western state. Our fathers knew little of the iron horse, and if they had known more could not have waited for the building of a way suited to its whirling feet They devised the prairie schooner, a two-horse wagon, having a raised canopy covered with sail cloth, which carried all their belong- ings and in which, when it rained, the family slept. The emigrant seldom patronized hotels; first, because inns were few and far be- tween, second, he could not afford to do so. A coffee pot and a frying pan, a wash dish, a half dozen cups and plates, a few knives, forks and spoons, some bedding, a few towels and a chair or two, constituted the traveling equipment. Flour and meat could be pur- chased from settlers who were to be found all along the route each ten to twenty miles, and in the eastern portion more frequently. Salt, pepper, vinegar, molasses, saleratus and dried yeast cakes they took from home. The roads were neither very good nor very bad; at seasons of long continued rain the procession had to halt. These sturdy pioneers had never heard that all who toil must go to the sea side or the mountains in summer and to California or the south in winter. The absolute necessity for vacations to toilers was a gospel
24
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
that had not been preached to them. Along every main road that led westward through New York and Ohio, the prairie schooners moved. Tidings of a land where it was not necessary to cut down and burn up heavy timber, devote years to uprooting and dragging away stumps and pick stone for a lifetime in order to have a good farm, had come to them, and this land they were getting to as fast as the condition of the path and the strength of men and horses would permit. "What sought they thus afar?" Not "the spoils of war" nor "freedom to worship God." Spoils they thought not of; free- dom to worship God they had in New England, for which they cherished an ardent affection. They sought for better lands and easier conditions under which homes could be created; they hoped for gain, for wealth acquired by honest toil and self-denying fru- gality. They toiled and they saved and because they did, Chicago is.
The town is a great convenience to the country; the country an absolute necessity for the town. We who ride in automobiles and Pullman cars think the journey of these emigrants must have been dreadful. Years afterward, old ladies, young in heart, who well remembered the trip, spoke of it as the pleasantest experience they ever had. It was the spring-time of life; they looked upon new scenes, the air was fresh, clear and invigorating. Hope stood at the helm and love rode in the wagon. It may be that sometimes as the caravan halted at a stream they were to cross in the morning, these church-going, psalm-singing homeseekers, stood on the bank and sang :
"On Jordan's rugged banks I stand And cast a wistful eye To Canaan's fair and happy land Where my possessions lie.
"Oh, the transporting, rapturous scene That rises to my sight : Sweet fields arrayed in living green, And rivers of delight !"
*
The toil, economy and success of the frugal souls who came west neither riding in chariots nor driving furiously like Jehu, enabled the state of Illinois to gird up its loins, pay its debts and Chicago to become the metropolis it is.
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS R L
COOK COUNTY COURT HOUSE BEFORE THE FIRE OF 1871
25
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
Chicago was made a city, and as such, at its first election in 1837, William B. Ogden was chosen mayor. No abler or more useful man has ever been at the head of the city government; nevertheless there was during his incumbency in Chicago, as elsewhere, a great financial depression. Merchants, banks and manufacturers failed in all parts of the country; real estate and much other property greatly declined in value. Yet, although according to public opinion, the population of the new city fell from 4, 180 in 1837 to 4,100 in 1838, the United States census of 1840 showed an increase to 4,479, while the con- mercial statistics were-imports for 1837, $373,667; 1838, $579,- 174; 1840, $562,106; of exports, 1837, $1,008,297; 1838, $785,504; 1840, $1,813,468. In 1838 thirty-nine bags of wheat were exported by steamer; in 1839 the export was 16,073 bushels, and in 1840, 304,212 bushels.
For some years there was a public well in Kinzie's addition, at which those who lived in its vicinity could obtain water; others were supplied by peddlers, who brought water from the lake and sold it by the gallon or bucket; so that although there may have been in those days thirsty souls who did not get what they desired to drink ; neither the laborer nor the good housewife looking at the river and the lake exclaimed "Water, water everywhere, and all the boards did shrink; water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink." In 1842 there was put into operation a steam pump and water raised by it was conveyed through bored logs to residences and business houses.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, immigration into the southern portion of the state was largely from Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia, and in great part composed of persons favorable to the institution of slavery. Indeed, the immigrants in many instances brought a few slaves with them and continued to claim and hold them as such notwithstanding the provisions of the ordinance in 1787. The influence of these immigrants was such that at the admission of the state and the making of the constitution of 1818, it is probable a majority of the people favored the introduction of slavery and the creation of a slave state. The ordinance of 1787, however, stood in the way, and the convention limited itself to a constitution which in effect recognized slavery as already existing and providing that it should not thereafter be introduced into the state. A statute made
26
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
in 1807, while Illinois was a territory, provided that owners of negroes and mulattoes above the age of fifteen years, or any citizen of the United States purchasing the same, might bring them into the territory, provided that within thirty days the owner or master should take them before the clerk of the court and have an indenture between the slave and his owner entered upon record "specifying the time which the slave was compelled to serve his master." This stat- ute also provided that, "The children born in this territory of a parent of color" (thus-either parent) "owing service or labor by indenture should serve, the males until the age of 30 and the females until the age of 28 years." The existence of slavery in this state was also recognized by section three of article six of the constitution of 1818. There were at all times in the southern and middle part of the state many persons determinedly opposed to slavery, while in the north the great majority of all immigrants looked upon human bondage with abhorrence; particularly was this the case in Chicago and the immediately surrounding country.
There was in 1842 a state statute forbidding any black or mulatto person to give evidence against or in favor of any white person, and providing that no black or mulatto person should be permitted to live in the state until he should produce to the county commission- er's court, where he or she is desirous of living, a certificate of his freedom; nor until he should have given bond with sufficient security in the penal sum of one thousand dollars that he would not at any time become a charge to said county or any other county in the state, as a poor person; and providing further that if any person should harbor such negro or mulatto not having such certificate, or should hire or give sustenance to such negro or mulatto not having such certificate of freedom and given bond, he should be fined in the sum of five hundred dollars; and providing further that every black or mulatto person found in this state, not having such a certificate, should be deemed a runaway slave or servant, and that it should be lawful for an inhabitant of the state to take such black or mulatto before some justice of the peace, whose duty it should be to commit him to jail, and in three days advertise him at the court house door for hire from month to month for the space of one year; and further providing that if any slave or servant should be found at a distance of ten miles from the tenement of his or her master or the person
27
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
with whom he or she lives without a pass * from his or her master, employer or overseer, it should be lawful to apprehend him or her and carry him or her before a justice of the peace to be by his order punished with stripes not exceeding thirty-five; and further provided that if any slave should presume to come and be upon the plantation or at the dwelling of any person whatsoever, with- out leave from his or her owner, it should be lawful for the owner of such plantation or dwelling house to give or order such slave or servant ten lashes on his or her bare back. These laws remained upon the statute book until 1865.
In 1842 an industrious colored man, a member of the Chicago Methodist church, while working in a field for wages, became in- volved in a quarrel with a fellow workman in which impolite and offensive language was used by both. Whereupon a white man had the colored laborer arrested, charged with being a negro in the state of Illinois without a certificate of leave from his owner or of freedom from court. The negro thereupon was put in jail, and for six weeks duly advertised for sale. At the appointed time the sheriff appeared with his prisoner and offered him for sale. A large crowd was present. The negro, thinly clad, shivered in the cold November air. The sheriff called for bids, stated his duty under the law. For some reason there was not a ready response to the invita- tion to buy a man sold because he was a negro found in the state of Illinois without a written permit from his owner or a certificate that he was a free man issued by the county commissioner's court. The sheriff explained that if no bid was received the law compelled him to return the man to jail; that he was required to sell the negro to pay the expense of his arrest and imprisonment. Finally Mahlon D. Ogden bid twenty-five cents; no other bid was made and the industrious negro, a member of the Chicago Methodist church, was on the fourteenth day of November, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred forty-two, and of the independence of the United States the sixty-sixth, struck off and sold to Mahlon D. Og- den for twenty-five cents. Mr. Ogden paid the money, and turning to his property said : "Edwin, I have bought you; you are my slave! Now go where you please."
In no part of the United States was the feeling with respect to the fugitive slave law and the other compromise measures of 1850
28
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
deeper than in Chicago. Yet in Chicago at the presidential election of 1852, Franklin Pierce received 2,835 votes; Winfield Scott, 1,765; John P. Hale, 424; Democratic majority over all was 646.
Illinois had nearly always been a Democratic state and Chicago a Democratic city. The people justly felt a pride in the command- ing position which Douglas had acquired in the senate and in the party of which he was a distinguished leader; yet, when in 1854, Douglas succeeded in carrying through Congress the measure known as the Kansas-Nebraska bill, by which the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was set aside and Kansas and Nebraska with all the territory lying westward opened to the introduction of slavery, the anti- slavery sentiment of the new and already great emporium, speaking with wrathful vehemence, carried all before it.
September Ist, 1854, Senator Douglas was by appointment in Chicago to defend his course in introducing and urging the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. A great crowd assembled on Michigan street in front of a building then known as North Market Hall. Douglas began to speak to a most unsympathetic and hostile audi- ence, if an assemblage which refuses to hear can be called an audience. Statements made by him were disputed with such bitter- ness, such malignant criticism of his conduct and such opprobrious epithets as clearly indicated not only an unwillingness to listen, but a determination that he should not be heard. Undoubtedly there were present very many adherents of the American, styled by its opponents the Know Nothing party, who disliked the senator because of the vigorous attack he had recently made upon that nascent organization, but the bitter hostility of the great mass of the throng was the result of long and deeply settled conviction of the fundametal truth that all men are born free and equal, that no man's child could right- fully be torn from him or held forever in slavery because its father was a slave, a negro or mulatto, and that the Kansas-Nebraska act, opening, as it did, to the introduction of slavery territory supposedly forever consecrated to freedom, was a crime against humanity. Nevertheless the refusal to hear cannot be justified. No one was obliged to go to the meeting; everyone had a right to go. The right of each person who wished to hear the senator, as well as his right to speak, was trampled upon. True it is that Elijah Lovejoy had been killed in Alton by a mob for daring to publish an anti-slavery
29
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
paper in that city ; but the greater wrong done at Alton in 1837 was no justification for a denial of the right of free speech at Chicago in 1854. One wrong does not justify another. The courageous con- duct of Douglas in for two hours facing a mob determined to howl him down, made him friends, in many quarters and helped not at all the anti-slavery sentiment by which it was principally inspired.
At the congressional election held in the fall of 1854, the true feeling of Chicago upon the question of slavery was expressed at the polls by a vote of 3.448 for James H. Woodworth, the Free-soil can- didate, contrasted with 1,175 for his Democratic opponent.
The refusal to hear Douglas had an effect not expected by the howling mob, the senator, his friends or any person. It at once focused the attention of the political world upon Chicago and Illi- nois. The Prairie state had been known as reliably Democratic; it had not been carried away by the panic of 1837, the log cabin cam- paign of 1840, or the brilliant record as a commander of General Taylor, under whom Illinois soldiers had fought and won imperisha- ble laurels at Buena Vista. Douglas was the leader of the young Democracy, the champion of his party upon the great issue which men felt was now to the fore and upon which for years political action would turn. That he should have been refused a hearing, repudiated in the chief city of the great west; that Illinois with an infamous slave code as a part of its statutory law should have turned against the most brilliant and the most influential man it had sent to Congress, was indeed startling. Boston! Boston indeed! had held a great meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Cradle of Liberty. Eloquent men had spoken and excited crowds had attended the so-called hearing of Simms and the assumed hearing of Burns, peaceable colored men who had lived .and toiled for years in the metropolis of Massachu- setts; but Simms and Burns had been consigned to slavery and car- ried through the streets of the capital of Massachusetts to lifelong bondage, without trial by court or jury, under a fugitive slave law, so-called because it authorized a commissioner appointed by the circuit court of the United States to, upon satisfactory proof of the escape of a slave and a declaration upon oath of the identity of the person arrested with the escaped slave, deliver up the alleged slave to his owner or his agent; it being specially provided that in such proceeding the testimony of the party accused of being an escaped
30
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
slave should not be admitted. Chicago. which the untamed Indians had possession of twenty-one years before, had risen in holy wrath and refused to listen to its representative who had voted for the fugi- tive slave law under which any man white or black could be seized and sent south to be there tried upon the allegation that he was a slave; and had contemptuously spurned its senator who had brought about the setting aside of a solemn agreement dedicating a vast do- main to freedom. What will Chicago do, was henceforth a question in the mind of the millions of anti-slavery men who thenceforth for a quarter of a century shaped the destiny of America. What, in the contest with the slave power, would Chicago do next? It brought about on the 17th of June, 1858, the nomination by the Republicans of Abraham Lincoln for United States senator and of Stephen A. Douglas by the Douglas Democracy. The Democratic administra- tion of Buchanan, because of the refusal of the Little Giant to sup- port the Lecompton constitution, attempted to be imposed by force upon Kansas, was no longer in harmony with Senator Douglas, and the party in Illinois was divided into Administration and Douglas Democrats; the Administration being composed almost entirely of federal office holders and their immediate followers. These nomina- tions were followed by a joint debate between Lincoln and Douglas, the most important and in its influence the most far-reaching public discussion that has ever taken place in this country, if not in the world. The debate was not concerning the tariff, the regulation of inter-state commerce, the free coinage of silver, the making of green- backs a legal tender or the creation of a great navy. It was con- cerning liberty, the fundamental rights of man, equality before the law, the selling into hopeless bondage of men, women and children; our duty to millions of slaves, husbands and wives to whom the law gave neither protection nor assistance in their desire to live together and love each other; the discussion had reference to children liable to be sold at any hour away from parents because of the whim, the interest, passion or misfortune of the owner, laws that make it a crime to teach a black person, woman or child, to read; that by sol- emn pronouncement of constitution and statute doomed four millions of human beings to unending ignorance; that closed and barred the door to hope and blotted out opportunity; that put before aspiration an impervious wall high as heaven and deep as hell, and in all this
31
CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY
fair land left but one light to which the down trodden slave could look with hope, the North Star. Fondly let us hope and fervently pray that no such discussion again arise from the denial to men, white or black, of rights we claim for ourselves.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.