The centennial of the state of Illinois. Report of the Centennial Commission, Part 14

Author: Weber, Jessie (Palmer) 1863-1926, comp
Publication date: 1920
Publisher: [Springfield, Illinois State Journal Co., State Printers
Number of Pages: 1038


USA > Illinois > The centennial of the state of Illinois. Report of the Centennial Commission > Part 14


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 Methodist way of conversation was not always gentle. A story is told of Reverend James Jones, who in 1820 was con- ducting a camp meeting in the Whitewater country. A woman


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who had just been converted was dragged froin the altar by an angry husband. Mr. Jones remonstrated in vain and finally seized the man, forced him to the ground, and seating himself on the man's , back, refused to let him go till he prayed. The victim swore. The wife and other believers prayed alond, and Brother Jones still held bis man fast. As he prayed he felt the man's museles relax and recognizel other sigus of the coming victory. Soon the man began to weep and cry aloud, "God be merciful to me a sinner" The shout of victory came and the man's soul was saved.


Father Dickey, one of the first of the Indiana Presbyterians, suported a family on an annual income of $80, including gifts. He helped by farming, teaching singing classes, writing legal papers, surveying, shee-making, and conducting school. His house was a log cabin, with greased paper instead of window glass. His wife locked after her eleven children, managed the entire house- hold, made garments for the family, and entertained numberless visitors.


It is good to remind ourselves that back in the twenties and thirties, benevolent folk in the least were as generous in sendling the gospel and civilization to us of the west, as we of the later gen ration have been to darkest Africa, or may yet be to pagan Germany.


In the files of the Gazette, published at the old capitol, Cory- don, in January, 1810, when Indiana was three years old, the first announcement reads :


"The Reverend Mr. Rogers, missionary to the state of Indiana, will preach tonight at candle light at the Court House."


The pioneer was a failure as a publicity man. Even George Rogers Clark, the most romantie figure in American history. failed to make good when it came to advertising his exploits. Recall how he took Kaskaskia and won command of the Mississippi Valley without firing a shot. He had left his little fleet near the mouth of the Ohio and tramped for a week with a hundred and seventy volunteers through mire and flood. As they came to Kaskasia, England's stronghold on the Mississippi, the sturdy Americans hid until midnight, and then slipped into the fort and took the


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commandant by surprise. George Rogers Clark wrote the story out in full in his report to Virginia's Governor, and this is what he said: "i broke into the fort and secured the Governor." That is the complete official account of one of the most romantic events in American history.


Did the day of adventure end when the pioneer moved no longer toward the West? We know it did not. We still thrill to the scream of the bugle and our eye still dims with tears when of a sudden we see the flag. The pioneer spirit remains.


You who are old enough to have seen history in the making remember how the sons and grandsons of the pioneer sprang to the colors when Sumter was assailed and "thronged the way of death as to a festival." Today their grandsons are answering America's eall and once more the road of righteousness is the road of death. In every crisis it is the blood of the pioneer that answers first to the call of civilization. And we of Illinois and Indiana may thank God that ours is the blood of the pioneers who con- quered the wilderness and won the west for America and American ideals.


Before Clark ventured into our Northwest there were perhaps seven hundred white men in the Illinois country. An early chroni- cler gives this figure for the year 1:66 and explains that "the number of inhabitants at the Illinois is very difficult to ascertain as they are going and coming constantly."


Last week at State and Washington streets in Chicago I noted the same characteristic persisting after a century and a half.


When Illinois was a part of Indiana territory there was little community of interest between the Illinois settlers and their east- ern neighbors. Our common capital, Vincennes, was as inaeces- sible to the people who lived along the Mississippi River and had to cross prairies that were sunbaked in summer and flooded in winter, as it was to the men of Indiana who blazed their way thither through the almost trackless forest wilderness.


The Illinois kaders cherished the promise of early indepen- dence that was to come with increased inmigration, and their strong leanings toward slavery with which the masses in Indiana had no sympathy, encouraged Illinois in its aspirations toward an


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independent territorial goverment. The slavery struggle bulked large in territorial politics, the leaders in your state, Governor Bond and Senator Thomas, doing their utmost to force slavery upon Illinois as Governor Harrison would fain have done in In- diana but for the free soil influences led by Indiana's first Gover- nor, Jonathan Jennings.


Strong counter-influences were at work among the people in both territories and Jefferson's secret anti-slavery missionary, James Lemen, employed energies and resources that were unsus- pected in that day to save both states for freedom.


In due time your pro-slavery leaders became less open in their support of a cause that was steadily losing popular favor. The main route of migration, down the Ohio and up the Miscis- sippi, brought into Illinois many from Kentucky and Missouri who saw in the richness of your meadows a golden harvest for slave labor. But the current of migration from Kentucky brought not a few free soilers, while Indiana and, through her, Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York, sent their steady stream of flat boats down the Ohio and up the Wabash and no less constant a caravan of prairie schooners over the slowly opening highways and these liberty-loving pioneers held your state loyally to the pledge of the Ordinance of 1787 and made it in due time the fit forum for the great debate that on your soil was to arouse the sleeping conscience of the nation and make it ready for Appomat- tox and an effective emancipation. Illinois extended southward into the heart of the slave country and people in every community in the southern part of the state had a natural sympathy for the material interests of the homes from which they had come, so that in Illinois the battle for freedom was more fiercely fought than in more austere Indiana.


We are wont to imagine that the slavery question was dor- mant in these two states from their territorial beginnings until the compromise of 1850. The truth is that the slavery question never slept. The St. Clair County resolutions of 1823 drafted, no doubt, by James Lemen, himself, read like the argument of Abraham Lincoln in 1858, as a single sentence will show :


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"Confine slavery within limited boundaries and necessity, that great law of nature, would devise measures gradually to emanci- pate and effectually to discharge from the country that portion of the population; ..... . extend it abroad and you give scope for the unlimited increase of slaves in the Union."


The only political issue in Indiana in 1816 and in Illinois two years later was slavery and the struggle between its advocates and its enemies in the making of your Constitution and of ours was as bitter as it was in 1858 when "the house divided" seemed to be tottering to its fall and the men of Illinois had to choose leaders between the pro-slavery Vermonter and the anti-slavery Kentuckian.


The years of compromise had to end and the vain endeavor to persuade an awaking public conscience that the right to earn one's bread by another's labor was merely an economic question, failed at last. You furnished the forum for the final discussion of this great moral question and it naturally fell to you to furnish the leader who should put the question at rest for all time.


I would not withhold any credit from Illinois for having furnished the forum for the great debate. It was a natural de- velopment from the conditions that arose out of the character of your pioneers. The issue could not have come up in any other state, for nowhere else was the division so naturally, so honestly, or so completely, drawn as in Illinois in 1858, when Stephen A. Douglas waged a patriot's fight for further compromise and for peace against the resistless power of Lincoln's appeal to conscience and right. Had Douglas been less of a patriot than he was, or had he fought for a baser ideal than the prevention of disunien by compromise and adjustment, in other words, had he been mere- ly a selfish politician as many superficial and partisan students of history declare him to have been, the debate would have been forgotten and there would not have emerged from it the one giant figure in American history. It was the greatne -- of both cham- pions, Douglas and Lincoln, and the honesty of their purpose that made the debate what it was. And as I have said, it was the sincere difference of opinion among genuine patriots that gave to


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Illinois the distinction of settling the slavery question on her own soil.


How far Illinois may claim credit for having given Abraham Lincoln to the world is purely an academic question. If we are to answer it, we must discover the sources of Lincoln's power. It is a matter of pure sentimental interest where a man was born, or what places afforded him his education, or his field of activity and achievement. The more practical problem in our study is how far the place of his birth, the place of his education, and the place of his achievement contributed to the making of the man.


There is nothing miraculous about Abraham Lincoln's growth in power. It was the most natural of processes. It will hardly be denied that he was a susceptible man-responding with singu- lar sympathy to the influences that beset him. We are all familiar with his salient characteristics, chief among which it may be said that he was "the man who understood." The expression of grave aloofness in those clear gray eyes vanished in a flash when the soul within answered the appeal of any kindred spirit, and there was instantly an understanding glance, a smile, and the intercom- munication of soul with soul. The solitary mood, that was as likely to be manifest in a crowd as when no one was near by, vanished, and he became a man among men, yielding to the psychic force of the mind which had aroused his own. As he faced his audience of men who knew him-some devoted follow- ers and quite as many the severest of critics -- the face they looked into had none of the stolidity we see in so many of his photo- graphs, but it was ablaze with the inner fire of human interest and alive with the thoughts that dominated him for the moment. The physiognomy of the man affords us the demonstration of my proposition, that his was a responsive nature, answering to the feeling of others as that of one who understood.


Mr. Herndon and some of his associates and biographers as- sure us that he was not influenced by the will or reason or ap- peal of others. I can not believe that this is so. He was firm. it is true, firm to the point of stubborness, when he had satisfied himself that he had come to a right conclusion, but it was what


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he termed "firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right." All the way along from the beginning of the problem until his soul had found its answer he was in touch with the thought of others, hearing with patience the demands of would-be dictators, reasoning the question out with unreasonable critics, listening al- ways to suggestions from all kinds of sources and trying. as he phrased it, to see if he could bring himself out on God's side. The progress toward the conclusion, lonely as it seemed, was nevertheless by way of constant contact with the thought of others and a complete understanding of their point of view and an ulti- mate recognition that the other man's point of view was always entitled to consideration.


If we grant this premise that what Lincoln came to be was the result of his understanding contact with all sorts of men, and his unusually sympathetic response to the influence of an extra- ordinary environment, it may be worth our while briefly to con- sider whether in pioneer Indiana in the yens of his education and growth of body and spirit there came to him the power that he used so effectively in the maturer period that belongs to Illinois and in the four final years that belong to all the world.


The period of boyhood and adolescence is at least as signifi- cant in the making of character as is that of maturer manhood. A man does not wait until middle age before he chooses his ideals. Ife may not be conscious of the ferment within, but it is in boy- hood that, consciously or unconsciously, ambitions begin to be- siege his soul. The teachers who suggest new interests to him, the first books that absorb his thought. and even his dreams, the friends whose companionship enriches his life-all these influences are the molds within which his character expands and becomes fixed.


If we could call up before us the seven year old Kentucky boy, well-born for all the squalor that surrounded him, and watch his development until at twenty-one he led his father's ox-team to Illinois, the vision might diminish for us the mystery of Abra- ham Lincoln's power. Certainly we can not be content to say that Lincoln was an ignorant and vulgar politician all his life and, over night, as it were, became the first gentleman and the


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polished orator of his century. Things do not happen so. Abra- bam Lincoln did not just happen. The developing of his great- ness was not a foreing process that gave us a finished product in a single campaign or a year of presidential responsibility. It was a life-long growth, steady, constant, and slow, under influ- ences that began in the Nolan's Creek region when the little child of five gave his catch of fish to a veteran of the Revolution be- cause "Mother told him always to be kind to the soldier," and that continued through that first bitter winter in Indiana when he lay on the bed of leaves upon frozen earth in his father's half-faced camp listening to the howling wolves, and that later winter when the comrade-mother died. There were the seven mile walks through the wilderness to school, the thrilling adventure of his later boyhood upon the Mississippi flat boat ending with the hide- ous vision of the New Orleans slave market. There were the groups of men about the Gentryville store, men of vulgar speech no doubt, yet men whose idol was Andrew Jackson, themselves the Jackson type, who devoured the occasional newspaper as Abe Lincoln read it to them, and who talked religion, politics and slavery and told stories and made the big Lincoln boy one of their own circle.


School declamation, soap box speech making, good natured mimiery of itinerant preacher and temperance orator, and at last the printing of a school essay on temperance in a widely circulated newspaper, attendance at a sensational murder trial fourteen miles away at Boonville and the lonely dreary walk back and forth, the casual acquaintance there of a prominent lawyer who lent him the Indiana statutes that contained the Declaration of Indepen- dence and the Ordinance of 1287 with its bold commandment : "Thou shalt not keep thy fellow man in bondage" --- did these ex- periences touch and change the growing boy? We do not need to turn to Dennis Hanks for confirmation of our conclusion. From what the man of Illinois was we know what the boy of Indiana must have been-a double nature, self-absorbed but not self-con- tered, thoughtful with a leaning toward philosophy. self-discip- lining always. moody and often melancholy-one aspect -- under- -12 C C


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standing the point of view of those about him and tolerant of dissent, responsive to the moods of others and quick to the point of eagerness to answer to their needs-the other aspect, he was:


"A blend of mirth aud sadness, smiles and tears, A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers."


Lincoln is identified in the world's thought with the emanci- pation of the slave. What was used as a last desperate war meas- ure by the patient president who was ready to try any remedy that measured up to his idea of right if only he could save the Union, was really the one thing by which he is remembered. The slavery question which opportunest politicians had avoided for half a century hoping that somehow it would solve itself entered into Lincoln's spiritual life at the very beginning and by slow degrees mastered it. It was to escape the competition of slave labor that Thomas Lincoln left Kentucky for a state dedicated to liberty.


The only book the boy Lincoln had was a life of Washington whose struggle to win liberty gripped his imagination. The two journeys to New Orleans at the most impressionable period of his young manhood; the visit to Kentucky in 1SI1 when he described the slaves "strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot line" to be taken to a land where the master's lash is pro- verbially ruthless and unrelenting: the slow awakening to a real- ization of his own opportunity and his own power to force an issue with Douglas which would settle the question ; and at last his happiness in the knowledge that the Thirteenth Amendment had given to the slaves the freedom which his Emancipation Procla- mation had promised them, constitute one story of the dominance of a single great idea. Can it be truly said that any local com- munity determined the course of that man's life or made his great- ness possible.


I am convinced that a special obligation rests upon your State at the time of its Centennial. This year, a State pride, which is really patriotism, has been inspired as you pause to look back upon a hundred years of service to humanity. To each loyal citizen of Illinois has come a new impulse that may well become a con-


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secration of Illinois and all her citizenship to world service. You will not have accepted this opportunity for self dedication if you leave no permanent memorial to remind your children and your children's children, that Illinois remembers her pioneers and all who bore their part in her first one hundred years of life and keeps that remembrance saered for coming generations.


Yon have great names on your roll of honor, more than could well be named in this address. What better service could you do now than give to each place identified with these men a tablet to attest that in the Centennial year they were not forgotten ? For one of these who stand head and shoulders above them all, as he did when he walked the streets of Springfield, no monu- ment is needed. And yet the places he haunted ought to be remembered. The road from Springfield to Petersburg, Peoria, Pekin, Lineoln, Clinton, and Danville, and so on around the old Eighth circuit, and many an old eovrt house and tavern and homestead along that way will be associated always with that brilliant company of itinerant advocates, and particularly the country lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, while a number of places in Springfield are mutely eloquent reminder of his master person- ality. The rooms in the old Capitol where his immortal speeches were delivered, the site of Speed's store with its hospitable upper room, the offices of Stuart and Lincoln, Logan and Lincoln, and Lineoln and Herndon, the room where the First Inaugural was written, and the site of the "House Divided" speech; these should be marked while Lincoln's personal friends still live, and im- perishable bronze should tell to generations yet unborn that Springfield remembers lovingly the places made sacred by bis presence.


THE CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF ILLINOIS


CLARENCE WALWORTH ALVORD Editor Illinois Centennial History


MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, FELLOW MEMBERS OF THE ILLINOIS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY: It gives me great pleasure to have this opportunity to talk to you about the task


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which the State of Illinois has placed upon me, the production of a Centennial history of the State. I am peculiarly glad to hear testimony concerning the progress of this work to you, fellow members of the Historical Society, for to you more than anyone else belongs the right of knowing what has been done and how; what the Centennial history is, and what it is not.


One might expect that the very name chosen for this work would indicate to every one its character, but from correspondence and conversation with many citizens of the State, it has been borne in upon me that the meaning of the title does not convey to everyone the same idea. It is true that everybody under the sun believes that he or she knows what the history is. And for that reason there have been many willing helpers in the production of the Centennial history, and many have been the suggestions that have reached your editor-in-chief. From these suggestions it is evident that many are expecting a cross between an ency- elopedia and such a year book as the Chicago Daily News publishes, wherein the reader inay expect to find a statement on every sub- ject that touches Illinois and the names of all public officials from those who hold the important State offices down to the latest county commissioners, as well as a list of all the men's clubs and women's clubs, a list of all the labor unions and boy scouts, with a careful list in every case of the officers and in most cases their photographs.


Needless to say to an audience composed of the members of the Illinois State Historical Society, the Centennial history will not serve any such purpose. No organization, however, important, will be mentioned except in-so-far as it forms an illustration of an important development in our social history. There will not be, and cannot be from the very nature of the case, any listing of societies or organizations for the simple purpose of perpetuating the names of the officers.


Other correspondents, whose souls have been stimulated by reading local history, think of the Centennial history in terms of county histories : they look for a general history of the State, fol- lowed by histories of certain phases of State history, such as the history of inedieine, the history of religion, the history of busi-


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ness, the history of newspapers, and so forth ad infinitum, all this to be topped off by biographical sketches of important people who may be willing to spend fifty dollars to have their photographs turned into half-tones for illustrative material. Such a work would have been very easy to prepare and in some ways might have satis- fied many people in the State better than the volumes which will be published next fall. But the Centennial history is as far re- moved from the average county history as can be well imagined in works that pretend to belong in the same field. There will be but very few illustrations, not more than four or five, in each volume. Some of these will be portraits, but only of men who have played a great part in building our State.


There will be no continuous history of various professions and businesses, although it is hoped that adequate treatment in the general narrative will be given to the various interests in which the people of Illinois are engaged.


Most of the suggestions which have come to your editor have emanated from men and women filled with that love and admir- ation of the past which makes to them the spot or object associ- ated with bygone ages holy. Theirs is the spirit of the auti- quarian ; and they are expecting that the Centennial history will be a guide-book to Illinois antiquities, a kind of ennobled Bae- decker, enshrining in print the spots which each community loves to point out to visitors as being of historic importance; yonder Indian mounds of Podunk center; the spring where Black Hawk used to camp; the block from which slaves used to be sold.


No suggestions has reached the editorial ears that equals in extravagance that of a recent convert to the importance of history. He was a French Creole of a neighboring state and was converted by a historian who was preaching to him the gospel of the preser- vation of past memories and old doeuments. The imagination of the Creole was aroused, and he gave ready agreement to the pro- position ; "For," he said, "the old people who remembered them are now dying out and the memory of the important events will soon be gone." He continued, "I am sure that there is no one living today who can confirm an event that was told me by my grandfather. Knoweldge of the fact is lost to history. I remem-


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ber well my grandfather telling me that when Father Gautier died and the people were assembled to pay honor to the pious priest who had served them so well, a star from heaven came down and stood above the parish house so long as the coffin remained therein and when the coffin was carried out the star returned to the firmanent." What answer can you make to a mind like that?




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