USA > Illinois > The centennial of the state of Illinois. Report of the Centennial Commission > Part 15
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Almost equally curious suggestions have come to me from people that were highly cultivated and in their own lines of work stood high in the opinion of their fellows. Such a man recently grew eloquent over the historic importance of his home town, hallowed by the memories of the fleeing Black Hawk and the tramp of the valorous militia men. IIe told me that in his own back yard he had found an army canteen of that far off period and that one day some inen while plowing had dug up a hexagonal pistol which they had given to him. Waxing enthusiastic over these childhood memories, he advised me to go there and dig for mementoes of the past, for I would be sure to find rich treasure. Let me ask you, wouldl a collection of a thousand of these guns borne by the Illinois militia or could a collection of all the scalps that were removed from both white and red skulls help to eluci- date the events that occurred during the Black Hawk War! The Centennial history, fellow members of the Illinois State Ilis- torical Society, is not to be a glorified guide book to historie Illi- nois, nor an apotheosized handbook of Illinois antiquity. Any- one expecting either of these equally desirable works is bound to be bitterly disappointed, for the authors of the Centennial his- tory have in no wise attempted their production.
So much for what the Centennial history is not. What, then, is the history? First of all, let me assure you that the very opti- mistic report in the newspapers of recent date, that the history was on the point of being ready for distribution is, to quote a well- remembered remark of Mark Twain's upon the report of his death, greatly exaggerated. It is true that one volume, the second, will come from the press all printed next month and the others will follow in as rapid succession as possible.
Knowing as you do that work has been going on in connec- tion with the writing of these volumes for some three years, it
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may be well to remind you that even when an author has once put down his story on paper, it does not at all mean that the book is ready to print. The first draft must be typed and collated, that is, compared with the original; it must be revised and cut down by the author, footnotes filled in, statement of facts checked, and then retyped for the editorial office. Here it has to 20 through a multiplicity of processes, reminding one of the oper- ations through which a factory product must pass. First the editor reads it, recommending points to be revised by the author and modifying the English. The chapters are then turned over to an assistant who checks carefully the accuracy of each footnote reference, cach quotation, each proper name. Then another as- sistant goes over the manuscript to see that capitalization, punctu- ation, and spelling are correct and in accordance with the set of rules worked out for the volumes. There is also a definite sys- tem for the citation of footnotes and for the bibliography, so that these things must be gone over very carefully to see that they conform. By this time so many changes have been made that it is necessary for a new copy to be typed for the printer; it goes without saying that it must again be collated. In a book of one hundred twenty-five thousand worls these operations can natural- ly not be done in a day. The editor gives the manuscript a final reading before it goes to the printer ; then the task of proof read- ing begins. Two acts of proof for every page of every book has to be very minutely read to see that the printer has printed what the author wrote and to correct any errors which may have escaped detection in the manuscript. Perhaps this sounds easy to those of you who have never tried it; if you have not gone through a similar experience, you can not dream of the knotty problems which can be involved in the placing of a mere comma ; you do not know how many words look all right until you consult Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, when you find you don't know how to spell at all; you little guess how inconvenient it is that the Eng- lish language has no logical system of capitalization. In spite of the great care exercised by each person who work's over the manuscript, a new mistake is discovered with every reading: if
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you are sharp-eyed, no doubt some of you will detect a few in the final printed copy.
With good luck, however, we are hoping that all five volumes will be ready for distribution some time next fall. If it so hap- pens that this distribution coincides with the great celebration in October, we shall all be exceedingly happy. I may say here, to answer the question I am sure many of you are asking, that the Centennial history is to be published by the A. C. McClurg Company of Chicago and that it will be sold through the regular book market at twe dollars a volume.
The authors of the Centennial history have attempted to give an interpretation of the development of the social, political and econcinic life of the people of the State of Illinois. Their final product might well have been called the history of the people of Illinois. There has been, therefore, an effort made to paint with the pen a succession of moving pictures from the time Illinois country was first traversed by the white men up till the present day. At every stage of our development sufficient information has been collected from various sources to give this picture of our changing civilization lifelike form.
It is a history of a state and not the history of the United States. Therefore we have made no attempt to tell the story of Illinois in terms of national history, but rather the story of Illi- nois as illustrative of the growth of a mid-western state. This means several important points of view to which I wish to call your attention. The wars in which Illinois has been engaged, for instance, as one of the states of the Union are important in state history; but this importance does not consist in the development of the war itself-I mean the war strategy and the campaigns- nor again in the engagement of Illinois troops in the war; the importance of wars to state history arises out of the social, eco- nomie, and political phenomena which the wars have produced within the boundaries of the State. Here then lies the problem of the historians, and it is to these phenomena rather than to the events outside of the State itself that the authors of the Centen- nial history have devoted their attention. The same attitude of mind must be assumed in the treatment of the activities of our
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members of Congress. So far as they are engaged in the pass- age of rational laws, they belong to national rather than state history; but when our representatives at Washington reflect the attitude of the State itself on important national issues, their activities become a part of the State personality and as such form a part of the picture of our past. For the same reason national politics can be neglected so far as they are extraneous to State affaire, but whenever the issues of national polities become vital in state history, then they fall within the treatment that the authors are giving.
For the purposes of this stuly, the authors have neglected consciously the writings of previous historians in-so-far as such writings were not considered as source material. We did not desire to allow our judgment to be biased by the prejudices of men who had preceded us in this field. We have therefore gone directly to what historians call source material, that is to say the contemporary documents made up of letters, legal documents, laws, and newspapers that have come to us directly from the period concerning which we were writing. The collection of this material has been laborious. I may illustrate from the experi- ences which I have had in the preparation of the first volume of the history that extends from 1673 down to 1818. the period of the Indian, the French, the British, and the American occupation. Covering this period there are thousands of printed pages of source material available. These had to be collected at the University of Illinois for my study. Besides these, however, there are in existence an equal monber of unprinted materials scattered in archives all over the world, in London, in Paris. in Boston, and Worcester, Massachusetts, in Albany, in Philadelphia and Pitts- burg, Pennsylvania, in Washington, in Richmond, Virginia, and in Chester, Belleville, and Chicago, not to forget the numberless documents in the Draper Collection at Madison, Wisconsin. Thou- sands of pages of manuscript material have been collected for the purpose of interpreting Illinois' past. Take for instance the manuscript material in the archives in Paris which has been never used in its entirety by any historian of Illinois or even of the United States. The library of Congress had fortunately copied
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some forty folio volumes of these manuscripts. The librarian has kindly loaned me these volumes, and copies have been made in my office of such of them as were needful for my purposes. But there are many more documents in Paris itself. Of these there is in existence a recently finished finding list which was put at my service; and the State of Illinois maintained a copyist with one assistant for about a year and a half in Paris doing nothing but copying for the purposes of this volume. What has been done in Paris has been done at other times in the other cities that I have named. The result is that no historian of Illinois has had col- lected at his disposal any such mass of source material as will be the basis for the interpretation of the early history of the State which is to appear in the Centennial history of Illinois.
Similar collecting has been done for the other volumes. You would be amazed at the amount of newspapers that have been ex- amined by the authors. Loans have been made from libraries all over the State, from Joliet, from Springfield, from Belleville and many other places. The libraries of Chicago have been examined, photograph copies of early newspapers in the State have been made from the collections in the Library of Congress and from the Mercantile Library in St. Louis, so that there has been col- lected for the authors a better collection of our very early news- papers, of which there are only few copies in existence, than can be found in any library in the United States.
In addition to these old newspapers there were a large num- ber of later files scattered around in various eities in the State which it was highly desirable to examine, yet which it was im- possible for the authors to visit and inspect in person. How could these be made available? The problem was solved by arranging with the various newpaper officers and libraries to ship their papers, a few volumes at a time and in specially constructed boxes, to Urbana, where they were examined by the authors and by re- search assistants under their supervision. Passages which were wanted were marked, then typed, and the copies compared with the original for accuracy. Thus in two weeks time by this method, a group of newspapers could be examined which would have re- quired a month or more, had each author undertaken to go from
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place to place and take all his notes himself. Furthermore, there are now literally thousands of typed newspaper excerpts available for still further study and use.
Besides the collection of newspapers the authors have also examined with great care large masses of unpublished letters. Dr. Pease who is the author of the second volume, the Pioneer State, 1818-1848, has made an exhaustive study of the material to be found in the Chicago Ili-torical Society and also in the Illinois Historical Survey of the University of Illinois and in the State Historical Library here in Springfield. Dr. Cole, the author of the third volume, The Era of the Civil War, 1818-1870, spent several weeks in Washington, going over the collection of Trumbull papers never before used and other collections that are to be found in the Library of Congress. Professor C. M. Thompson who is half author with Professor Ernest L. Bogart of the fourth volume, The Industrial State, 18:0-1893, has made great use of material collected from the descendants of men who acted during this period, besides using other well-known material.
The fifth volume, the Modern Commonwealth, 1893 to the present day, differs in its character from the other four. This is a period in which the actors are still living and when the events are so new that judgment can scarcely be passed upon them. It would therefore be a very doubtful policy to attempt to make an- interpretation of these recent years, besides it was very essential for the history of the State that there should be a very complete description of the activity of the citizens of the State as they are exhibited in their agriculture, their manufacturing, their mining, their business in general. their government in all its ramifications, and their cultural development. The Centennial Commission there- fore selected to write this volume an economic historian, Professor Bogart, and a political scientist, Professor J. MI. Mathews, who have given us a description of the State as it exists today, and you will find therein a very complete analysis of present day conditions, and the best account of the Government of the State that has ever been written. Besides this Mr. Henry B. Fuller of Chicago has written two chapters on the cultural development of the State. one of these will appear in the fourth volume and the other in the fifth.
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The secret of writing true Listory depends upon the collection of all the contemporary evidence bearing on the case. The reason that people complain of the changing interpretations of history is that new material is found, as society demands a broader and broader interpretation of the phenomena of the past. There was a time when history consisted in what we call today the drum and fife history; the doings of the great political leaders, events of military glory and almost no other phenomena of changing society were noted. Today the task of the historian however, is far greater ; and he is obliged to cast his net far afield in order to collect the material for the social development of the past. The task of interpretation is made easier the more complete is the collection of source material, and it is this fact upon which the authors of the Centennial History particularly pride themselves.
An example of how easy it is to misinterpret a past event, provided all the material available is not collected, and how easy is that interpretation after the material has been found has come under my observation and will be embodied in the narrative of the first voluune. About forty years ago Edward G. Mason, at that time secretary of the Chicago Historical Society, found the record book kept by the County Lieutenant, John Todd. in year 1119, when Todd came to govern the territory that had been occupied by George Rogers Clark and his Virginians during the Revolu- tionary War. In this record book Mason found the copy of a warrant for the death by burning at the stake of a negro, named Manuel, which burning was to take place after consolation to the criminal had been given by the parish priest. The copy of the warrant had been crossed out by drawing lines through it. Please bear this fact in mind, since it should have suggested a correct interpretation. Naturally this warrant aroused the imagination of Mr. Mason, and he began to search for an explanation and discovered that about this time there was an outbreak of voodooismi among the Illinois slaves and that tro slaves had been put to death. He drew the natural conclusion therefore that Manual had been burned at the stake for the practice of witchcraft. Bas- ing his interpretation upon Mr. Mason's find, a well-known ex- President, who among other occupations has dabbled in history.
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Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, wrote at some length upon this episode and drew a comparison between the eighteenth century Catholic Illinois where men were burned at the stake with the sanction of the parish priest and in accordance with French Catholic law for the practice of witchcraft, with a similar episode in the history of Puritan Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Fortunately there has come into my hands a full record of the court's pro- ceedings by which Manuel was condemned; and I find that the judges in the case, although they were obliged to listen to the superstitious accusations of negro slaves, were careful to determine the fact that Manual and another negro had been the cause of the death of Mr. and Mrs. Nicolle by poisoning and that for this act they were condemned to death. I then looked up the law of the land. Naturally it might be supposed that this was French law, hut there was another possibility, namely that Virginia law in criminal cases would be used by a Virginian inagistrate, such as Jolin Todd. I found that the Virginia law in the case of murder of a master by a slave was death by burning at the stake so that in the case of Manuel you see that the condemnation was strictly in accordance with Virginia law and not with French law. Another document of even greater interest in the case also came to mny hands. It certainly was a surprise. This was another warrant for the death of Manuel, issued at a later hour in the day, but by this later warrant the death penalty was changed from burning at the stake to hanging by the neck. To summarize then: Manuel was not condemned for witcheraft but for murder; he was not condemned to be burned at the stake in accordance with French law, but in accordance with Virginia law; and finally he was not burned at the stake at all. but was hung by the neck. This is an excellent example of the danger of drawing inferences in regard to historie events upon too narrow information. There was one fact which both Mr. Mason and Mr. Roosevelt ignored in their interpretation of the warrant. The copy of the warrant was found in a carefully kept record book and was crossed ont by lines being drawn through it. That fact should have made them suspicions of their own interpretation. Records such as this condemnation
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to death would not be lightly erased by the keeper of a record book. An historical Sherlock Holmes would not have been misled.
Even if all the material which will illuminate the past has been collected there remain difficulties of interpretation. Naturally many past events can not be described because of the lack of space, and therefore there must be exercised a choice to determine what episodes should be depicted in order to make the picture true to reality. These difficulties lying in the path of the man of research I do not wish to speak of today, but rather to point out a serious obstacle that confronts the writer of history, namely that to be found in the prejudices of his readers. The picture he would draw must convey a correct impression to the mind of those who may peruse his volume, and he must have constantly in his mind the particular prejudices that he is likely to encounter. I may illus- trate the point if you will exeuse ine for being so personal, from my own research concerning the character of Father Gibault who played such an important part in securing the Illinois country to the Virginians during the Revolutionary War. He is one of the heroes of the West in the minds of the people, although possibly a careful investigation of the facts may detract somewhat from the popular impression of him. It is not, however, of this fact that I wish to speak, but of some unpublished information which it is my intention not to use because of the possible misinterpretation that would be placed upon it by readers of my volume. In a public address of this sort the information may be used by way of illus- tration, since the full explanation may accompany the statement, whereas in the condensed narrative required by the size of the volume, such an explanation would not be possible. In the course of my investigations in Revolutionary history, there came to me three grocery bills of Father Gibault, containing itemized state- ments of his purchases for a period of time. From these it appears that the good priest found it difficult to live one day and never more than two days without purchasing from the nearby grocery one quart of whisky. This piece of information appears on the face of it interesting and important for the interpretation of Father Gibault's character and under some conditions might be used, but we are today on the eve of the final triumph of the
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Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the prejudice against the use of alecholle liquors is widespread throughout our country ; to the mind of many readers therefore any mention of the daily consumption of a quart of whisky would only bring to the mind sceres of debauchery; and they would condemn Father Gibault without qualification as a drunken and debau hed parish priest. The picture would not be irne for Father Gibault lived in a time when the average man bought his whisky by the demijohn rather than by the quart, and the average citizen of Illinois, or Missouri where Father Gibault lived at the t'me, would hive regarded as very moderate the consumption of a quart of whisky daily by him- self and friend -. Therefore to avoid a wrong impression of this particular parish priest I am not going to use the information contained in his grocery bills.
The danger of allor ing the reader to draw his own inference: from the source material was well illustrated upon the appearance of the introductory voilure of the Centennial history, Mr. Buck's "Illinois in 181s," which appeared J. - t vear. The character of his volume, purposely composed of extracts from contemporary document , made Mr. Bock a little careless in handing out to his readers the raw material with which he himself was working : still he had every right to expect his readers to place the proper interpretation upon this source material and to set it in its cor- reet per-pretive. In attempting to convey an idea of the educa- tional conditions in Illinois existing in the year 1818 he quoted the comments of men who were living at that time. Among other descriptions he quoted one by John Mason Peck a well known Baptist missionary, who after a survey of educational conditions in Missouri reached the following conclusion, which I quote in his own words: "At least one-third of the sche Is were really a public nuisance, and did the people more harm than good : another third about balanced the account by dohig woont a- mich harm as good, and perhaps one-third were advantageous to the community in various degrees-not a few drunken. profane. worthless Irishmon were perambulating the country, and getting up schools; and vet they could neither speak. read. pronounce, spell. or write the Eng- lish language." Mr. Back's comment on this post was that
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"the situation in llinois was very similar." Now to Mr. Buck the Reverend Pock's statement was interesting simply as the opinion of a contemporary and he doubtless cracked smiles over the austere Baptist's hit at Irishmen and included the statement as a bit of local color, never doubting that his readers would discount Peck's prejudices as he did.
Great was Mr. Buck's amazement when on the publication of the book, a perfect storm of protest came from the Illinois citizens of Irish birth or extraction, who considered that the author had a personal grudge against them and that he had gone far out of his way to cast a very special aspersion upon them.
Now let us pause for a moment and cahnly consider the situ- ation. First of all in every discussion of former citizens of Ireland it must be remembered that there are two kinds of Irishmen in existence-one from the north and one from the south of the Emerald Isle; it must be further remembered that they have no love for each other, as recent events have only too well taught us. The men who protested against Mr. Buck's quotation of Peck were south Irelanders and jumped to the conclusion that their particular kind of Irishman was the only kind meant ; whereas I should judge that since these Irishmen spoken of were forming schools among a Protestant community, they were the kind of Irishmen who when they got drunk had faith in the efficacy of Scotch whisky rather than of Irish whisky. Secondly, let me point out that although the present Irish may foreswear their liquor and disdain to use profane language, in the pioneer days they would not have been regarded as real men by their fellow citizens unless they were aceumstomed to do both, for such was the practice of the frontier. Our ancestors who crossed the mountains and won their way in the wilderness were men of strong virtues and of equally strong vices; and Peck found not a few drunken, profane, and worthless men from every race in Europe on the frontier which he knew so well. Further it must be remembered that Peck was a Baptist missionary with the prejudices of his calling and of his Anglo-Saxon blood. He had come from New England, where a particular brand of culture reigned, to a region that was under- going the storm and stress of the pioneer days. Peck's very pre-
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