USA > Illinois > The centennial of the state of Illinois. Report of the Centennial Commission > Part 11
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Jesic. Temple Boys' Choir Address-"Virginia in the Making of Illinois". IL. J. Eckenrode Richmond, Virginia
Music. Temple Boys' Choir Addres :- "Illinois in the Democratic Movement of the Cen-
tury"
Allen Johnson
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut THURSDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 18, 1918- 3:00 O'CLOCK
The Centennial Hymn. Mrs. Gary H. Westenberger Address -- "Establishing the American Colonial System in the Old Northwest". Elbert Jay Benton Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio- Secretary Western Reserve Historical Society
Address-"Indiana's Interest in Historic Illinois" . Charles W. Moores
Indianapolis
Music
Address -- "The Illinois Centennial Ilistory" . Clarence Walworth Alvord University of Illinois, Editor-in-Chief of the Centennial History Tea at Historic Edwards Place 5 .30 to 6:00 o'clock By Invitation of the Springfield Art Club
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THURSDAY EVENING -- 8:00 O'CLOCK
THE HONORABLE TRANE @ LOWDEN Governor of the State of Illinois, Presiding
"Illinois Centennial March" Edward C. Moore John L. Taylor's Orchestra
Invocation .Right Reverend Granville H. Sherwood
March-"Freedom and Glory". Edward C. Moore John L. Taylor's Orchestra
Address: "A Message From France". . . . . The Hon. Louis Aubert Of the French High Commission to the United States
Songs
Miss Ruby Evans
Centennial Address
Bloomington Edgar A. Bancroft
Chicago
Reception
THE ADDRESS OF WELCOME
BY EDMUND J. JAMES President of the University of Illinois
. The committee in charge of this meeting has invited me to extend a word of welcome to our guests who have come from abroad to participate in this great celebration, which we formally inaugu- rate tonight-the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the admission of Illinois to the Union.
I do not know just why the committee selected me for this honorable post unless indeed it is that I am one of the few surviv- ing members of the first families of Illinois. My grandfather. on my mother's side, Rev. Anthony Wayne Casad, entered land in what is now Clinton County on the site of the present city of Trenton in the year 1817; and moved his family the following year to St. Clair County and settled at Union Grove near what is now Summerfield. He shortly afterwards removed to Lebanon, in which or in the adjoining districts of which, he lived for some forty years. My mother was born in Lebanon and was so at- taehed to her native state that with the exception of an occasional shopping trip to St. Louis she never even set foot outside of its boundaries, though she lived to be over fifty years of age. My
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father came imo the state within ten years after it was admitted to the Union. And here I was born over sixty years ago and have lived most of my life within its boundaries.
My father was a Methodist preacher, and in common with the members of his craft in that early day we moved from one appointment to another with great facility. We had hardly un- packed our goods and stowed them away in the parsonage in one town before we had to pull up and move on to the next at the order of the Bishop, or the earnest request of the parishioners either in the town we went to or sometimes the town we were leaving.
It is sometimes said by men, who like to point a moral or adorn a tale, that Methodist preachers' boys are a pretty difficult lot of youngsters to get along with, and that in the early days at any rate the congregations were quite willing to see Methodist preachers move on, who had a considerable number of boys in he family. As our family numbered more boys than girls and ; they were a somewhat mischievous lot, that fact may account for a greater degree of moveability than was characteristic of most families.
However that may be, one of the incidental results of this continued habit of moving was that I got a pretty thorough ac- quaintanee with a considerable number of different counties in the State: and I have no doubt that this acquaintanceship with settlers from the southern part of the State, and settlers from the extreme north, and settlers in the east and settlers in the west, and a consequent acquaintance with all the forces which went to make up the Commonwealth, had a very real influence in preparing me for the difficult duties of the position with which the people of Illinois have honored me during the last fourteen years.
As a family we have lived in twenty-one different counties in this State, and I have known specimens of every kind of human being that has gone to make up what we call the Commonwealth of Illinois.
Perhaps, it was for this reason that your committee invited me to extend to you on their behalf the most cordial welcome
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to this initial meeting of our celebration. However, whatever may have been the reason, I am very happy indeed that this privilege was accorded me. And in the name of the Common- wealth for whose Governor I speak, in the name of the Centennial Commission in the name of the State Historical Society I bid you one and all a hearty welcome to this great occasion.
The Commonwealth of Illinois has ever been hospitable to the new comer. Lying stretched across more than five and one- half parallels of latitude, embracing within its boundaries over four degrees of longitude, washed along the entire stretch of its western front by the Father of Waters, touching Lake Michigan at its extreme northeastern point and bounded for a portion of its territory by the Wabash, and for another brief stretch by the Ohio, it was so located that many lines of emigration from the east to the far west led through its territory. And here stopped very many people who had started from their eastern homes along the Atlantic scaboard and farther east from beyond the seas with the intention of going to California,-some of them because they were bankrupt and couldn't get farther-some be- cause they got stuck in the mire and could not pull out -- some of them because they were attracted by the climate and soil, by the flowers and streams of the prairie state, lingered, entered land, developed it and became the pillars of the Commonwealth.
From every State in the Union, from every European coun- try and from Asia and Africa as well, scores and hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of human beings-some for one reason and some for another have poured into the territory of this great State and joining hearts and hands have built it up from a group of trackless prairies and pathless forests within a century to one of the most enviable portions of the earth's sur- face-no matter by what standard you judge such portions.
Whether you wish to measure the glory of a state by its crops or minerals or fish or means of communication or banks or industries: or by its schools and colleges: or by its churches and its religion : or by its willingness to provide for its dependents and defectives through its hospitals and asylums ; or by the sacri- fres it has made for the country and the world, in this case,
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through the service of its sous in southern fields to preserve the Union, and now on the blood stained fields of France to preserve peace and liberty and righteousness and justice for all muen -- no matter what the test-Illinois will compare favorably with any equal portion of the earth's surface which has behind it only a hundred years of separate political organization.
And to all this we bid you welcome !
In the few minutes accorded me in this program, I do not know that I can do a better thing than to call your attention to the peculiar feature of our national polity which this day, whose anniversary we celebrate, signalized.
Ilere was a great extent of fertile territory, occupied by a very small population-some of it not occupied at all in any proper sense of the term-simply moved over occasionally by a semi-romadie hunting population consisting of a few bands of more or less savage Indians.
Its favorable location, however, the fertility of its soil, its mineral wealth, its prairies, its forests, the wealth of streams, all indicated that as a part of the American Republic it was des- tined to be occupied by a rapidly growing population of white people of European origin, traditions and culture.
How was it to be governed? Up to this time it had slowly been coming under the influence of institutions which found their origin in the early societies of Europe and other lands, which partly unconsciously and partly by formal governmental actions had been imposed upon them. For a short time before this date they or such of them as lived near enough together had had a certain privilege of helping to make some of the laws under which they lived. But such law making was only a matter of sufferance. It had been permitted by a Congress located far away on the banks of the Potomac and the permission could be withdrawn by the same power as had given it.
This power said to this population on the 18th of April, 1818, you may now draw up a scheme of government for the regulation of your own affairs and if this plan is approved by our members, does not violate any of the clauses of our Federal Constitution
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and is otherwise in harmony with our American tradition we will let yon form a state and come into our American Union of States. We will let you send chosen delegates to both houses of Congress and we will give you the same position so far as political privileges are concerned and the same share in the government of the eoun- try as the other States of the Union; and at the same time we will give up all rights on our part to regulate your affairs for you and we will go farther, we will undertake to guarantee your inde- pendence as a political unit-not only against the possible eneroach- ments of other nations and other states: but against our own interference with your internal affairs. In return we shall only ask you to do your part as a member of the Union.
Now we have become so used to this process of adding poli- tical units to our government that we seldom stop to think of how new a device it was in the history of politics and how difficult it was to introduce it with our system.
One of the great problems of all human political history has been this very one of providing a peaceful and efficient means of aggregating human population.
The ancient world in historic periods seemed to have dis- covered no way by which this could be done except by forcible annexation or conquest. Of course small communities have often united for purposes of defense against the aggressions of stronger powers. Families which grew large and then split apart some- times came together again and formed a union of tribes like the Jews.
Rome seems to have grown out of a union of small tribes. Then it enlarged its union as in the admission to Roman privileges of sister cities and Italy; though this process was accompanied by long and bitter wars.
She expanded later by planting colonies of Roman citizens in distant territories and ultimately extended the privilege of Roman citizenship to freemen throughout the Roman territory. But all this was accompanied by such bitter struggles that by the time it was accomplished the Republic had disappeared in the Empire.
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The greatest free nation outside of the American Republic -- our own mother country- has not even yet been able to devise a scheme by which even the most progressive states of its great empire can be represented in its highest law making body.
Canada, Australia, South Africa have no such relation to the Government of the British Empire as Illinois to the Federal Government of the United States.
Now this device was not adopted in this country without a struggle and without the expression of grave doubt. as to whether the scheme would not end in the carly dissolution of the Union.
Many of the States of the Atlantic seaboard looked forward with fear and jealousy to a time when the Senators from the newer states which under such a policy could multiply rapidly, could easily outdo those from the older states, and to the time when the center of gravity would be on the banks of the Missis- sippi instead of on the banks of the Potomac.
But with the adoption of this plan, friends, we have estab- lished a pohey under which the rapid conquest of the heart of the continent was made possible and with that the foundations of the republic so securely laid that no combination of political powers could shake them.
Now, of course, the conditions were favorable for the easy working of such a plan.
We had already. when the plan was adopted, under our juris- diction the bulk of the territory which we' ultimately gained this side of the Mississippi. It was mostly open territory-without cities or towns or for the most part even any white population of respectable numbers.
The only occupants were the American Indians who would not adopt the habits or customs of the whites and were not strong enough to resist the ever increasing tide of immigration.
The first people to come in in large numbers were the roving and restless elements in the white population east of the moun- tains or the energetic and progressive elements of the people who had been thoroughly broken up by the events of the Revolutionary War and all of them had brought what political ideas they had
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from their homes in the Atlantis States. They were bourgeois in their notions.
They had no settled population to overcome or to be swallowed up by. They had their Lares and l'enates with them and set up their family altars by every stream, in every forest along the foothills of every mountain chaiu and finally in every prairie and speaking generally they had rene to molest or make them afraid.
They were men who could and did build states; held all terri- tory they acquired; and were ever ready to acquire more.
The disturbance in Europe incident to the Napoleonic Wars favored their peaceful and undistorbul development and threw Louisiana into their lap and by the time they were ready to seize the northern part of Mexico-no European state was strong enough to prevent it.
This device therefore, of which the event we celebrate to- night was an excellent specimen, might not have worked in any other country -- though the development in Canada has been somewhat similar -- but it was certainly here a glorious success.
And when this Great War is over and our Allied armies have entered the city of Berlin and the wise-men of all nations are gathered around the Counsel Board to determine how the world may be made safe for democracy and how justice and righteous- ness and peace may be established in this war torn world, I am quite sure that some plan of world federation will be adopted under which any nation or state may enter the federation on the same terms as Illinois entered the American Union, viz. : a constitution in harmony with the principles of such world federation, a promise to abide by the general traditions of five nations as expressed in the constitution of the federation-and in return receiving the guarantee of the federated nations that she would be protected in her local self government and independent against all attacks of predatory kings or proples no matter how strong they may be.
In this work our own country must lead and give the decisive vote.
And Illinois will be found shoulder to shoulder with her sister states in extending and guaranteeing to all peoples in the world the privileges which have been hers.
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VIRGINIA IN THE MAKING OF ILLINOIS
H. J. ICKENRODE
It is my privilege to bear the fraternal greetings of the Vir- ginia Historical Society to this assembly on the happy and an- spicious occasion of the celebration of the one-hundredth anni- versary of the Statehood of Illinois. It is also my honor and pleasure this evening to speak of the part played by Virginia in the origin and development of Illinois.
Illinois has been often called, and with reason, the foremost commonwealth of the Union; and, as we see it today, it is great, prosperous, rich in material wealth and rich in human happiness. It is a type of modern civilization, offering all that seems best in twentieth-century life. But it is not of the present Illinois, in which it has been your fortunate lot to be born, that I am here to speak, but of that Illinois of long ago, the Illinois of forests and uninhabited prairies, of Indians and wild beasts-the embryo Illinois, still unshaped by fate, as it waited to be born. The task is mine to outline those prenatal forces which determined what Illinois should be, when, in the fulness of time, it became a com- munity of civilized men.
Happily there is no tendency today to begrudge the South the credit due to it for its share in the making of America. After the long estrangement all parts of the United States are now joined in a fraternal love and fellowship which angurs well for the future of the nation. One of your finest Middle West states- men-one of the finest Americans of the present generation, in my opinion-ex-Senator Beveridge of Indiana, in his great work on John Marshall. has generously acknowledged the important contribution of Virginia to the development of America.
In the publications of the Illinois Historical Society, which are a model of scholarship and of the book-maker's art as well, the great work done by Virginia in the West is set forth at length. Indeed, in recent years there has been a growing tendency all through the North and West to, appreciate at its full worth the part of the South in the moulding of the American nation, and a
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realization that without the South the National life would be the poorer.
The discovery of America was one of those events which should help to confirm our faith in Providence, even in spite of the fearful turmoil of the present. The discovery was not only a matter of supreme good fortune to mankind, but the time of discovery as well. It came at the end of the Middle Ages, in a period of great change and rapid development, when the influence of.such an unprecedented happening produced its maximum effect. If the Nor-e had colonized America centuries before Columbus, there would have been only another feudal Europe on our shores; if the discovery of America had been delayed until Europe had come into full contact with India and the East and had completed the growth of the new civilization which came into being at the close of the feudal era, America would not have so greatly in- fluenced the life of humanity. But the discovery, by enlarging man's physical world by vast, uninhabited regions at the very moment when his spiritual and intellectual vision was enlarging, proved decisive of the future of the race.
At the end of the Middle Ages, European man had passed through the centuries of disorder and anarchy following the de- struction of antique civilization and was busily engaged in evolv- ing a life which embodied the germ of representative government and the other great, distinctive modern ideas.
Much had been learned in the Middle Ages, but man had suffered very grievously in the course of his hard schooling. Political and social caste had become more deeply imbedded in human consciousness than at any other time in human existence, and democracy was as yet almost unthought of. Sir Thomas More's Utopia, written at this time, seemed a hopeless dream of justice and equality. Class distinctions were embodied in law, and the chance for the poor man, the obscure man, in England as in all European countries, was exceedingly small. There was then, at the time of the discovery of America, a young and plastic civilization, full of promise but threatened with destruction by the growing economic pressure due to an increasing population. -- 10 C C
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Some way of emancipation was needed and the New World sup- plied the need.
When the English settled America-Virginia first in 160%, and Massachusetts a few years later-they brought with them the ideas, traditions and prejudices of me lieval Europe, along with the priceless inheritance of English liberty and English institu- tions. The contemporary accounts of American life in the first century of colonization do not make cheerful reading De Foc, for instance, paints a dreary picture of Virginia, and there is no hint in his description of the splendid civilization maturing beneath the surface . In New England, too, there was a long age of religious bigotry and narrow living -- of smallness and dulness- before the New England spirit gained its great historic growth.
But gradually, in the vast areas of America, in the immense stretches of pine and oak forest, offering breathing space and working-space and happiness-space to the immigrants from crowded Europe, a spiritual revolution was wrought.
Every individual was offered a chance to become a free man -that is to make a decent living for himself and for his family without a master over him. The pine forests have proved good for the health of the ailing body; they are also good for the ailing spirit. European man caine sick to the American shores and in the wild, untenanted woods his soul found healing. He began to lose his age-long class consciousness and to stand erect and free.
The English in Virginia, favored by a good soil and a kindly climate, built up one of the two civilizations which were destined to grow into the United States. The other was developing, at the same time and quite independently, in New England.
The community founded by the tobacco planters in Virginia was one of the most notable and influential in modern history, by reason of its singular charm and its solid merit as well. It was a life of great freedom and eminent sanity that the planters lived on the beautiful rivers of Old Virginia. The spell of that life, so admirably described by our Ambassador to Italy, Thomas Nelson Page, has been cast over the whole South and West. Surely the gracious tradition of Middle West hospitality is Virginian in
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origin, and from the same source comes the Middle West joy of living.
The fine tradition of English constitutional liberty flowered in the Virginia House of Burgesses, which, by the middle of the eighteenth century, had become in many ways the foremost legis- lative body in the world. The modern committee system was first perfected in the House of Burgesses, before the House of Commons in England and before our own Congress. -
In almost every way the House of Burgesses was a model of .parliamentary procedure and enlightened legislation. It was this House of Burgesses which first perceived and resisted the sinister tendencies of the British government as these became manifest at various times in the eighteenth century. It maintained clearly and effectively the principle of constitutional government.
In Virginia, in that wonderful period between the elose of the French and Indian War and the close of the Revolution, American democracy grew to fruition. The Virginia planters, far freer and far more generous in outlook than their brethren, the English landed proprietors, willingly adopted the ideals of democracy and gave them practical realization in the government of the common- wealth.
It was the great democrat, Patrick Henry, whose name should be forever dear to the lovers of liberty, that first openly defied the British government and began the Revolution. It was the equally great George Mason, who, in the Virginia Bill of Rights, laid down, once for all, the principles of free government, and who, in the Virginia constitution of 1716, gave the world the first. written constitution. And there, too, was Thomas Jefferson, the greatest of them all, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and changed the ideal of national democracy from the dream- stuff of generous thinkers into that governmental system to which our allegiance and our lives are pledged.
Virginia and New England together lighted the fires of the Revolution and brought the American nation into being in that ever-happy year of 1726. But the outcome of the war with the greatest military power of the age was doubtful; and even if inde-
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pendence wore achieved, it seemed likely that the United States would be bounded on the west by the Alleghany Mountains.
There were then no American settlers in the vast region be- tween the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. A few Frenchinen were the only white inhabitants of this region, which was held by British garrisons at various points. If the year 1783 had found those garrisons still in possession, of the Illinois country, the ground we stand on would be English soil and not American. The whole history of the United States would have been different, its promise would have been frustrated. The United States today would be a second-rate power instead of the greatest and strongest nation on the globe.
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