USA > Illinois > The centennial of the state of Illinois. Report of the Centennial Commission > Part 12
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
The fact is held in grateful remembrance by all Americans that a Virginian preserved our country from a thwarted destiny and gave to the republic the incomparable gift of the Middle West. Not equally well known is the share of the Virginia government in bringing about the fortunate consummation.
George Rogers Clark was one of those immortal men who see through the darkness of the present to the may-be of the future and so save the world from the might-have-beens. Amidst all the distraction of the Revolutionary War as it raged in the East, Clark preserved a wise detachment. He realized the possibilities of the great forest-covered, Indian-haunted West. The West fasci- nated him and he turned from the opportunity of honorable serv- iee in the Continental Army to the greater service of claiming the West for America. He dreamed of leading an army past the Alleghanies and driving the British from the land.
He could do nothing, however, without some governmental sanction and aid. And where was this aid to be obtained ?
The harassed Continental Congress, at its wit's end to keep the Eastern Army supplied and equipped, had no leisure or re- sources to devote to so remote an adventure as the conquest of the West. Clark's one chance lay in the favorable action of the Virginia government, and consequently he went to Williamsburg and laid his case before the authorities.
Most fortunately for America and the world, Patrick Henry happened to be Governor of Virginia at the time, and he was the
149
OFFICIAL CELEBRATIONS
farther-sighted statesman of his age. When the young Clark pleaded with him for his great idea, Henry listened with sympathy. He then called in consultation Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and George Wythe, and the decision was made to send out the expedition destined to conquer the West -- surely one of the most fateful decisions ever made.
It required courage on Henry's part to think of making efforts in a new field at such a time. My rescarches in the Virginia Department of Archives, which in recent years has become a center of historical study, taught me that Virginia's share in the support of the American Revolution has been greatly under-estimated. The records show that through all the early years of the struggle, when the North was the scene of invasion and therefore weakened in resources, immense quantities of beef and flour and thousands of guns went up Chesapeake Bay to Washington's Army. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that that army could not have kept the field but for the aid given by the Southern commonwealth.
Although the burden of the Revolution thus rested so largely on Virginia, and every dollar was badly needed for the prosecution of the war in the East, Patrick Henry was sufficiently large-minded to see the vital importance of the West and to make a special effort to claim it. The means available were small and could not have been otherwise than small at such a moment. The obstacles were almost insuperable. Circumstances and men alike seemed to con- spire against the undertaking; and if it had not been for the unyielding will and unfailing enthusiasm of George Rogers Clark, the expedition would never have set out at all.
But at last, in that history-making summer of 1228, Clark sailed down the Ohio to claim for America a land richer than all the El Dorados of the imagination. He had something less than two hundred men, and the little company trusted itself to the waters on rough wooden scows which were without other motive power than hand-poles. And yet his small expedition, armed only with rifles and poorly supplied with food and ammunition and everything else needed in campaigning, performed one of the most notable military achievements in the annals of war.
150
ILLINOIS CENTENNIAL COMMISSION
That little band, drifting down the Ohio to the West through the interminable forest, carted with it the destiny of America. It carried with it all that Virginia had inherited from England and all that she herself originated or developed-it carried the English law as applied in America, the idea of constitutional liberty, the fine qualities of planter culture, the democracy which had grown up under Henry and Jefferson and Mason -- a rich seed for the fertile soil of the Middle West.
How the valiant haodfnl came to Illinois and conquered is an old story-through their matchless hardihood and their bravery they added the West to the United States. When Clark raised the American standard over the Illinois forts, the crisis had passed in the fate of the nation; it then became a question only of time before the United States should expand to the Pacific. All our great advance towards the setting sun was the logical outcome of the American conquest of Illinois.
It is a fact most gratifying to a Virginian and flattering to his pride that the first organization of Illinois as American soil was accomplished under the government of Virginia. In the fall of 1728, the assembly constituted the new region the County of Illinois in the Commonwealth of Virginia. After the old Virginia fashion, a County Lieutenant, John Todd, Jr., was sent out to organize the county and govern it. Thus a Virginian county lieutenant was the first civil ruler of Illinois under the American flag. Todd appointed judges and effected sneh an organization as was possible in a territory of vast distances and few and alien inhabitants. In his letter of instructions to County Lieutenant Todd, Governor Henry struek the note of true Americanism as by some prophetie instinct: "You are on all occasions to inculcate in the people of the region the value of liberty and the difference between the state of free citizens of this commonwealth and that slavery to which Illinois was destined." Settlers from Virginia soon followed the soldiers, and the first permanent element in the life of Illinois was thus almost exclusively Virginian.
The rest of the story is familiar to you-how Virginia gener- ously resigned the territory which her arms had won to the gov- ernment of the United States, to be the common possession of all
151
OFFICIAL CELEBRATIONS
the states. In the due course of time-now just a century ago -- Illinois began her great career as a sovereign State. The Virginian element in Illinois has been an honorable one, and many of the foremost citizens of the Commonwealth trace their origin to the Old Dominion.
It will be seen that Virginia's share in the making of Illinois was a most important contribution. So, too, was that of New England. The New England settlers, who came by thousands in the early years of the nineteenth century, completed the work which it was Virginia's lot to inaugurate. Virginia did all in her power to fashion Illinois into an American Commonwealth. New England sent her finest blood, her keenest brains, to assist in the building of the great State of the Middle West. Here the two main civilizations have blended to produce the typical Ameri- can Commonwealth and the typical American spirit. The rich Illinois lands drew not only Virginian and New Englander, but Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers as well, and men from all the eastern states and from beyond the seas. Here all currents of our life met to build up in the Middle West the first distinctively and originally American communities.
In the Middle West the process of nation-making was com- pleted. That process had had its origin in Great Britain and in Holland; and in the Atlantic states the ideal of free government, the germs of which had been borne across the ocean, had grown to flower. On the Atlantic slope modern democracy had its birth and the modern attitude towards life came into existence.
But neither Virginia nor New England represented the last stage in the long development. About both there lingered mueh of European custom and prejudice; both of them at times looked backwards towards the European shore. Both were too self-con- tained. too marked with local characteristics to produce the final type in American civilization. That was the work of the Middle West.
The very names of the East are reminiscent of Europe-Vir- ginia, Carolina, Maryland, New York, New England. They reflect the European colonization of the Atlantic slope. But the beautiful name of Illinois is novel and unmistakable; it belongs to America
152
ILLINOIS CENTENNIAL COMMISSION
and to America alone. It breathes the thought of a new world born in the free forests and the unfenced prairies of the West.
In 1812, the London Times, in commenting on the victory of the Constitution over the Guerriere, spoke thus of the Ameri- eans: "They are of us, and an improvement on us." In the same way the East may say of Illinois: "It is of the East and an improvement on the East." In Illinois an American community came into existence which had no direct contact with European life-which was wholly American and growing to maturity in the age of the expansion of the American spirit. In the Middle West the last feudal scars on the soul of European man were smoothed away and mankind entered into the full enjoyment of modern life, with its broad democracy, its free opportunity and its hope of happiness.
It was the part of Illinois and the Middle West to give the workl a fresh and rich civilization, which, it may be believed, will in the end transform the world. This civilization is democratic but it is also more than that. It is not the Athenian democracy of small things. It is a civilization which has vastly enlarged the prospect of man's material welfare. Here in the Middle West agriculture first becam . epic; on the broad prairies modern farm- ing machinery was first used with effect, and the world's food sup- ply wa- increased ten-foll. It is this largeness of life which the Middle West has added to the making of America. The Middle West is not a land of pettiness and smallness, of inertia and hesi- tation. It as a country of broad-minded men and women-of people who go forward, who are not afraid of the untried, who look towards better things in the future because the present is so rich and full.
We meet here in a solemn hour. The historic civilizations of Europe are dying. Science, art. literature. industry are perishing in the blood-flamed horror of the Great War. It is the fate of America to be the decisive factor in the struggle, to turn the even scales. When the titanic struggle for human right shall have ended. the United States will be the greatest, richest and most civilized country on earth. It will reach in a stride that manifest destiny which the forces of life marked out for the land more
153
OFFICIAL CELEBRATIONS
than a century ago, when the Middle West became American soil. How precious American civilization will be in the wreck of nations and the downfall of races, we can hardly appreciate as yet.
But we do know even now that America, as great in her generosity as she is terrible in her wrath, will be the hope of the world and that the stars of Old Glory will shine more brightly than ever in the darkness of humanity's night.
The place of Illinois in the history of the century just past is a great and honorable one. Her share in the achievement of the coming century will be even larger. Illinois has always stood four-square for patriotism, freedom and the right to live and grow -for all the higher things of life. As never before the nation needs the virile democracy, the largeness of outlook, the open- mindedness of Illinois; and because of this need the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great Commonwealth is a time of congratulation and a harbinger of good things yet to come.
ILLINOIS IN THE DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT OF THE CENTURY
ALLEN JOHNSON
In the month of November, one hundred years ago, two con- gresses were in session four thousand miles apart. One was an inconspicuous gathering of plain citizens, representatives of the common people, charged with prosaic duties : the levying of taxes, the appropriating of public moneys, the framing of laws for a people still largely raw and rural, still amazingly ignorant of the vastness of their own country. This congress sat in an unkempt town whose public buildings had been burned, only four years before, by an invading army. The city of Washington was barely eighteen years old.
The other congress convened at the ancient town of Aix-la- Chapelle, the German Aachen, shrouded in memories which went back to the Middle Ages, when German emperors were crowned in its famous cathedral and buried in full regalia in its deep vaults. The ashes of Charlemagne, so tradition said, lay. under
15-1
ILLINOIS CENTENNIAL COMMISSION
foot. This brilliant gathering was attended by royalty. The crowned heads of Russia, Austria, and Prussia with their entour- age were present ; the kings of Great Britain and France were represented by their ministers. These three monarchs had no mandate from their people, acknowledged no obligations to their people, sustained no intimate contact with their people. They were bound together by one of the most extraordinary alliances in all history-the Holy Alliance which had emanated from the strange mind of Czar Alexander I of Russia. The unctuous phrases of the pious document which the impressionable Czar had offered to his fellow monarchs of Austria and Prussia might mean much or little. Metternich, prime minister of Austria, declared the proferred alliance a sonorous nothing; the English premier referred to it as a piece of sublime mysticism and non- sense. Its significance in history lies in its name which was soon applied to the combination of the five great powers that met at Aix-la-chapelle.
The presiding geinus of this European congress-the domi- nating figure of Europe, indeed, for full thirty years-was Prince Metternich. He was the living embodiment of that repressive spirit which seized the minds of reactionary rulers after the fall of Napoleon. He hated the French Revolution with perfect hatred. To his mind the revolutionary spirit was a disease which must be cured; a gangrene which must be burned out with the hot iron. He abhorred parliaments and popular representative institutions. He represented perfectly the reactionary spirit of his liege sovereign who declared the whole world mad because it wanted new constitutions and who crushed remorselessly every trace of liberalism in his Austrian domains. Playing upon this common fear of revolution and this common hatred of popular sovereignty, Metternich bound the five great powers to a policy of repose, of political immobility, over against the propaganda of liberals throughout Europe. In case of further revolution in France -- that storm-center of popular unrest-they were to unite to suppress it. By further congresses steps would be taken to cure the malady of revolution wherever it might break out. The year 1818 marks the beginning of that repressive policy which
155
OFFICIAL CELEBRATIONS
sounded the death-knell of popular government in the Old World for a generation.
While this famous congress of monarch-by-divine-right was setting the face of Europe against the mad doctrinairies who talked of constitutional government, our plain, sombre-clad congressmen on the banks of the Potomac were quietly and as a matter of course giving their approval to a constitution drafted by inhabi- tants of a distant territory where the native redman still roamed and where primeval forests and prairies still awed men by their great brooding silences. At the very time these self-appointed defenders of absolutism and the peace of Europe were leaving Aix-la-chapelle, our national House of Representatives was vot- ing to receive Illinois into the American Union on an equal foot- ing with the thirteen original states.
In this contrast I find the fundamental reason for America's participation in the Great World War! And now once again, one hundred years after Aix-la-chapelle, irresponsible government has thrown down the gage of battle, and American democracy has accepted the challenge !
I have mentioned Great Britain among the five powers who followed the lead of Prince Metternich. This is not the time or place to explain the circumstances that made contemporary Eng- land also reactionary. Enough that even the Mother of Parlia- ment. had lost its true representative character. Many an Eng- lishman felt that he was losing his political birthright under the heavy, repressive hand of the Tory squirearchy. Much as he might mistrust the firebrands of liberalism in Europe, he had no heart for a policy which denied to a nation the right to choose its own political institutions. And it was the silent, indirect pressure of such Englishmen that eventually forced the British government to protest against Metternich's doctrine of interven- tion. Eventually, too, liberalism broke through the tough crust of British conservatism and achieved the reform of Parliament.
It was in these days of the un-reformed Parliament, when representative government had become a farce, when the common man who did not possess a frechold worth forty shillings a year found himself a mere tax-payer without a vote. when a land-
156
ILLINOIS CENTENNIAL COMMISSION
owning squirearchy monorobzed political office and taboocd re- forms, that English ycomen farmers cast wistful glances overseas. Held fast between the insolence of wealth on the one hand and the servility of pauperism on the other, they could see no prospect of relief in Merrie England. There was only hollow mockery in the name.
Happily we are not without direet personal records of these Englishmen who came to America on their own initiative of that of their fellow formers and mechanics. As they made their way over the Alleghanies to the prairie country, they found America in incessant motion. "Old America," wrote Morris Birk- beck, one of these plain English farmers, "seems to be breaking up and moving westward." He was a correct observer. America was on wheels or on horseback. Conditions somewhat like those in Old England were driving New Englanders and Virginians and Pennsylvanians in a veritable human tide into the valley of the Ohio. The Commonwealth of Illinois was born in the midst of this swirling emigration.
It has been the fashion of historians to ascribe this rapid westward movement to the lure of free lands. A fundamental instinct, no doubt, this passion for virgin soil that one may call his own. The pioneer who in his own clearing between the stumps of trees felled by his own hand, planted Indian corn in the deep rich-illimitable rich-black loam, was obsessed by one of the deepest of human emotions. This soil and the produce thereof was his -- his! His sense of individual property became acute. Like Anteus of Greek mythology his contact with the soil in- creased his might. Ilis manhood leaped to its full height as he brought aere after acre under cultivation.
Yet other motives for the crossing of the Alleghanies played no mean part. Man does not live by bread alone. Birkbeck con- fessed to a strong desire to better his material fortunes -- to "ob- tain in the decline of life an exemption from wearisome solicitude about pecuniary affairs:" but he desired even more for himself and his children membership in a democratic community free from the insolence of wealth. That is a recurring note in the history of American expansion-a note that vibrates as passion-
157
OFFICIAL CELEBRATIONS
ately as lust for land. Deep-seated in the breast of every man whom the conventions of an older society have barred from recog- nition is the sense of outraged manhood-rebellion against the artificial restrictions of birth, family, and inherited wealth. It is this eternal protest of human nature against man-made distine- tions of class that has driven thousands of souls into the wilder- ness. That self-assertive spirit of the Westerner which at times breaks rudely in upon the urbane life of older communities is his protest against conditions from which-Thank God !- he has escaped. Your Westerner of the twenties and thirties of the last century, your Westerner who hurrahed for Andrew Jackson and bore him triumphantly into the White House, was asserting his native manhood. He was the living embodiment of Carlyle's Everlasting No.
It is interesting to observe the subtle influence of American conditions on this English farmer whom we have chosen to follow to the territory of Illinois. The spirit of optimism radiates from his journal-an optimism that made him an inaccurate observer at times; but the worth of his observations is less important just here than this objective impression of his inner mind. It is as though a weight were rolling off his heart. He breathes great drafts of prairie air, stands more erect, allows his eye to range over the prairies, and yields unconsciously to that sense of dis- tance and space which has widened imperceptibly the mental hori- zon of three generations of Illinoisans.
I find my thought projecting itself forward fifteen years and my eye catches sight of a true son of Illinois who came from the cramped valleys of Vermont to the broad prairies of the Northwest, and who testified to his own mental growth by thio not very gracious remark that Vermont was a good state to be born in provided you migrated carly!
What charmed this transplanted English farmer was "the genuine warmth of friendly feeling" in the communities through which he passed-a disposition to promote the happiness of each other. These people have rude passions, he admits. "This is the real world and no political Arcadia." But "they have fellow- feeling in hope and fear, in difficulty and success." After a few
158
ILLINOIS CENTENNIAL COMMISSION
months on the prairies of Eastern Illinois he feels himself an American. "I love this government," he exclaims; "and thus a novel sensation is excited: it is like the development of a new faculty. I am become a patriot in my old age."
And what was this government which he held in such af- fection ? He does not name it but he describes it in unmistak- able terms. "Here, every citizen, whether by birthright or adop- tion is part of the government, identified with it, not virtually, but in fact." This was American Democracy !
Not all the States of the American Union at this time were democratically organized. A few-a very few-were born de- mocracies; some achieved democratic institutions; and some had democratie government thrust upon them. It is one of those pleasing illusions which patriotic societies like to indulge and which are perpetuated by loose thinking, that democracy was brought full-fledged to America by the Puritan fathers. Noth- ing could be further from the truth! Let us face the historic facts frankly and fearlessly. Men of the type of John Winthrop did not believe in social or. political equality. They would have stood aghast at the suggestion that every male adult should have a voice in the government which they set up on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. They shrank from those levelling ideas which radicals were preaching in Old England. There was little in colonial New England that suggested social equality. Men and women dressed according to their rank and station in life. Class conventions were everywhere observed. Public inns reserved par- lors for the colonial gentry ; trades people went to the tap-room or the kitchen for entertainment. All souls might be equal in the sight of God; but one's seat in church, nevertheless, corresponded to one's social rank. Learning might be open to all classes of men; but the catalogue of Harvard College in the 17th century listed the names of students not alphabetically but according to social standing.
So feeling and thinking these Puritan patricians of the Mas- sachusetts Bay Colony indulged in no foolish dreams of democ- racy. Almost their first precaution was to raise bulwarks against the unstable conduct of the ungodly. At first only church mem-
159
OFFICIAL CELEBRATIONS
bers were allowed to become freemen in the colony. Only godly men of good conversation should be intrusted with the choice of magistrates. And when this policy of rigid exclusion broke down under assaults from the home government, property qualifications were established as in the rest of the straggling English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard.
When the American colonies declared their independence there was not one which did not restrict the right to vote to male adults who were property-holders or holders of estates. The usual quali- fication was the possession of a freehold worth or renting at fifty pounds annually, or the ownership of fifty aeres. Under these restrictions probably not more than one man in every five or six had the right to vote. If democratie government means the rule of the majority, then these thirteen colonies were hardly more democratie than Prussia in this year of grace 1918!
In framing constitutions for the states in the course of the Revolution, the fathers followed habit and precedent. They be- traved little or no concern for the unpropertied or landless man. They followed the universal rule that those only were entitled to vote for magistrates who showed evidence of "attachment to the community." And evidence of such attachment consisted in the possession of property-preferably landed property. Said that typical American of his age, Benjamin Franklin, "As to those who have no landed property
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.