USA > Illinois > The era of the Civil War, 1848-1870 > Part 40
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In January, 1869, Governor Oglesby turned the reins of government over to his successor, John M. Palmer, who brought to the gubernatorial office a reputation for calm, tem- perate, broadminded statesmanship which augured well for a clean administration. He had always been a moderate parti- san, he had not forgotten his early democratic associations, and conditions generally were favorable to the maintenance of that popularity he had won as a military leader during the Civil War. His inaugural address, conceived in the spirit of nonpartisanship and progressivism, defined a sphere of state rights that made the republicans hold their breath in consterna- tion, while the democrats hailed it as a model state paper.27 In considering the general demand for corporation control and for regulatory railroad legislation, Governor Palmer called atten- tion to proposals to enlist the national government in the crea- tion of corporations for the construction of railroads in Illinois and adjacent states. Pointing out the confusion produced by the Civil War as to the relative powers and duties of the national and state governments, he declared: "Now that the war is ended, and all proper objects attained, the public welfare demands a recurrence to the true principles that underlie our system of governments, and one of the best established and most distinctly recognized of these is, that the federal govern- ment is one of enumerated powers. The state governments are a part of the American system of govern- ment. They fill a well defined place, and their just authority must be respected by the federal government."
26 Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1868; Joliet Republican, June 13, 1868; Illinois State Journal, June 17, August 28, September 9, 12, 17, October 12, 1868; Rock- ford Gazette, June 18, 1868.
27 Ibid., January 28, 1869; Illinois State Register, January 12, 20, 1869; Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1869; Cairo Evening Bulletin, January 14, 1869; Joliet Signal, January 19, 1869; Rushville Times, January 21, 1869.
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STEPHENSON WINNEBAGO
BOONE
MCHENRY LARE
CARROLL
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WHITESIDE
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COOK
ROCK ISLAND
BUREAU
LA SALLE
ORUND
MERCER
PUTNAM
KANKAKEE
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HENDERSON
WARREN
KNOX
LIVINGSTON
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PULTON
TAZEWELL
HANCOCE
McDONODOH
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PIATT
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CHRISTIAN
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Presidential Election 1868
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FORD
BOND
MADISON
Democratic
44%
56%
JEFFERSON
MONROE
Over 75%
RANDOLPH
PERRY
HAMIL
65-75%
JACKSON
SALINE
JOHNSON POPE
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ASK
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50-55%
(Ulysses S. Grant)
CLINTON.
MARION
RICHLAND
LAWRENCE
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WA
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WASHINGTON
Republican
- CLAY
(Horatio Seymour)
SCHUYLER
MASON
LOGAN
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CHAMPAIGN VERMILION
WOODFORD
MCLEAN
HEL
MACOUPIN
55-65%
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415
SPOILS AND THE SPOILERS
Palmer pointed to the appearance after each session of the general assembly of ponderous volumes "filled with acts creating corporations for almost every purpose, clothed with powers of the most extraordinary extent," and diplomatically suggested the problems growing out of this situation. In clos- ing he emphasized the duty of the legislators: "The people of the State have confided to the General Assembly a great trust. They expect at your hands the most careful scrutiny of the operation of every department of the government. That abuses, if any are found to exist, shall be corrected. They demand the most rigid economy in the expenditures of the public money. I have no doubt your efforts to promote their happiness will meet their approval." 28
The legislature, however, cared little for the advice handed out to it. Although Governor Oglesby upon retiring had left an excellent message stressing public needs, and Governor Palmer now added his suggestions for necessary legislation, the assembly callously set out to duplicate the orgy of 1868. Legislative "rings" and logrolling appropriation bills were prepared before the session formally opened; and rumors of "big steals" began to circulate, while the lobby, or "third house," assembled in force.29 Special legislation of all sorts was jammed through; about seven hundred acts of incorpora- tion were passed despite the constitutional provision which had sought to prohibit that class of legislation. Again talk of cor- ruption and bribery filled the atmosphere until the legislature itself felt moved to order an investigation; this was a safe enough proceeding, according to the Chicago Tribune, because "the men who have 'money bills' in the Legislature are not so green as to pay anything beyond liquor, cigars and board until one day after adjournment-never in any case until the bill passes." When the legislature finally adjourned, opinions differed as to the amount of its political jobbery: the Carthage Republican, a democratic journal, was content to believe that "compared with the former, the legislature is a model of all virtues," although its dishonesty had been limited only "by
28 House Journal, 1869, 1: 202-208.
29 Bloomington Pantagraph clipped in Illinois State Journal, January 7, 1869; Joliet Republican, January 9, 1869; Illinois State Register, January 9, 12, 1869; Ottawa Free Trader, February 20, 1869.
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THE ERA OF THE CIVIL WAR
the impecunious character of the lobby;" the Tribune believed that with bipartisan combinations for special interests and with personal corruption which it was prepared to prove, it had been "reckless beyond precedent." 30
Throughout the session Governor Palmer had conceived it his duty to check what seemed to be hasty, injudicious, and unscrupulous legislation with his veto; with the slaughtering of seventy-two bills he established a new record for the veto power of the governor of Illinois and won golden opinions from both democratic and republican critics of the legislature. Such interference did little to stem the flood of legislation; seventeen bills were hurried into law over the governor's merely suspensive veto. Besides four hundred pages of public laws, nearly three thousand five hundred pages of private legislation forced their way into the statute books.31
The more important items in the mass were: an appro- priation of $400,000 for improvement in the Illinois river to permit the uninterrupted movement of boats by way of the Illinois and Michigan canal; the "penitentiary steal"-an appropriation of $300,000 to the "penitentiary ring" which had been unable to make a similar appropriation cover the previous biennium and which was accused of an administra- tion which had resulted in a complete breakdown of prison discipline at the penitentiary; 32 a lake front act providing for the transfer of the submerged lands outside the tracks of the Illinois Central railroad to that company instead, as origi- nally proposed, of releasing it to the city of Chicago, together with the lake front inside the tracks; and railroad legislation, including an act regulating railroad rates and an act which assigned a portion of the state taxes to assist in paying the remaining unpaid railroad debts of counties and municipal cor- porations. Two of the three last mentioned laws were enacted over the veto of Governor Palmer; in the case of rate regu-
30 Chicago Tribune, March 2, April 17, 1869; Carthage Republican, March 18, 1869; Ottawa Free Trader, April 24, 1869; Illinois State Register, Novem- ber 15, 1869.
31 Ibid., April 16, July 29, 1869; Cairo Evening Bulletin, March 1, 1869; Illinois State Journal, April 17, 1869; Joliet Signal, April 27, 1869; see also Debel, The Veto Power of the Governor of Illinois, 79.
32 Illinois State Register, February 3, July 2, August 4, September 16, 1869; Joliet Signal, January 11, March 16, 1869.
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lation, however, a veto pointed the way to modifications which met with his formal approval.33
While the legislature was at its work, news arrived of the passage of the fifteenth amendment giving the Negro the right to vote. This the assembly promptly ratified, although there was still a grave question as to whether Illinois was ready to admit its own Negro citizens to the polls. The issue of Negro suffrage had an interesting history in Illinois. The Chicago Tribune was one of the first papers in the country to advocate this principle; during the campaign of 1866 its editors, Senator Yates and certain other republican leaders, had boldly struck out for universal suffrage; but many in the party, especially republicans in Egypt, recognized that "the deep-rooted preju- dices of the white masses can only be banished by the slow but certain process of time." 34 Democrats in the northern counties, too, came to accept the justice of Negro suffrage. The Joliet Signal, a democratic journal, declared itself ready to extend the franchise "as soon as the negroes shall prove that they are capable of a proper exercise of that privilege." After the campaign of 1866 was over the Chicago Times acknowledged Negro suffrage as so certain to be incorporated into the fundamental law that it became good policy, if not a public duty, to accept it without delay and in good faith. Democrats at the center and opposite end of the state, how- ever, did not believe that their party could secure a new lease of life on that basis; and they soon silenced the Times by the storm of protest. A year later, by making plans for the estab- lishment of a new party organ at Chicago, the democratic antis forced the Chicago Times to repudiate the heresy and chal-
33 Laws of 1869, p. 245-248, 309-312, 316-321; Palmer, Personal Recollec- tions, 290-291.
34 Central Illinois Gazette, April 27, 1866; Canton Weekly Register, January 29, 1866; Cairo Democrat, October 20, 1866. "The prejudice against the negro is not wholly overborne," declared Dr. C. H. Ray, who was not in favor of imposing Negro suffrage on the south. "Say what we may, you and I share it; and what is true of us is doubly true of others. Because we have a sense of duty, a desire to be faithful to principles and a profound but not always active belief in that much talked-of 'brotherhood of men'. Where we think on this question, the masses give way to prejudice uncontrolled: and to dislike, I will not say hate, a negro is just as natural as to distinguish black from white." Ray to Trumbull, February 7, 1866, Trumbull manuscripts. So also Congress- man Kuykendall of the Cairo district refused to follow his republican associates on the Negro suffrage issue. Jonesboro Gazette, January 5, February 9, 1867.
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lenged the republicans to make Negro suffrage the issue for the next presidential campaign; the republican national conven- tion, however, failed to put the issue squarely, though it con- tinued an important feature of party politics. In the general assembly of 1869, as previously in 1867, considerable pressure was exerted in favor of an amendment to strike from the state constitution all discriminations against color and race in the matter of political privileges. When the fifteenth amendment, however, was given the approval of the state, the necessity of further action was eliminated, although democrats dared their opponents to strike the word "white" out of the new state constitution.35
Another act of the assembly of 1869 was to make the formal arrangement for the constitutional convention ordered by the people in the election of 1868. The election of delegates was set for the first Tuesday in November, and the convention was to assemble on the second Monday of the following month. This interjected a new atmosphere into the local elec- tions of that year; inasmuch as none of the questions at issue, except the Negro suffrage matter, were political in char- acter, the attempt was made to select capable representatives regardless of party affiliations. As a result the convention was made up almost equally of democrats and republicans, with a few republicans who ran as "people's candidates" holding the balance. 36 The party line, however, was also a sectional line, as the democrats were present in force only from Egypt, and the republicans from the northern half of the state.
The disintegration of the republican party, which bespoke the need for internal reorganization, found a wide range of expression. In the city and county elections of northern Illinois a certain puritanical reform element launched a political tem-
35 Illinois State Register, November 13, 17, 1866, October 21, 1869; Chicago Tribune, November 13, 1866, January 10, 30, 1868; Joliet Signal, May 8, Decem- ber 4; Cairo Democrat, November 14, 15, 16, 1866; Carthage Republican, November 15, 1866.
36 The Chicago Tribune, November 4, 1869, rejoiced in the smallness of the republican majority, which it then estimated at ten: "This is as much as any party ought to have in any deliberative assembly. It is both safer and more reliable than a majority of twenty." It is quite evident that Joseph Medill's scheme of minority representation grew out of his disgust with the antics of the large republican majority in the sessions of 1867 and 1869. Cf. ibid., November 13, 1869.
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perance movement which placed separate candidates in the field; the democrats welcomed this movement as a division of the majority. In La Salle county a labor ticket was nominated on the platform of the National Labor Union; in Chicago, in Will county, and in Kane county, democratic and republican reformers united on "people's" or "citizens'" tickets to de- feat the " ring tickets " put up by the local republican machines. All the republican newspapers in Chicago, except the Post, refused to support the regular party ticket; the Chicago Times, the leading organ of the democracy for the northwest, indorsed the "citizens'" candidates. The Kane county independent movement proved abortive, but victory was registered against "clique domination " in Will county, and in Cook county a stinging rebuke was administered to the corrupt gangsters who had for five or six years controlled the county offices and emolu- ments. The "barnacles," claimed the reformers, were being swept off the ship of state. Elsewhere, notably in Perry county, the result of dissension in the republican ranks had been either democratic gains or democratic victories.37
The republican party of 1870 had lost the spirituality that had characterized it in its early battles for freedom as a minor- ity party. In that day the spoilsman had sought satisfaction for his ambitions in the ranks of the "unterrified" democracy, but the revolution of 1860 with its spoils of victory had drawn the professional politician into the republican ranks. After a decade of power the republican party was in need of much the same purification as that through which the democratic party had passed in the lean days of its failures during the Civil War.
37 Rockford Gazette, February 4, July 15, 22, September 23, October 7, 21, 1869; Ottawa Free Trader, September 4, 1869; Ottawa Weekly Republican, September 30, October 14, 1869; Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1869; The Nation, 9: 282; Illinois State Register, November 4, 1869; Belleville Democrat, Novem- ber Ix, 1869.
XX. RELIGION, MORALITY, AND EDUCATION, 1860-1870
I N SPITE of the lofty idealism of many northerners, who had welcomed the crusade against slavery, it cannot be denied that war conditions stimulated a moral degeneration sufficiently serious to command the attention of thoughtful observers. Later, when the champions of morality had secured perspective for adequate evaluation of the problem, they girded their loins for combat with the forces of darkness.
During the war normal habits of living were undermined by the incidents of poverty growing out of prevailing high prices and by the consequences of withdrawing a large percent- age of the male population. Newspapers of every political stripe chronicled with horror the growing prevalence of licen- tiousness and crime. Besides the metropolitan vices of Chi- cago, crime seemed to find a safe refuge in cities like Spring- field and Cairo, which had large military establishments. Row- diness and bloody brawls among the soldiers grew at times into organized attacks upon persons and property. Street walks and corners were so infested by gay and flashing damsels, brazen-faced courtesans and their parasites, that the news- papers set up a howl of protest; the Chicago Tribune stated that there were known to be at least two thousand lewd women in that city. Cairo struggled helplessly with the problem, its citizens complaining that there was not another city in the country where the social evil was carried to such fearful and disgusting lengths. In 1865 matters came to a climax when the soldiers were being mustered out at Springfield. The city was so "overrun with blacklegs, burglars, garroters and har- lots, (male and female) who have congregated to rob the sol- diers of their hard earned wages,"1 that Gen-
1 Chicago Tribune, July 22, 24, 1865, January 9, 1866; Cairo Democrat, February 28, March 5, 1864, November 12, 22, 1865; Cairo Evening Bulletin,
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eral John Cook detailed two additional companies to act as a provost guard whereupon the criminal business underwent a decided decline.
In attempting to explain this wave of crime, some held that there was no alarming increase-crime had merely con- centrated in urban centers and was given the light of publicity by a press that had become microscopic; yet it was notably true that the state penitentiary at Joliet was unable to furnish satis- factory accommodations for the increasing number of convicts. To others the fact that in 1867 capital punishment was vir- tually abolished by the legislature explained the increase of crime; they therefore demanded the restoration of the death penalty. Still others proclaimed the wave as the legitimate and inevitable consequences of war; said the Rockford Register, a republican paper: "The restraints imposed upon evil pro- pensities by society and by law, before the war, have been greatly weakened by the bloody scenes and lawlessness of the past four years." 2
Coincident with the numerous reports of a general increase of drunkenness, a reviving temperance movement gathered strength, while the news of extensive frauds by Illinois whisky distillers who had evaded payment of a half million dollars of revenue tax played into the hands of reformers. But tem- perance had had its day in the fifties, and politicians were no longer amenable to the political pressure of the temperance forces. William H. Underwood, of Belleville, confessed in confidence to Senator Trumbull: "We have too many mere partizan drunkards and stump speakers now in office." 3
The public man of the Civil War era must not be judged by the standards of today; indeed, it was only then that the traditional atmosphere, in which all important transactions were aided by alcoholic lubricants, was just beginning to pass away. To be sure, Lincoln could win the unqualified praise March 30, May 28, 1869; Illinois State Register, April 16, 1862, February 10, 1864; Chicago Times, January 6, June 27, 1864; Illinois State Journal, July 25, 1865.
2 Rockford Register, August 12, 1865; Chicago Times, January 21, 1864; Illinois State Register, February 24, 1864; Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1865, November 23, 1866; Illinois State Journal, March 14, 28, 1866, August 8, 1867; Aurora Beacon, December 13, 1866.
3 W. H. Underwood to Trumbull, January 15, 1866, Trumbull manuscripts.
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of a stern old puritan who proclaimed that "In old Abe is Combined the eloquence of an orator the fancy of a poet the Acuteness of a Schoolman the Profoundness of a Philosopher and the piety of a Saint for I am told that he neither drinks intoxicating drinks nor uses that nasty filthy dirty disgusting nauseating Poisonous weed called Tobbacco."4 Yet because he was tolerant of the habits of his fellows he "ran smoothly in society - complaining of no immorality, no intemperance - no vice-no tobacco-chewing."5 But some of the ablest rep- resentatives of the state at the Springfield capitol, in the halls of congress, and on the battlefields of the Civil War were given to overindulgence in intoxicating drinks. In 1868, when the resignation of a prominent United States senator, probably the most loved of all the public men of the day, was demanded by a large portion of his party's press on account of his intem- perate use of liquor, he penned a solemn statement to the people of Illinois in which he frankly confessed the weakness that had brought "discredit upon my State and myself. During twenty seven years of political service - with the exception of ten of those years when I totally abstained - I have often yielded to temptation, and as often have suf- fered the pangs of unutterable remorse; " 6 the people of the state bade him a hearty Godspeed in his plans to reform.
In the first few months of the war many pious observers thought that it had worked out a purification -that the fear and cowardice of those who had stood by as silent witnesses to the martyrdom of the antislavery prophets had been stripped off and forever discarded. With the outbreak of civil strife it required little nerve to discourse on the moral evils of slavery and to set up a lusty shout for the union; the clergy, even those who had previously shrunk from the propositions of the abo- litionist, now demanded the most up-standing loyalty of their fellows and of their congregations. Some had the courage of their convictions and, laying aside their frocks, rushed into the fray ; a notable case was that of Reverend Jesse H. Moore,
4 W. K. Kendall to Trumbull, January 7, 1860, Trumbull manuscripts.
5 Herndon to Joseph Gillespie, February 20, 1866, Gillespie manuscripts. He continued : "Lincoln had no appetites, but woman must get out of his way." 6 Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1868; Rockford Gazette, April 2, 9, 30, 1868 ; Aurora Beacon, April 30, 1868.
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a Methodist pastor at Jacksonville, who raised the One hun- dred and fifteenth regiment in 1862 and graced his colonelcy so well that he was mustered out as a brevet brigadier general. Most clergymen, however, preferred to wage battle from the pulpit from which there now emanated a veritable barrage against the rebel and the copperhead. Loyalty resolutions were pressed upon all church conferences and conventions to such effect that they carried with practically no opposition. The Central Illinois Methodist Conference in September, 1862, adopted a resolution, drafted by Dr. Richard Haney, chaplain of the Sixth Illinois volunteers, requesting President Lincoln to free the Negroes from slavery; this resolution is claimed to be the first ecclesiastical action of the kind to reach the president.7
Although the Methodist conferences displayed unwavering loyalty-even suspending or expelling the few members who openly condemned Lincoln's emancipation policy-yet many felt politics to be too sordid a game to be mixed with true religion. The Illinois conference in session at Lima on Sep- tember 2, 1863, adopted resolutions declaring affairs of state out of order in that conference, while at Carthage efforts were made to establish an independent Methodist church, where politics would not be tolerated in the pulpit; a call was even issued for a meeting of seceders from "abolition synagogues" who favored the organization of a society for christian com- munion free from political partisanship. The impetus of this feeling carried into existence a new organization called the "Christian Union" which within a year was able to send out a call to nearly twenty ministers to assemble in convention at Peoria.8
The democrats espoused and hotly defended the ministerial minority which abstained from politics and denounced the "degeneracy of the church " which allowed " political parsons "
7 Jacksonville Journal, May 12, 1866; Adjutant General, Report, 1861-1866, I: 179. Haney had given thirty years of service to the ministry in Illinois and in September, 1866, preached the centennary sermon of American Methodism at Lexington. Ryan, "Antislavery Struggle in Illinois as it Affected the Metho- dist Episcopal Church," Illinois State Historical Society, Transactions, 1913, P. 75. 8 Chicago Times, October 13, 1863, January 22, 1864; Carthage Repub- lican, November 12, 1863; Illinois State Register, July 27, 1864; Ottawa Free Trader, November 26, 1864; Canton Weekly Register, December 19, 1864.
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to outlaw "ministers who have conscientious scruples against preaching niggerism in the pulpit."9 "It looks very much to an outsider," said the State Register, October 11, 1863, "as if the members of the conference, who approved of the desecration of the church in the manner stated, have their minds more upon the negro and politics, than upon religion and the salvation of souls." "Descending to the low squabbles of pot-house demagogues," commented the St. Louis Repub- lican, "they have willfully placed themselves on the level with those who make politics their trade, or with those miserable creatures, found in some communities, who take delight in stirring up contentions among their neighbors." 10 .
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