In 1814, Shadrack Bond resigned his position as delegate in Congress from the Illinois Territory to take a position as receiver of public money at Kaskaskia, and was succeeded in Congress by Benjamin Stephenson of Randolph County. In 1816, Nathaniel Pope, of Kaskaskia, was elected delegate in Congress. Nathaniel Pope was one of the ablest lawyers of his time and it was fortunate for the State of Illinois that he was our delegate to Congress at the time the Act was passed which provided for the admission of Illinois as a state. In the Act as originally drawn, the northern boundary of Illinois was fixed as an east and west line tangent to the extreme south end of Lake Michigan. Judge Pope, recognizing the future value of a frontage on Lake Michigan, opposed fixing the boundary as the bill provided and secured thereby an agreement fixing the northern boundary at its present location. This saved Chicago, the lead mines of Galena and fourteen. of our richest counties to the State of Illinois.

The Act of Congress providing for the admission of Illinois as a state became a law April 18, 1818, and in July of that same year a convention assembled at Kaskaskia to draft the first constitution. This convention concluded its important work in about one month, and the first election under it was held in the latter part of September, 1818. In this election Shadrack Bond was chosen as the first Governor and Pierre Menard, Lieuten

ant-Governor, for terms of four years. Under that constitution the legislature was all powerful, and the convention which adopted it apparently were so well satisfied with their work that they did not deem it necessary or expedient that the proposed constitution should be submitted to the people who were to be bound by it. A reason for this may be found in the fact that the enabling Act of Congress had provided that the government when formed "shall be republican, and not repugnant to the ordinance of the 13th of July, 1787," in conformity with which a provision was inserted in the Constitution declaring that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter be introduced into this state," and providing further for the emancipation of slaves brought into Illinois from other states. Inasmuch as the original settlement of Illinois was from the southern states, it may have been feared by the men who wrote our first constitution that a majority of the electorate at that time might be found in sympathy with the peculiar southern institution of slavery, and refuse to approve a constitution which abolished slavery in this state. If such a fear did exist, it was without foundation, because a contest arose immediately after the adoption of the constitution which came to issue six years later, the result of which showed the anti-slavery party in a majority.

CHAPTER VII

MIGRATION OF THE MCLEANS

Having set the stage, as it were, in the Illinois country, let us review the situation in the colonies on the seaboard and fix as briefly as possible the landmarks of history as there recorded. In doing so we shall find that in the southern colonies, including Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, a condition had arisen to which the descendants of the early Scotch settlers could not be reconciled. That people originally, like the Pilgrim fathers, had quit their homes across the sea because their own liberty had been abridged; and this innate love of personal freedom had been so ingrained in the character of their descendants that they could not be indifferent to the institution in their midst which consigned the negro to perpetual bondage.

It was a strange coincidence that about the same time the Pilgrims landed from the Mayflower on Plymouth Rock to found the old Bay Colony, which was later Massachusetts, the first load of African negroes were unloaded at Jamestown in Virginia, to be sold into slavery to the southern planters, who, as Cavaliers at the Eng

lish Court, had been taught to regard labor as beneath the dignity of a gentleman. Thus were the two irreconcilable elements, which later were to reach their fruition in the greatest civil war of history, transplanted to these shores. The negroes by nature were adaptable to the southern climate, they were wholly unsuited to the rigorous climate of the north. The northern colonists were agriculturalists; while the early southern colonists were anything but that. So it was only natural that the institution of slavery should take root and grow in the congenial surroundings of the south where it had been recognized as a local institution one hundred years before the Scotch

came.

In communities where slave labor was not absolutely necessary for development of latent resources, a sentiment had grown up by the time of the American Revolution, after one hundred and fifty years of slavery, that the institution was a cancer in our body politic which ultimately must be removed. It is known, for instance, that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were for gradual emancipation of the slaves, and their views doubtless would have been written into the Constitution when it was framed had it not been for the determined opposition of South Carolina and Georgia, whose delegates in the convention served notice that their States would not approve a Constitution which did not protect slavery. It

was necessary to have the Carolinas and Georgia in order to have a Union under the Constitution, so one of the important compromises of the convention, which afterward was characterized by William Lloyd Garrison as "a league with the devil and a covenant with hell," was agreed upon, through which the slave trade was extended for a period of twenty years and the provision known as the fugitive slave law was included. It was significant, however, of the general sentiment of the time that the words "slave" or "slavery" were not allowed to appear in the Constitution.

Even with the new lease of life which the Constitution gave to slavery, the sentiment of that time was so strong against the unholy system that it would have fallen into gradual decay and ultimate dissolution had it not been for the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 by Eli Whitney, a New England yankee, who was teaching school in Georgia and was thus made acquainted with the great problem in cotton culture of separating the fiber and the seed. When done by hand, the operation was slow and laborious to such an extent that there was little profit in the industry, but Whitney's invention multiplied by fifty-fold the output of a slave and thereby made the slave more profitable and therefore more desirable than he had ever been before. As weighed against the golden harvest he could then produce, the right of the slave to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness did