WORLD. For starters, the state was flat broke. Illinois had bankrupted itself investing in public works projects such as canals, roads, and railways that were never built. Illinois’s state bank stopped redeeming currency for gold or silver in 1840, and state bonds were trading for 33 cents on the dollar. No one had money. There was no national currency, and the economies of towns such Quincy and Nauvoo subsisted on scrip, IOU’s, barter, and the occasional gold or silver coin. Counterfeiting was rife, and continually bedeviled Nauvoo.
In his
History of Illinois,
Governor Thomas Ford noted that the southern part of the state had attracted immigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee likely to be poor because they didn’t own slaves, which were banned from Illinois’s free soil. “The wealthy immigrant from the slave States rarely came here,” Ford wrote. But that is not to say that Illinois extended its arms to black people. The legislature resolutely vowed to enforce fugitive slave laws, to ensure that Southerners’ “property” found no shelter in its borders. As in many parts of the United States, abolitionists were held in low regard. Congregationalists in Warsaw, Illinois, barely twenty miles from Nauvoo, dismissed their first minister in 1839 when they learned that he was active in the anti-slavery movement.
An Easterner by birth who lived much of his life in upstate Springfield and Peoria, Governor Ford ungenerously characterized his southern Illinois neighbors as “unambitious of wealth, and great lovers of ease and social enjoyment.” The Southerners in turn despised their northern counterparts, whom they called Yankees, even though they had little idea what the name meant. They thought a “genuine Yankee was a close, miserly, dishonest, selfish getter of money, void of generosity, hospitality, or any of the kindlier feelings of human nature,” Ford wrote.
In downstate Illinois, to be “Yankeed” meant to be cheated. Southern Illinois legislators even opposed the Lake Michigan–to–Illinois River canal that made Chicago’s fortune, because they feared it would bring more New Englanders into their ambit. Northern Illinois residents viewed the typical downstater as “a long, lank, lean, lazy, and ignorant animal, but little in advance of the savage state; one who was content to squat in a log-cabin, with a large family of ill-fed and ill-clothed, idle, ignorant children.”
The settled United States ended at Illinois’s western border, and the frontier was a dangerous place. As elsewhere in Andrew Jackson’s America—Jackson was still alive, although his presidency ended in 1837—the rule of law was theoretical at best. “Each state has the unquestionable right to regulate its own internal concerns according to its own pleasure,” Jackson proclaimed in his Farewell Message to the American people. In his valedictory, just as he had during his presidency, Jackson championed the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which allowed each state to sort out their affairs more or less as it wished. * Across the land, laws became tools of popular will, of whim, or of local bigotry. The sophisticated Manhattan businessman, mayor, and diarist Philip Hone called popular sovereignty “the abominable doctrine . . . viz, that the people are to be governed by the law just so long as it pleases them.”
Rural Illinois, too, was a part of America where people made their own laws. The year before the Mormons came to Hancock County, a young Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln called mob violence the greatest threat to the young body politic. He decried “the increasing disregard of law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts. . . .” If the American experiment were to perish, he continued, it would die from within: “If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we
In his
History of Illinois,
Governor Thomas Ford noted that the southern part of the state had attracted immigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee likely to be poor because they didn’t own slaves, which were banned from Illinois’s free soil. “The wealthy immigrant from the slave States rarely came here,” Ford wrote. But that is not to say that Illinois extended its arms to black people. The legislature resolutely vowed to enforce fugitive slave laws, to ensure that Southerners’ “property” found no shelter in its borders. As in many parts of the United States, abolitionists were held in low regard. Congregationalists in Warsaw, Illinois, barely twenty miles from Nauvoo, dismissed their first minister in 1839 when they learned that he was active in the anti-slavery movement.
An Easterner by birth who lived much of his life in upstate Springfield and Peoria, Governor Ford ungenerously characterized his southern Illinois neighbors as “unambitious of wealth, and great lovers of ease and social enjoyment.” The Southerners in turn despised their northern counterparts, whom they called Yankees, even though they had little idea what the name meant. They thought a “genuine Yankee was a close, miserly, dishonest, selfish getter of money, void of generosity, hospitality, or any of the kindlier feelings of human nature,” Ford wrote.
In downstate Illinois, to be “Yankeed” meant to be cheated. Southern Illinois legislators even opposed the Lake Michigan–to–Illinois River canal that made Chicago’s fortune, because they feared it would bring more New Englanders into their ambit. Northern Illinois residents viewed the typical downstater as “a long, lank, lean, lazy, and ignorant animal, but little in advance of the savage state; one who was content to squat in a log-cabin, with a large family of ill-fed and ill-clothed, idle, ignorant children.”
The settled United States ended at Illinois’s western border, and the frontier was a dangerous place. As elsewhere in Andrew Jackson’s America—Jackson was still alive, although his presidency ended in 1837—the rule of law was theoretical at best. “Each state has the unquestionable right to regulate its own internal concerns according to its own pleasure,” Jackson proclaimed in his Farewell Message to the American people. In his valedictory, just as he had during his presidency, Jackson championed the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which allowed each state to sort out their affairs more or less as it wished. * Across the land, laws became tools of popular will, of whim, or of local bigotry. The sophisticated Manhattan businessman, mayor, and diarist Philip Hone called popular sovereignty “the abominable doctrine . . . viz, that the people are to be governed by the law just so long as it pleases them.”
Rural Illinois, too, was a part of America where people made their own laws. The year before the Mormons came to Hancock County, a young Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln called mob violence the greatest threat to the young body politic. He decried “the increasing disregard of law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts. . . .” If the American experiment were to perish, he continued, it would die from within: “If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we
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