‘In the Hollow of my Hand’: Library’s Local History Room features display highlighting Native American life and culture of Central Illinois

Around the time white settlers began flooding into Tazewell County in the 1820s, Potawatomi War Chief Senachwine compared the settlers’ numbers to the blades of grass on the prairie, while the chief could take all of his people and “place them in the hollow of my hand.”  After futile efforts at resistance and co-existence, the native tribes of our area finally were expelled in the mid-1830s. Some of the stories and memories of the original peoples of Pekin and Tazewell County will be recalled this Columbus Day by Pekin Public Library’s Local History Specialist Jared Olar, who will present a program titled “In the Hollow of my Hand” in the library’s Community Room at 9:30 a.m. Monday, Oct. 10. The library also has a display that spotlights Central Illinois’ Native Americans in the Local History Room.

Displayed here are images of: the war club and grave marker of Senachwine, Pottawatomi War Chief, who resided near the future site of Washington, Illinois, during the 1820s; the text of two speeches of Senachwine on the plight of the Native Americans of Illinois; Black Hawk, a leader of the Sauk and Fox who fought to resist the expulsion of his and other tribes in 1832; and a map showing the various expulsions of the Pottawatomi bands from Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois.

Displayed here are an array of images of Chief Shabbona of the Pottawatomi and his family, who is recorded as having camped in Pekin around 1830 (though his camps usually were in northern Illinois, and he and many members of his family are buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Morris, Illinois). In the image on the left, Shabbona wears the distinctive Pottawatomi turban. Also shown is Mimikwe or Miomex Zebequa ‘Po-ka-no-ka’ (1778-1864), daughter of Daniel Topinabe Bourassa (1758-1826), a Pottawatomi chief in Michigan, who was the chief of Shabbona’s three wives. Two other family members are also shown: Shabbona’s daughter Modwe Quah, and his great-granddaughter Josephine Marshno. Another photograph shows a line of Native American wigwams along Pekin’s railroad tracks during a community fair in the early 1900s which included a commemoration of the Pottawatomi and Kickapoo who lived here until they were forced to leave in the mid-1830s.

In this display is a reproduction of artist George Winter’s 1837 sketch of Kee-waw-nay Village, near Bruce’s Lake in northern Indiana, which depicts Pottawatomi life. Note the distinctive turbans, like that which Chief Shabbona is known to have worn. Also in this display are maps showing the areas where the Illiniwek, Pottawatomi, Kickapoo, and other tribes lived around the time that white settlement began to increase in Illinois. Copies of two historically significant letters of Ninian Edwards that describe the locations of the tribes and chiefs in Illinois while he was territorial governor of Illinois, are also shown. According to Edwards, in May 1812 the future site of Pekin was then the dwelling place of Kickapoo chief Lebourse Sulky.

An array of historic maps from the “Indian Villages of the Illinois Country” collection are here displayed.

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Black Hawk, Shabbona, and the Clearance of Illinois’ Native Americans

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

As previously noted in this column, the city of Pekin was established at the site of a Native American village of about 100 wigwams located on Gravel Ridge along the eastern shore of Pekin Lake (near the location of the Pekin Boat Club). Pekin’s first European settler, Jonathan Tharp, built his cabin in 1824 to the south of that village, at or very near the spot where the former Franklin School stands today, at the foot of Broadway.

The Indians who lived along Gravel Ridge in the 1820s and 1830s were primarily Pottawatomi, but much of Tazewell County also was home to Kickapoo bands. In a letter dated in May 1812, Illinois Territorial Gov. Ninian Edwards wrote, “At Little Makina, a river on the south side of [the] Illinois, five leagues below Peoria, is a band, consisting of Kickapoos, Chippeways, Ottaways and Pottowottamies. They are called warriors, and their head man is Lebourse or Sulky. Their number is sixty men, all desperate fellows and great plunderers.”

While Sulky was a Kickapoo, his other name “Lebourse” is French, for he was, like many Native Americans in Illinois during that period, partly of French descent, even as his own band was made up of warriors from three other tribes besides the Kickapoo. The name of the river that Gov. Edwards said was the location of Sulky’s village – “Little Makina” – might suggest that they were living on the shores of the Mackinaw River south of Pekin. However, the distance “five leagues below Peoria” indicates a spot about 17 miles downriver from Peoria Lake, which is the river distance between Peoria and Pekin, so “Little Makina” must refer to a stream or creek that flows into the Illinois (perhaps Lick Creek?). That would mean Sulky and his band were living at the future site of Pekin around May of 1812.

Another Kickapoo chief in Tazewell County, mentioned by Gov. Edwards in a letter written July 21, 1812, was Pemwotam (or Pemwatome), whose village was at the northeast end of Peoria Lake in Fondulac Township, to the north of the McClugage Bridge. On his raid of the Indian villages of Peoria Lake in Oct. 1812, Gov. Edwards destroyed a Kickapoo village that is said to have been Pemwotam’s. In his 1879 “History of Tazewell County,” Charles C. Chapman gives a somewhat lengthy account of Edwards’ raid, describing the destruction of the Kickapoo village in Fondulac Township and of Pottawatomi chief Black Partridge’s village in Woodford County.

Chapman mentions another Kickapoo chief of Tazewell County named “Old Machina,” whose name is also spelled “Mashenaw.” Machina’s village was near Mackinaw, and Chapman related the pioneers’ recollections of Chief Machina’s displeasure at the new wave of settlers who arrived in the 1820s.

Another Native American name associated with early Pekin history is that of a Pottawatomi leader named Shabbona, whose name is also spelled Shaubena and Shabonee. He was prominent in the early history of Pekin and Tazewell County and played a significant role in the wider history of Illinois, the Midwest and the U.S. At the time that Jonathan Tharp settled at the future site of Pekin, Shabbona’s camp was in the vicinity of Starved Rock, but Pekin pioneer historian William H. Bates indicates that around 1830 Shabbona and his family had set up a small village of Pottawatomi just south of Tharp’s cabin, between McLean Street and Broadway. But not much later, during the Black Hawk War of 1832 Shabbona and his family were camped in northern Illinois.

Pottawatomi leader Shabbona, shown in a daguerreotype printed in John Leonard Conger’s “History of the Illinois River Valley,” 1932.

A member of the Ottawa tribe, Shabbona was born about 1775, but his place of birth is uncertain. In his 1879 “History of Tazewell County,” Charles C. Chapman said Shabbona “was born at an Indian village on the Kankakee river, now in Will county,” but others say he was born in Ontario, Canada, or on the Maumee River in Ohio.

Shabbona was the grandnephew of the great Ottawa Chief Pontiac, and his father had fought alongside Pontiac in Pontiac’s War of 1763. His name comes from the Ottawa word zhaabne (related to the Pottawatomi word zhabné) which means “hardy” or “indomitable,” and interpreted by white settlers as “built like a bear.” The Ottawa originally lived in Ontario, Canada, but were driven out by the Iroquois, moving to Michigan where they joined with the Ojibwa and Pottawatomi, and afterwards migrating with their kinsmen the Pottawatomi to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Around 1800, Shabbona married Pokanoka (Coconako), daughter of a Pottawatomi chief in Illinois named Spotka (Hanokula), and upon the death of his wife’s father he succeeded him as leader of Spotka’s Pottawatomi band.

Chapman devoted a few pages of his 1879 history to the life of Shabbona, whom he praised as “The kind and generous Shaubena” and “that true and generous hearted chief.” In his account of the Black Hawk War of 1832, Chapman wrote:

“At the time the war broke out he, with his band of Pottawatomies, had their wigwams and camps on the Illinois within the present limits of the city of Pekin. Shaubena was a friend of the white man, and living in this county during those perilous times, and known by so many of the early settlers, that we think he deserves more than a passing mention. . . . While young he was made chief of the band, and went to Shaubena Grove (now in De Kalb county), where they were found in the early settlement of that section. In the war of 1812 Shaubena, with his warriors, joined Tecumseh, was aid to that great chief, and stood by his side when he fell at the battle of the Thames.”

Shabbona’s experiences in the War of 1812 convinced him of the futility of armed resistance to white encroachment, and for the rest of his life he strove to live in peace with the white settlers who were flooding into Illinois. Many Native Americans in Illinois called him “the white man’s friend” – and they didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Together with a fellow Pottawatomi leader named Wabaunsee, Shabbona kept the Pottawatomi out of the Black Hawk War, despite two attempts of Sauk war leader Black Hawk to persuade him to join the fight. “On one of these occasions,” Chapman wrote, “when Black Hawk was trying to induce him and his band to join them and together make war upon the whites, when with their forces combined they would be an army that would outnumber the trees in the forest, Shaubena wisely replied ‘Aye; but the army of the palefaces would outnumber the leaves upon the trees in the forest.’ While Black Hawk was a prisoner at Jefferson Barracks he said, had it not been for Shaubena the whole Pottawatomie nation would have joined his standard, and he could have continued the war for years.”

This artist’s depiction of Black Hawk was published in From John Leonard Conger’s “History of the Illinois River Valley,” 1932.

The Black Hawk War was the last, desperate attempt of Native Americans living in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin to resist their displacement before the wave of encroaching white settlers. The war is named for a Sauk warrior named Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, 1767-1838), who had refused to accept the treaties with the U.S. by which the Sauk people had agreed to move from Illinois and Wisconsin to Iowa. Black Hawk repeatedly led hunting parties from Iowa into Illinois, and in 1832 when he was ordered to cease his “incursions,” he attempted to forge a confederacy of tribes to resist white settlement. But by 1832 it was already too late for the Indians of Illinois – though the war opened in April 1832 with a victory for Black Hawk caused by American incompetence at Stillman’s Run (in which Pekin co-founder Isaac Perkins was killed), Black Hawk’s efforts were futile and the war was over in months, having been nothing more than an occasion for whites and Indians to commit some brutal massacres. Black Hawk retreated to Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin, where he surrendered on Aug. 27, 1832, and bringing Illinois’ leaders to the conclusion that all remaining Native Americans should be expelled from the state. How differently things may have turned out for the Indians of Illinois if Black Hawk had taken an approach more like that of Shabbona and of his fellow Sauk chief Keokuk.

Chapman commented, “To Shaubena many of the early settlers of this county owe the preservation of their lives, for he was ever on the alert to save the whites.” But, Chapman said, “by saving the lives of the whites (he) endangered his own, for the Sacs and Foxes threatened to kill him, and made two attempts to execute his threats. They killed Pypeogee, his son, and Pyps, his nephew, and hunted him down as though he was a wild beast.” After the surrender of Black Hawk, for their alliance with the U.S. Shabbona and Wabaunsee were rejected by their people, who instead chose as their leader Kaltoo, also called Ogh-och-pees, eldest son of the late Pottawatomi war chief Senachwine (Sen-noge-wone).

After the Black Hawk War, new treaties were negotiated so Illinois would be cleared of all Native American tribes. The Pottawatomi of Indiana and Illinois, including those who had lived at Pekin, were deported to Nebraska and Kansas, and, and we noted before, the agonizing march of the Indiana bands is remembered as the Pottawatomi Trail of Death. Shabbona, however, was allowed to have a reservation of two sections of land at Shabbona’s Grove. But “by leaving it and going west for a short time the Government declared the reservation forfeited, and sold it the same time as other vacant land. Shaubena finding on his return his possessions gone, was very sad and broken down in spirit, and left the grove for ever,” Chapman wrote.

The people of the town of Ottawa then bought him some land near Seneca in Grundy County, where Shabbona stayed until his death on July 17, 1859. “He was buried with great pomp in the cemetery at Morris,” Chapman wrote. His widow Pokanoka drowned in Mazen Creek, Grundy County, on Nov. 30, 1864, and she was laid by his side. Efforts to raise money for a grave monument were interrupted by the Civil War, so it was not until 1903 that a large inscribed boulder was placed at their final resting place. According to the 1886 compilation “Abraham Lincoln’s Vocations,” some years later Shabbona’s daughter and her son, John Shabbona, came from the reservation at Mayetta, Kansas, and visited Shabbona’s Grove, viewing photographs and documents pertaining to Shabbona in DeKalb and Chicago. In 1903, when Shabbona’s monument was laid, John Shabbona again returned to Chicago along with members of several of the expelled tribes of Illinois for a special Indian encampment recognizing the original peoples of Chicago (see “City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934,” 2015, by Rosalyn R. LaPier, David R. M. Beck, page 64).

As an epilogue, in 2001 the Department of Interior’s Solicitor wrote an opinion that Shabbona’s Grove was never lawfully forfeited and therefore is a reservation owned by the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation. The case is still pending, however.

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Free State of Illinois: Gov. Coles calls for emancipation

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

Previously in our ongoing Illinois Bicentennial series, we saw how the controversy over slavery affected the history and development of Illinois from the formation of the Northwest Territory in 1787 right up to Illinois statehood in 1818. In fact, the dispute between Illinois’ pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers played a role both in the breaking off of the Illinois Territory from the Indiana Territory in 1809 and in the race to achieve statehood for Illinois prior to Missouri.

This week we’ll recall how the issue flared up again during the tenure of Illinois’ second state governor Edward Coles (1786-1868).

About two years after Illinois became a state, the U.S. Congress agreed to admit Missouri and Maine to the Union simultaneously under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which sought to defuse tensions between America’s pro-slavery and abolitionist parties by keeping the numbers of new “slave states” and “free states” balanced. The Missouri Compromise stipulated that slavery would be illegal in any new states formed from the areas of the Louisiana Purchase north of Parallel 36°30′ North.

Looking ahead, we can see that although the issue of slavery continued to simmer in the next three decades, at the national level the Missouri Compromise had moved the issue to the back burner. This arrangement endured until 1854, when Congress passed Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and made slavery possible north of Parallel 36°30′ North.

Douglas’ rival Abraham Lincoln sharply criticized the Kansas-Nebraska Act in his Peoria speech on Oct. 16, 1854, an important step on the road that would take Lincoln to the White House. The resulting outrage over the act on the part of the free states and the abolitionists led to the dreadful violence of “Bleeding Kansas” and, ultimately, to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and the final abolition of slavery in 1865.

In the great conflict over slavery, Illinois was ranged with the free states. As noted before, Article 6 the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had outlawed slavery in any territories or states that later would be formed from the Northwest Territory. But in its early history Illinois’ place among the slave states was somewhat dubious and precarious. Most of Illinois’ early settlers came from slave states and territories, and from 1796 to 1806 there were repeated attempts to legalize slavery in the Indiana and Illinois territories.

Although the pro-slavery forces in Illinois failed to legalize slavery, effectively the practice of slavery still went on in Illinois due to an indentured servitude law that made it possible for slave owners to pressure their slaves to agree to continue to serve their masters after coming to Illinois. In Jan. 1818, the Illinois Territorial Legislature sought to emphasize to Congress that Illinois would be a free state by approving a bill that would have reformed labor contracts to eliminate the practice of indentured servitude. However, Gov. Ninian Edwards (1775-1833), himself a wealthy aristocratic slave-owner, vetoed the bill, claiming it was unconstitutional – the only time Edwards ever exercised his veto power as territorial governor.

After Illinois achieved statehood, pro-slavery forces continued to strive to legalize it. In anticipation of Illinois’ admission to the Union, the territory framed a state constitution in Aug. 1818 – but it is significant that Illinois’ first constitution had a “loophole” of which pro-slavery leaders soon tried to avail themselves in order to legalize slavery. On the question of slavery, the 1818 constitution said, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter be introduced into this state otherwise than for the punishment of crimes.”

In his 1933 history, “Illinois: the Heart of the Nation,” former Ill. Gov. Edward Dunne explained the loophole in Illinois’ first constitution in these words (pp. 240, 260, 262, emphasis added):

“The section of the constitution relative to slavery and prohibiting it in the state, as amended and finally passed, was a compromise between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery members of the convention. In effect, it practically admitted that the former indentured laws of the territory practically amounted to slavery, but provided that the children of indentured persons were to become free. Under that provision, no indentures made outside the state could be enforced within the state, but the constitution failed to bind the state not to make a revision of the constitution which would admit slavery. Notwithstanding that the constitution failed to have any provision in strict accordance with the Ordinance of 1787 relative to slavery, it was accepted and approved by Congress, . . .

“Slavery had already been introduced into the state. Slaves and indentured servants, who were in almost as abject a condition of service as slaves, were numerous in Illinois at the time this constitution was adopted and, noting the word ‘hereafter’ in the constitution, there was a rush to have indentured articles approved before the constitution went into effect. . . .

“To have framed a constitution favoring slavery, or one making no declaration on the subject, would have invited a denial by Congress of the application for statehood. Therefore, some declaration against slavery was necessary, but reserving a method of reopening the question, was devised and carried in the convention . . . .”

As expected, Dunne wrote, “That opportunity soon arose and was promptly seized by the pro-slavery element in the state.”

It happened following the election of Virginia-born Edward Coles as Illinois’ second governor. In Virginia, Coles held a large estate and owned at least 20 slaves, and he served as President James Madison’s private secretary from 1809 to 1815 with a special assignment as ambassador to Russia. By 1814, Coles had come to oppose slavery, corresponding with ex-President Thomas Jefferson on the subject that year.

Edward Coles, 2nd Illinois governor, 1822-1826

After returning from his diplomatic work in Europe, Madison appointed Coles registrar of the federal land office in Edwardsville, Ill. After arranging matters at his Virginia estate, Coles struck out west for Illinois. On the way down the Ohio River, Coles made the decision to set his slaves free. “He promised them each emancipation from slavery,” Dunne wrote, “and 160 acres of land and help for farming, and they, of course, joyfully accepted their freedom and every one of them agreed to accompany him to Edwardsville. Before landing in Illinois Coles gave each of his slaves a written certificate of freedom and all settled around his home near Edwardsville.”

Two years later, Coles and three other men entered the race to succeed Shadrach Bond as governor of Illinois. The other gubernatorial candidates were Illinois Supreme Court Justice Joseph Phillips, Associate Justice Thomas C. Brown, and Gen. James B. Moore – Phillips and Brown ran on pro-slavery platforms, while Coles and Moore were anti-slavery. Even though pro-slavery voters outnumbered those opposed to slavery, Coles managed to secure his election because the pro-slavery vote was split almost equally between Phillips and Brown, while Moore only won a few hundred votes.

Coles decided to force the issue of slavery on his very first day as governor in 1822, calling in his inaugural address before the Illinois General Assembly in Vandalia for the immediate emancipation of all slaves or indentured servants in Illinois. The pro-slavery members of the General Assembly responded by making plans to call for a new constitutional convention, with the unstated intention of crafting a constitution that would enshrine slave-owning as a right.

The resolution to put the question of calling a new convention to the people for a vote narrowly passed the Illinois House of Representatives by the slimmest of margins, and under extremely questionable circumstances. Initially the resolution failed by one vote when Nicholas Hansen of Pike County switched sides and voted against the resolution. But Hansen’s own election to the House had been marred by a vote-counting dispute – so his outraged pro-slavery colleagues expelled Hansen from the House and replaced him with his opponent in the election, John Shaw, who then obediently voted in favor of the resolution.

Even though the majority of Illinois voters and members of the General Assembly favored slavery, Dunne observed that, “The high-handed, arbitrary and unfair methods pursued by the House in evicting Hansen and securing thereby a two-thirds vote for the convention, disgusted many fair-minded citizens who had been tolerant of slavery.” Furthermore, although those who sought a new constitutional convention had the goal of turning Illinois from an officially free to an officially slave state, they were not forthright about their intentions, and that cynical approach probably cost them support.

Consequently, despite the numerical advantage and the initial momentum of those who wanted to call a constitutional convention, in the end their effort was resoundingly defeated on Aug. 2, 1824, by a vote of 6,640 to 4,972, “after a campaign of exceeding violence, lasting about eighteen months,” Dunne wrote. It had been an ugly fight, but Gov. Coles and his anti-slavery allies, including the influential journalists Morris Birkbeck and Daniel P. Cook (eponym of Cook County), managed to prevent the prospect of a pro-slavery constitution.

In retrospect, it can be seen that the very fate of the nation hung upon the outcome of Illinois’ convention battle – for if Illinois had switched from free to slave, the proponents of slavery would have gained permanent control of the U.S. Senate, “and no law thereafter could have been passed by Congress limiting or restricting slavery in the United States,” Dunne wrote.

The 1818 constitution limited governors to a single term, so Coles left office in 1826. Though he was able to defeat the convention movement, he was otherwise impotent against the pro-slavery General Assembly, which rejected all of his nominees to state office and ignored his legislative recommendations. Afterwards Coles was sued by the State for freeing his slaves without paying bonds of $200 to vouch for the good behavior of each freed slave. Even though he’d free his slaves before entering Illinois, the State initially won the politically-motivated suit – Coles would have had to pay $2,000, a great financial blow, but Coles appealed to the state Supreme Court and won on appeal.

Wearied by his bitter political experiences in Illinois, Coles returned to the East, finally settling in Philadelphia. He was gravely disappointed by his son Robert, who became a slave-owner and fought for the Confederacy – but he did live to see the abolition of slavery and emancipation of all slaves in the U.S. in the 1860s.

In 1929, a bronze portrait of Gov. Coles was erected in his memory in Valley View Cemetery in Edwardsville. Also, in recognition of Coles’ commitment to the abolition of slavery, the State of Illinois Human Rights Commission offers the Edward Coles Fellowship, a scholarship for law students.

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Settlers pour into Peoria and Tazewell counties

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

On Friday, March 2, at 11 a.m., the Pekin Public Library will present the third video in its Illinois Bicentennial Series in the Community Room. The video that will be shown is 34 minutes in length and is entitled, “Farming in Tazewell County During the ’30s and ’40s,” presented by Tom Finson. Like last month’s Finson video, it includes vintage film footage from around the county. Admission is free and the public is invited.

For the pioneer settlers of central Illinois, farming wasn’t merely a business, but was crucial for a settler family’s survival. Our column this week recall the first of the post-War of 1812 settlers in our area.

The summer before Illinois was admitted as the 21st state of the Union in 1818, a territorial census counted 40,258 souls living in the soon-to-be state – but the new state’s population rapidly increased over the next decade. Up to that time, American settlers in Illinois had come chiefly from southern states and had settled almost exclusively in southern Illinois.

But with the dawn of statehood a new wave of migration arrived, in which settlers from southern Illinois began to move north, joined by newcomers from states north of the Ohio River. These new arrivals to central Illinois came up the Illinois River or overland from southern Illinois to Fort Clark (Peoria) and its environs – and as we shall see, these newcomers included William Blanchard and Nathan Dillon, names prominent in early Tazewell County history.

As we saw previously, American soldiers built Fort Clark in 1813 on the ruins of the old French village of La Ville de Maillet, which Capt. Thomas Craig had burned the year before during an Illinois militia campaign meant to warn the Indians of Peoria Lake not to ally with Britain during the War of 1812 (but which likely had the opposite effect).

In relating the story of Craig’s burning of the French village, S. DeWitt Drown’s “Peoria Directory for 1844” says (italics as in original), “Capt. Craig excused himself for this act of devastation, by accusing the French of being in league with the Indians, with whom the United States were at war; but more especially, by alledging (sic) that his boats were fired upon from the town, while lying at anchor before it. All this the French have ever denied, and charge Capt. Craig with unprovoked, malignant cruelty.”

Craig’s accusation that the French Americans of Peoria Lake were in league with Indians hostile to the U.S. was based on the fact that the French not only lived peaceably with the tribes of the area, but even sometimes intermarried with them. But the tribes of Peoria Lake had declined to join Tecumseh’s confederacy and were considered to be friendly until the unprovoked attacks of Territorial Gov. Ninian Edwards and Capt. Craig.

The destruction of La Ville de Maillet essentially ended the French phase of the European settlement of central Illinois – afterwards only the French fur traders of Opa Post at the present site of Creve Coeur were left in the area. The early historians of Peoria and Tazewell counties tended to disparage the early French settlers of central Illinois, even to the point of claiming that they weren’t really settlers at all. For example, Charles C. Chapman’s 1879 “History of Tazewell County” described the men and women of Opa Post in this way:

“These French traders cannot be classed as settlers, at least in the light we wish to view the meaning of that term. They made no improvements; they cultivated no land; they established none of those bulwarks of civilization brought hither a half century ago by the sturdy pioneer. On the other hand, however, they associated with the natives; they adopted their ways, habits and customs; they intermarried and in every way, almost, became as one of them.”

Chapman’s comments reveal that his disparaging appraisal of the French fur traders was due not only to disdain for the social class and lifestyle of a fur trader, but also the pervasive racist bias against Native Americans that spread westward with American expansion. Other influences included the age-old enmity between England and France that stemmed from the medieval Hundred Year’s War, with religious estrangement and animosity between Protestants and Catholics also thrown into the mix.

Those same attitudes toward the Indians and the French were also exhibited by Charles Ballance in his 1870 “History of Peoria.” In his history, Ballance argues at length that the French Americans of La Ville de Maillet were culturally and socially greatly inferior to the Americans of British origin who supplanted them, finding fault with the style of the homes they built and even denying the reports of the village’s former inhabitants that their settlement included a wine cellar and a Catholic church or chapel. Maybe behind Ballance’s common ethnic, racial, and social disdain for the Indians and French, there was an uneasy conscience over the fact that the city of Peoria of Ballance’s day only existed because the French settlement had been wiped out in 1812.

The construction of Fort Clark at the site of the French village in 1813 planted the seed of the present city of Peoria, for a new village quickly grew up around the fort (the site is today Liberty Park on the Peoria Riverfront, at Liberty and Water streets). According to Chapman, the fort itself burned down five years later. But in 1819, one year after Illinois statehood, the pioneer founders of Peoria arrived: Joseph Fulton, Abner Eads, William Blanchard (1797-1883), and four other men, who had traveled by keelboat and on horseback.

The next few years saw the arrivals of even more settlers. In 1825 the state legislature created Peoria County, which originally covered a large area of central and northern Illinois, including the future Cook County and the soon-to-be formed Tazewell County. Ten years later, Peoria was officially incorporated as a town, and by 1845 Peoria was large enough to incorporate as a city.

Three years after William Blanchard’s arrival at Fort Clark, he and a few companions crossed Peoria Lake to present-day Fon du Lac Township in Tazewell County, building a dwelling and growing crops south of the future Woodford County border. Here is how Chapman told the story of Blanchard’s earliest pioneer activities:

“Wm. Blanchard, Jr., is a native of Vermont, where he was born in 1797; left that State when seven years of age, and with his parents went to Washington Co., N. Y., where his father, William, died. When seventeen years of age he enlisted in the regular army, and took an active part in the war of 1812, serving five years, when he, with Charles Sargeant, Theodore Sargeant and David Barnes, veterans of the war, started West, coming to Detroit, Mich., thence to Ft. Wayne, whence they journeyed in a canoe to Vincennes, thence to St. Louis. From there they came up the Illinois in a keel boat manned by a fishing crew, and commanded by a man named Warner, and landed at Ft. Clark, now Peoria, in the spring of 1819.

“Crossing the river to what is known as the bottom lands they found a cleared spot, and with such tools as they could arrange from wood put in a patch of corn and potatoes. This land is now embodied in Fond du Lac township. Looking farther down the stream they found, in 1822, an old French field of about ten acres, on which they erected a rude habitation, and soon this soil was filled with a growth of blooming corn and potatoes. This was the first settlement between Ft. Clark and Chicago, and was the first dwelling erected. The site is now covered by the fine farm of Jacob Ames.”

In this map detail from an 1873 atlas of Tazewell County, the farm of Jacob Ames —
designated on the map as land owned by “Rachael Ames” — is shown in Sections 11 and 12 of Fondulac Township, around the area of Grosenbach Road. William Blanchard’s “rude habitation” is said to have been built in 1822 on land that later was included in the farm of Jacob Ames.

One year before Blanchard came to the future Tazewell County, North Carolina native Nathan Dillon (1793-1868) brought his family overland from Ohio to Sangamon County, first dwelling on Sugar Creek south of Springfield. Dillon then struck out north, arriving in the future Tazewell County in 1823.

Dillon has traditionally been called Tazewell County’s first white settler, but he arrived here a year after Blanchard and long after the Frenchmen of Opa Post. The confusion arose from the haste with which Chapman’s 1879 Tazewell County history was compiled and edited – Chapman didn’t learn that Blanchard preceded Dillon until the printing of his book was underway, so Chapman’s book at first states that Dillon was the earliest, then later on corrects and apologizes for that error. The monument at Dillon’s grave erroneously pronouncing him the county’s first white settler stems from Chapman’s mistake.

But regardless who was first, Blanchard and Dillon both possessed pioneering courage and grit, paving the way for many others who were soon to follow.

Next week we’ll review the story of the creation of Tazewell County.

#capt-thomas-craig, #charles-ballance, #drowns-directory, #fort-clark, #french-trading-house, #illinois-bicentennial, #la-ville-de-maillet, #nathan-dillon, #ninian-edwards, #opa-post, #tazewell-county-history, #tazewell-county-settlers, #war-of-1812, #william-blanchard

Illinois’ race to statehood: 1813-1818

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

It was less than a decade from the creation of the Illinois Territory in 1809 until Illinois entered the Union as the 21st state. During those years, as we saw last time, the nation would go to war once more against Britain – the War of 1812.

Despite some impressive successes in battle, the U.S. soon found that it had bit off more than it could chew – the British sacked and burned down the nation’s capital in 1814, destroying the original White House. In the Old Northwest, Britain and its Native American allies were able to seize parts of Michigan and Illinois and the entirety of Wisconsin (lands then a part of the Illinois Territory) and maintain control until the war’s end. The British Navy also had the U.S. blockaded, ruining the economy.

With the U.S. facing further humiliation and Britain preoccupied with the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, both sides in the war agreed to cease hostilities. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which the U.S. ratified on Feb. 17, 1815. The treaty called for Britain and the U.S. to restore the territory they had seized from each other – effectively the war ended in a stalemate.

In practical terms, however, the War of 1812 left the U.S. poised to expand further into Native American lands of the Old Northwest. The destruction of Tecumseh’s confederacy in 1813 had brought an end to effective Native American resistance to the encroachment of land-hungry U.S. settlers who had been pouring into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Although the Treaty of Ghent called for the U.S. to respect the rights and territories of the American Indians, the U.S. never honored that article of the treaty – and Britain, which abandoned its former allies at the negotiating table, did not wish to go to war again to enforce it.

Even with Native American resistance in the Old Northwest effectively neutralized, however, there were still legal and economic obstacles that slowed the settlement of the Illinois Territory. As former Illinois Gov. Edward Dunne explained in his 1933 history of Illinois, “Up to this time (1812) there had been but little immigration unto Illinois. Fear of Indian atrocities was one cause, but the greater and more far-reaching one was the inability of settlers to gain legal title to the land upon which they located.” In the eyes of the law, most of the settlers in Illinois were squatters, since the laws up till then discouraged white incursion in a region that the British king had formerly set aside as an Indian Reserve.

Shadrach Bond, first state governor of Illinois, is shown in this image from Edward Dunne’s 1933 Illinois history, “Illinois — The Heart of the Nation.”

That was soon to change. Dunne wrote, “Shadrach Bond, upon his election as delegate to Congress for Illinois Territory in 1812, exerted himself vigorously in securing a preemption law that would enable a settler to secure a quarter-section of land, and thus attract settlers to the territory.” In 1813 Congress approved Bond’s proposed law, which stipulated that if a settler made improvements to the land he’d secured, then he had the first right to buy that land at government sale.

Due to that law, Illinois soon saw a dramatic influx of settlers. According to Dunne, “The passage of this law, the ending of the war with Great Britain, and the subsequent treaties of peace with the Indians in 1815 under which they conveyed their titles to the United States, opened wide the doors in Illinois for rapid settlement and growth for the first time in its chequered history. From now on the condition of Illinois ceased to be static and became dynamic. Its population in 1810 was 12,282; in 1820 it was 55,162.”

Continuing, Dunne observed, “The dammed-up waters of immigration and civilization had sapped and undermined the walls of war, isolation and law that had surrounded Illinois, and the waves began to overflow the fertile prairies of all the section. Riding on these waves came not only men and women from the Southland, as heretofore, but from all over America and from foreign lands.”

By 1816, editorials were appearing in Daniel Pope Cook’s newspapers, the Kaskaskia Herald and the Western Intelligencer, advocating in favor of Illinois statehood and showing the advantages of self-government that statehood would bring. The chief obstacle to statehood was the Northwest Ordinance’s stipulation that a territory’s population must be at least 60,000 before it could be admitted as a state. Nevertheless, Congress had waived that requirement when it admitted Ohio as a state – and Cook argued that Illinois should be granted the same leniency.

As it happened, the simmering controversy over slavery helped to unite the people of Illinois, both pro- and anti-slavery, in support for statehood. As Dunne explained in his history, support for statehood in Illinois was promoted by the fact that a Congressional bill was already pending for Missouri statehood, and everyone expected Missouri to be a slave state.

“The fear that the Missourians would anticipate the men of Illinois in securing admission of their state into the Union caused prompt action,” Dunne wrote. “The anti-slavery element feared that if Missouri was admitted as a slave-state, that it would be used as a precedent for slavery in Illinois. On the other hand, the pro-slavery element feared the admission of Missouri to statehood before Illinois because, as they believed, it would attract immigration from the South and prevent settlers from coming to Illinois. It developed that both discordant elements, from different motives and activated by different fears, were united in favoring the admission of Illinois to statehood before the pro-slavery crowd in Missouri could secure statehood from Congress.”

Although Illinois would not become a state until 1818, the bill to admit Illinois to the Union was first introduced in Congress on Jan. 23, 1812, by Illinois’ territorial delegate (and former territorial secretary) Nathaniel Pope (1784-1850). According to Dunne, in its original form the bill would have set Illinois’ northern boundary “at a line drawn east and west from a point drawn ten miles north of the most southerly part of Lake Michigan in an attempt to approach compliance with a provision of the Ordinance of 1787.” That would have given Illinois only a very small amount of Lake Michigan shoreline.

Nathaniel Pope, Illinois territorial delegate to Congress who submitted the petition for Illinois statehood in early 1818, is shown in this image from Edward Dunne’s 1933 Illinois history, “Illinois — The Heart of the Nation.”

But while the bill was still in committee, Pope had the proposed northern boundary moved 41 miles north, to the position where it is today. The members of the committee accepted the new proposed boundary because it would make the new state more economically viable and, through the Great Lakes system, would firmly link Illinois to New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. How very different Illinois history would have been if Chicago had instead developed as the largest and wealthiest city of Wisconsin!

On Jan. 16, 1818, the Illinois Territorial Legislature formally petitioned Congress to become a state, sending the petition by the hand of Delegate Pope. The same month, the Legislature, seeking to emphasize to Congress that Illinois would be a free state, approved a bill that would have reformed labor contracts to eliminate the practice of indentured servitude whereby slavery was able to exist in Illinois despite being illegal. However, Gov. Ninian Edwards (1775-1833), himself a wealthy aristocratic slave-owner, vetoed the bill, claiming it was unconstitutional. It was the only time Edwards ever exercised his veto power as territorial governor.

The issue of slavery would remain at the forefront of Illinois political issues in the early years after statehood, as pro-slavery forces strove to legalize it. In anticipation of Illinois’ admission to the Union, the territory framed a state constitution in August – but it is significant that, whereas the Ohio and Indiana state constitutions explicitly forbade any amendments or the writing of new constitutions that would legalize slavery, Illinois’ first constitution had no such provision, a “loophole” of which pro-slavery leaders soon tried to avail themselves.

After the ratification of the constitution, Illinois held elections to fill the state offices. Maryland-born Shadrach Bond (1773-1830), former territorial delegate to Congress, was elected the first Illinois governor, taking office on Oct. 6, 1818, about two months before Illinois became a state. The march to statehood proceeded apace throughout the remainder of 1818, until at last, on Dec. 3, 1818, President James Monroe signed the bill granting Illinois admission to the Union as the 21st state. The new state’s population was tabulated in an 1818 census at 40,258.

The territorial capital at Kaskaskia on the Mississippi River now became the first state capital, even as it formerly had been the seat of government reaching back to the days of Virginia’s vast Illinois County during the Revolutionary War. Flooding of the Mississippi led to the removal of the state capital to Vandalia in just two years, however.

The Illinois State House at Kaskaskia, where the first state legislature convened in 1818, from an image in Edward Dunne’s 1933 Illinois history, “Illinois — The Heart of the Nation.”

At statehood, Illinois already had 15 counties, but within a year four more counties were added. At that time the yet-future Tazewell County’s lands were included in the oversized Bond and Madison counties which then extended all the way to Illinois’ northern border.

The Illinois General Assembly established Tazewell County a mere nine years after statehood. During those years Illinois experienced a rising tide of immigration – and many of those settlers came up the Illinois River or overland from southern Illinois to Fort Clark (Peoria) and its environs. We’ll look closer at that wave of settlement next time.

#daniel-pope-cook, #illinois-bicentennial, #illinois-statehood, #indian-reserve, #kaskaskia, #nathaniel-pope, #ninian-edwards, #northwest-ordinance, #shadrach-bond, #slavery, #treaty-of-ghent, #vandalia, #war-of-1812

War returns to Illinois

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

Following the conclusion of George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Campaign in 1779 during the Revolutionary War, peace would reign over the wider Illinois Country for the next three decades.

During that period, off to the east the Ohio Country was the theater of numerous battles during the Northwest Indian War, and while Native Americans from Illinois joined in the fighting in Ohio, Illinois itself was not a field of battle.

That long peace, during which several Ohio tribes began cultural accommodation with white Americans, would be broken a mere three years after the 1809 formation of the Illinois Territory, with the outbreak of the War of 1812, at which time war returned to Illinois.

But given the state of affairs in the territories of Indiana and Illinois in the years leading up to the United States’ declaration of war against Britain, it was inevitable that Illinois would also be caught up in bloodshed.

Illinois was caught up in war at that time as a consequence of an important treaty that Indiana Territorial Gov. William Henry Harrison had negotiated with a number of Indian tribes of Indiana and Illinois in 1809 – the same year that the U.S. Congress separated the Illinois Territory from Indiana and erected it as a separate territory.

Throughout his time as territorial governor of Indiana, Harrison had pursued a consistent policy of negotiating treaties to open up more Native American land for European-American settlement. One of the most important of his treaties was the Treaty of Fort Wayne (also known by the nicknames of the Ten O’Clock Line Treaty or the Twelve Mile Line Treaty), initially signed Sept. 29, 1809, only seven months after the Illinois Territory was separated from Indiana.

Through this treaty, the U.S. acquired 3 million acres of land in Indiana and Illinois – but the treaty caused great unrest among the Native American tribes of these territories, soon leading to war. The difficulty was that at the outset, three important tribes, the Kickapoo, the Wea, and the Miami, were absolutely opposed to selling any more of their land near the Wabash River. Contrary to President James Madison’s wishes, Harrison adopted a divisive strategy of making an agreement with tribes who were willing to sell their land, then using their agreement to pressure unwilling tribes to sign the treaty.

Harrison’s strategy was successful – the Pottawatomi persuaded the Miami to sign, Miami Chief Pacanne then persuaded the Wea to sign, and the Wea then persuaded the Kickapoo to sign. Thus the Treaty of Fort Wayne was finalized by the spring of 1810.

However, many of the Shawnee as well as members of different tribes rejected the treaty. In August 1810, a Shawnee chief named Tecumseh, who opposed any further Indian accommodation with white encroachment and aspired to bring about an independent Native American nation in the Old Northwest, brought 400 warriors to a meeting with Gov. Harrison at Vincennes, Ind. At the meeting, Tecumseh pronounced the new treaty to be illegitimate and warned that any attempt by whites to settle the newly acquired lands would be met with war, in which Tecumseh said he would seek an alliance with Britain.

This led to the outbreak of Tecumseh’s War in 1811, a two-year conflict that overlapped with the War of 1812. The most memorable – and first regular battle – of the war was the Battle of Tippecanoe on Nov. 6, 1811. In response to Tecumseh’s plans to wage war, Harrison led an army on a mission to destroy Prophetstown, Ind., capital of Tecumseh’s confederacy. Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa, an influential Indian holy man known as “the Prophet,” then attempted a surprise attack on Harrison’s camp, but Tenskwatawa was defeated, and Harrison’s men destroyed Prophetstown the following day. Harrison’s victory gave him his nickname of “Tippecanoe” – a reputation he would ride all the way to the White House in the presidential election of 1840.

With the aid of British arms, Tecumseh maintained the struggle until he was finally defeated and slain during the War of 1812 at the Battle of the Thames on Oct. 5, 1813, near present-day Chatham, Ontario, Canada. One of the United States’ chief purposes for declaring war on Britain in 1812 was to conquer and annex Canada – the American victory at the Battle of the Thames temporarily gave the U.S. control of western Ontario, and also destroyed Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy. (A warrior who fought alongside Tecumseh at this battle was an Ottawa-born Pottawatomi named Shabbona, who would live for a while at Pekin, Ill., in the latter 1820s and very early 1830s.)

With the outbreak of war against Britain and Britain’s Native American allies, Illinois Territorial Gov. Ninian Edwards became convinced that the Indian tribes of Illinois would enter the war on Britain’s side. Edwards came to that conviction following the massacre at the Battle of Fort Dearborn (Chicago) on Aug. 15, 1812, where the Pottawatomi and Winnebago obtained a complete victory and burned down the fort. Among the slain at Fort Dearborn was well-known Indian agent and scout William Wells, an adopted member of the Miami tribe (in which he had the name “Apekonit”), son-in-law of Miami chief Little Turtle who had fought the U.S. during the Northwest Indian War.

Ninian Edwards (1775-1833) was the first and only territorial governor of Illinois, serving from 1809 to 1818, and the third state governor of Illinois, serving from 1826 to 1830.

Aiming to prevent Native American alliances with Britain, in Oct. 1812 Edwards personally led a small force from southern Illinois north to Peoria Lake, attacking and destroying a few Kickapoo and Pottawatomi villages, including villages of Pottawatomi chiefs Gomo and Black Partridge in the area of Upper Peoria Lake, and that of Kickapoo chief Pemwotam (the latter’s village being located on Peoria Lake in present day Fondulac Township, Tazewell County).

In a second attack, Edwards sent Capt. Thomas Craig to Peoria Lake, where Craig attacked the French settlers and their Native American neighbors and relatives living at La Ville de Maillet (Peoria). Even though the French were U.S. citizens, because they were on good terms with the Pottawatomi Craig claimed they were supplying the Indians with guns – so he set fire to La Ville de Maillet, slaughtering many inhabitants and taking the survivors prisoner, taking them downriver to Alton. These atrocities were later condemned by Congress and the French survivors were compensated for their losses.

This diagram-map from S. DeWitt Drown’s “Peoria Directory for 1844” shows the layout and land-ownership of the old French-American village of La Ville de Maillet (Peoria) in 1812, just before it was destroyed by Illinois militia during the War of 1812. Many of the residents were slain in the attack, but some escaped while most survivors were taken prisoner and carried down to Alton, Ill.

Edwards’ unprovoked attacks angered the U.S. government because the Indians of Peoria Lake were considered to be friendly, some of their chiefs having declined to join Tecumseh’s confederacy (Black Partridge had even helped the Kinzie family escape at the Battle of Fort Dearborn). As a result, the native tribes of this area became hostile to all white settlers, Black Partridge became a British ally, and Gov. Edwards, now out of favor with President James Madison’s administration, found it advisable to move to Kentucky until the end of the war.

The following year, Illinois militiamen and U.S. troops returned to the ruins of La Ville de Maillet, where they drove out all Native Americans and built Fort Clark (named for Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark) at what is now the corner of Water and Liberty streets in Peoria. Fort Clark was the nucleus of the present day city of Peoria.

As for Gov. Edwards, once the War of 1812 had ended, he managed to get himself reappointed as Illinois Territorial Governor in 1815. In the next three years, Edwards oversaw the process of turning Illinois from a territory into a state. We’ll tell that story next time.

The map from Gov. Edward Dunne’s 1933 “History of Illinois,” vol. I, shows the Illinois counties and the locations of Native American tribes in 1812.

#battle-of-the-thames, #black-partridge, #capt-thomas-craig, #chief-pacanne, #george-rogers-clark, #gomo, #illinois-bicentennial, #illinois-territory, #indiana-territory, #la-ville-de-maillet, #little-turtle, #ninian-edwards, #shabbona, #tecumseh, #tenskwatawa, #tippecanoe, #treaty-of-fort-wayne, #war-of-1812, #william-henry-harrison, #william-wells

Slavery cast its shadow upon creation of the Illinois Territory

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

In the course of our survey of the events of history that led to the creation of the state of Illinois, we have seen how the Indiana Territory was founded on July 4, 1800, encompassing territory that included the future states of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, part of Minnesota, and half of Michigan.

The first territorial governor, appointed Jan. 10, 1801, was William Henry Harrison, future hero of Tecumseh’s War and the War of 1812 and U.S. president. According to Illinois Gov. Edward Dunne’s 1933 “History of Illinois,” the entire Indiana Territory then held a population of less than 6,000 souls.

William Henry Harrison, first territorial governor of Indiana (which then included Illinois), would later briefly serve as U.S. President in 1841.

As a part of the Indiana Territory, Illinois was included in three counties – Knox County (made up of Indiana and eastern Illinois), Randolph County (southern Illinois), and St. Clair County (the bulk of Illinois as well as Wisconsin and Minnesota).

The Illinois Country was then peopled mainly by Native Americans and relatively small groups of French settlers. Dunne says there were about 1,500 French, but 2,500 Americans of British origin had already settled in Illinois by that time. Meanwhile, territorial leaders and land speculators were laying the groundwork for further westward expansion and encroachment upon Native American lands.

Dunne notes that when the Indiana Territory was formed, “All of Illinois except the land on and surrounding the French villages owned and occupied by the French, was an Indian reservation recognized by American law.” But as we have noted previously, from 1773 to 1819 a series of land purchases and treaties were made with the Illini, Piankeshaws, Kaskaskias, and Kickapoos that extinguished Native American title to most of the lands of future state of Illinois, opening the land to further European-American settlement. The future site of Peoria (then La Ville de Maillet) was included in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and the future Tazewell County was included in the lands ceded to the U.S. by an Aug. 13, 1803 treaty with the Kaskaskias and a July 30, 1819 treaty with the Kickapoos (in the year after Illinois statehood).

On Dec. 4, 1804, Gov. Harrison proclaimed that the population of the Indiana Territory was high enough that its citizens could legally elect a representative legislature. Among the representatives elected the following month were Shadrach Bond from St. Clair County and Pierre Menard from Randolph County. Bond, who previously was elected to the Northwest Territorial Legislature in 1799, later became the first governor of the state of Illinois, while Menard would serve alongside Bond as the first lieutenant governor of the state of Illinois. Both Menard and Bond would have Illinois counties named after them, and Menard’s son Pierre Menard Jr. would live for a while in Tremont and serve as a sub-Indian agent at Fort Clark (Peoria).

According to Dunne, at the time of the Jan. 1805 Indiana territorial election, the population of Illinois proper was probably around 6,000 to 7,000 souls. The 1800 U.S. Census had counted 5,641 people in the Indiana Territory, including 2,458 in the area that would later become the state of Illinois.

Only four years elapsed from Indiana’s first territorial election until the territory was further divided in order to create the Illinois Territory in 1809, made up of the lands of the future states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota and Michigan. Ominously, the primary issue that led to Indiana being broken into separate territories was the one that would eventually tear the country in two during the Civil War – slavery.

As Dunne’s history explains, the early American settlers of the Indiana Territory “almost without exception, had come from Kentucky, Tennessee and other slave-holding states, and some of these American settlers had brought slaves into the territory from Southern states.” But Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which regulated all of the lands of the old Northwest Territory from which the Indiana Territory had been formed, expressly stated, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the said territory . . . .”

As early as 1796, territorial leaders had petitioned the U.S. Congress to repeal Article 6, but Congress denied the request. A second petition to allow slavery, with language that called for gradual emancipation of slaves, was drawn up in 1801, but again Congress denied the petition. Undeterred, the pro-slavery group gathered in a convention in Kaskaskia, Ill., in 1802, where they prepared a “memorial” asking Congress to suspend Article 6 for ten years. Again the request was denied. Thwarted by Congress, Gov. Harrison and the Legislature attempted an end run around Article 6 by passing an unjust contract law that slave owners could readily manipulate to coerce their slaves brought into the territory to agree to continue to serve their masters.

Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the inhabitants of two of Illinois’ three counties petitioned to become a part of the new Louisiana Territory, where slavery was legal. Congress denied their petition. Two years later, a bill was introduced into the Indiana Territorial Legislature that would ask Congress to allow slavery in the Indiana Territory, but the bill failed to pass both houses.

According to Dunne’s history, by this time the settlers in the future state of Illinois had grown bitterly opposed to the “arbitrary rule” of Gov. Harrison and his appointees. Seeking a change in government for that reason as well as to find a way to get out from under Article 6’s anti-slavery law, in 1806 the Illinois settlers decided to petition Congress for the creation of a new, separate territory. Like the previous petitions, it was rejected. The same year, the Indiana Legislature held a special session to once more debate making slavery legal, but the outcome was inconclusive.

In 1807 the people of the Indiana Territory elected Virginia-born Jesse B. Thomas (1777-1853) as their delegate to Congress. Thomas, who would later serve as a U.S. Senator for the state of Illinois, secured his election as delegate by promising the separationist settlers that he would advance their cause in Washington, D.C. Keeping his promise, Thomas worked diligently to help advance an act in Congress to create the new Territory of Illinois. President Thomas Jefferson signed that act into law on Feb. 3, 1809, and the new territory was formally erected on March 1 of that year.

Dunne says that estimates at the time were “that there were 17,000 people east of the Wabash in Indiana and 11,000 west of that river in Illinois.” The following year, the 1810 U.S. Census counted 12,282 inhabitants in the Illinois Territory.

Illinois’ first and only territorial governor was Maryland-born Ninian Edwards (1775-1833), governing from Kaskaskia. He would be appointed to three consecutive terms as territorial governor, and later was elected Illinois’ third state governor.

Next time we’ll take a look at the momentous events of Edwards’ time as governor.

#illinois-bicentennial, #illinois-territory, #indiana-territory, #jesse-b-thomas, #kaskaskia, #la-ville-de-maillet, #ninian-edwards, #northwest-ordinance, #pierre-menard, #pierre-menard-jr, #shadrach-bond, #slavery, #treaty-of-greenville, #william-henry-harrison

The first-comers to Illinois

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

As National American Indian Heritage Month nears its end, this week we’ll take a look at Illinois’ Native American past and what one can learn about it at the Pekin Public Library’s Local History Room.

Recorded history in central Illinois reaches back not even four centuries, to the era of the European exploration and colonization of North America. But archaeology and anthropology enable us to learn about the thousands of years of human habitation in central Illinois prior to written records.

Naturally much of our local history involves the stories of the white settlers, and the bulk of the materials and resources in the Local History Room has to do with their story. But our local history collection does not neglect the peoples who arrived here first during forgotten past ages, and so from time to time this column has looked back at the original inhabitants of Tazewell County, especially during the period of the arrival of white settlers and the dispossession of the Native American tribes – recounting, for example, the life of Pottawatomi leader Shabbona who dwelt for a while in Pekin, or the Oct. 1812 raid of Illinois Territorial Gov. Ninian Edwards on Chief Black Partridge’s village which was located on the northeast shore of Peoria Lake in Fon du Lac Township.

Those who would like to learn more of the first-comers to Illinois can find a great deal of information in the publications on Illinois state history that may be found on the shelves of the Local History Room. Our collection also includes fascinating resources such as the atlas of “Indian Villages of the Illinois County,” which contains reproductions and descriptions of rare historical maps of North America and the Midwest dating from as early as the time of the French explorers of the Illinois River valley in the 1680s.

This atlas was one of the resources referenced by this column in 2012 when we told the story of the founding of Fort Crevecoeur. Another useful compilation in the Local History Room is John Leonard Conger’s 1923 “History of the Illinois River Valley.”

Shown is George Catlin’s 1830 painting of Kee-mo-ra-nia (“No English”), a member of the Peoria tribe, which originally lived in central Illinois but by 1830 had been relocated to Kansas. Catlin’s painting was donated by Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr. to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Those whose interest in the first nations of Illinois is more genealogical might want to search Helen Cox Tregillis’ 1983 volume, “The Indians of Illinois: A History and Genealogy,” which includes a lengthy and apparently exhaustive alphabetized list of Native American individuals who appear in the documents of Illinois history from 1642 to 1861, along with the title or description of the historical document where he or she was mentioned. Tregellis compiled this index from 43 different publications. Because Native Americans in earlier periods usually were illiterate and thus did not produce the written texts that are the basis of historical works and genealogical research, we are largely dependent on the texts and treaties of the white colonists for Native American history. Consequently, Tregellis’ index can be a great navigation aid for researchers.

One of the more recent additions to the Local History Room collection is Blake A. Watson’s 2012 “Buying America from the Indians: Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights.” Watson’s book views Native American history through the lens of laws, treaties and the courts, exploring the impact of the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh, which, as Watson explains, set important legal precedents that determined the principles that still govern American Indian property rights today.

Although it’s a story that encompasses a broad sweep of U.S. history, Watson’s book also touches directly on Illinois and the land that would later become Tazewell County, and in the process Watson tells how land speculators and government agents obtained title to the Illinois country and displaced the native tribes.

Watson relates the story in a dispassionate and factual manner, but the story he tells is the same one that was emotionally evoked in James Stelle’s 1853 poem, “An Indian at His Father’s Grave,” which commences with these lines:

“Stop! Whiteman stop! This mound you see
Is where my father’s ashes lay;
‘Tis dearer far than life to me –
Oh! Do not force his child away.”

Stelle’s poem was published as the frontispiece to Tregellis’ book.

#black-partridge, #ninian-edwards, #shabbona, #tazewell-county-native-tribes

When Tazewell wasn’t a county and Illinois wasn’t a state

By Jared Olar
Library assistant

The year 1827 was a pretty important one in Tazewell County history for the simple reason that prior to that year, there was no such thing as “Tazewell County.” As we’ve related here previously, the Illinois General Assembly created Tazewell County on Jan. 31, 1827, prior to which the land that would become Tazewell County was included in Peoria County, and prior to that was a part of Sangamon County.

When Tazewell County was founded, the state of Illinois itself was only about eight years old. It was on Dec. 3, 1818, that Congress admitted Illinois to the union. Before that date, Illinois had “territorial” status under the administration of the federal government.  The territory of Illinois was formally established by Congress on March 1, 1809, and it included not only to the future state of Illinois but also included the entirety of Wisconsin, the western half of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the northeast third of Minnesota.

These facts are important to keep in mind when studying the earliest periods of Tazewell County’s history, because until 1827 those periods are Tazewell County’s “prehistory.” Thus, while Charles C. Chapman’s 1879 “History of Tazewell County” identifies William Blanchard and Nathan Dillon as the first white American settlers of Tazewell County, in fact Blanchard and Dillon settled in what was then Sangamon County.

The changing jurisdictional boundaries in those early years mean that a historian or genealogist researching lands or families in the future Tazewell County during the years from 1809 to 1827, or even after 1827, might find some of the relevant documents in Tazewell County, but many others will be found in Springfield – whether because the documents always have been stored there or (as is sometimes the case) were subsequently moved to the state archives for safekeeping. A knowledge of the changes in Illinois’ territorial and county boundaries is essential for interpreting early records – for example, an 1810 document mentioning a location in “Illinois” might really be talking about Wisconsin, or a family living in eastern Tazewell County in 1828 will have been living in what is now McLean County.

The Pekin Public Library’s Local History Room collection contains several publications that can help researchers and students of history obtain a better understanding of the wider historical trends that shaped the early history and development of Illinois and Tazewell County. One item in particular is an extensive compilation of official government documents and papers of the territorial government of Illinois from the years 1814-1818, just prior to Illinois’ statehood. This book, compiled and edited by Clarence E. Carter, is volume XVII in a series titled “The Territorial Papers of the United States.”

Ninian Edwards served as Illinois’ only territorial governor from 1809 to 1818, a period during which the groundwork was laid for expanded white settlement in the state, including the future Tazewell County.

These papers cover the last four years of the administration of Territorial Governor Ninian Edwards, who was the only territorial governor of Illinois and who would later be elected the third state governor of Illinois in 1826. The documents present Edwards’ policies as territorial governor following the War of 1812, when the territorial and federal government laid the final groundwork making possible the opening of Illinois to extensive and systematic settlement and development by white Americans.

Gov. Edwards also figures in Tazewell County’s “prehistory,” as we’ve noted here before, due to his leading a raid on a Pottawatomi village in what is today East Peoria during the War of 1812.

#illinois-territory, #ninian-edwards, #tazewell-county-history