ILLINOIS POLITICAL ATTITUDES, 1854-1861

327 Pages·017.483 MB·English

by  FEHRENBACHER, DON E

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
ILLINOIS POLITICAL ATTITUDES, 1854-1861
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
BY
DON E. FEHRENBACHER
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
AUGUST, 1951
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
FOREWORD ............................................................................................ 1
I. THE PEOPLE................................................................................... 2
Illin o is in the 1850’s
The People and P o litics
II. THE INSTITUTIONS..................................................................... 28
The P o litical Party
P o litical Journalism
The Church
Railroads
III. THE ISSU E S................................................................................... 157
The S pirit of Reform
Nativism
Western Interests
Slavery and the South
Slavery in the T erritories
Personal R ivalries
Summary of Relationships
IV. THE REVOLUTION IN POLITICS.................................................. 266
The Rise of the Republicans
A C ritical Year: 1858
The Election of Lincoln
CONCLUSION..................................................................................... 313
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................... 317
i i
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FOREWORD
An attitude has been defined as a pre-established pattern
of response to a stimulus. This study is concerned with the a tti­
tudes of the Illin o is people toward p olitics in the years from
1854 to 1861, and the forces that shaped those attitudes—or es­
tablished those patterns of response. Basic were the influences
of cultural backgrounds, economic organization, and the structure
of society. These factors w ill be dealt with briefly in the fir st
section, which w ill also describe the extraordinary attention which
Illinoisans paid to p o litics a hundred years ago. Then the in sti­
tutions which affected the people in their p o litica l thinking and
activity w ill be delineated, with special emphasis upon four: the
p olitical party, the newspaper, the church, and the railroads.
Next, the chief issues toward which the patterns of response were
directed w ill be analyzed and their relationships to each other
suggested. The fin al section w ill summarize the broader aspects
of the revolution in p o litics which occurred during the seven years
under scrutiny.
Since the events of these years have already been described
in detail by competent historians, there w ill be no attempt here
to duplicate their work. While original source materials furnish
the major part of its documentation, this study is intended as
a commentary upon the facts rather than a catalogue of them.
1
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CHAPTER I
THE PEOPLE
Illin o is in the 1850's
By 1850, Illin o is had ceased to he a fro n tier state. To
be sure, there was much land s till awaiting settlem ent within its
boundaries; agriculture was s till the occupation of two-thirds
of those who labored; transportation was characteristically
Western in its inadequacy; popular tastes and habits were suf­
ficien tly unrefined to disturb v isitin g Easterners; and the
surest path to p o litic a l success was s till the one which had been
blazed by Andrew Jackson. Yet by mid-century th is lingering
pioneer flavor was obsolescent The frontiersmen had moved on
to Iowa and Minnesota, had hurdled the Great Plains to the mines
and rich farm lands of the Far West, while into Illin o is were
pouring immigrants of more variegated backgrounds and more speci­
alized talen ts than the older se ttle rs. The la tte r had made
th e ir way into the southern part of the state by the Ohio River
route, coming, by and large, from the Upper South. They were
^■"The outstanding feature of life in Illin o is during the
f if tie s was the passing of the fro n tie r,” says the leading his­
torian of th is period in Illin o is history. ”Every aspect of its
social and economic make-up declared that the sp irit of western
pioneering could not perpetuate its dominance over the growing
commonwealth.” Arthur Charles Cole, The Era of the Civil War.
1848-1870. Vol. I l l of The Centennial History of Illin o is , ed.
“Clarence Walworth Alvord (5 vols.; Springfield: Illin o is Cen­
tennial Commission, 1919), p. 1.
S
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3
seldom representatives of the higher stra ta in Southern society,
for the upper-class Southerner was usually a slaveholder, who
must migrate to slave states, i f he wished to take his Negroes
with him.
The lesser Southern folk who came to Illin o is were de­
scribed by a contemporary historian as "a very good, honest, kind,
hospitable people, unambitious of wealth, and great lovers of
ease and social enjoyment."1 Less friendly p o rtraits presented
the southern Illinoisan as backward, ignorant, and lazy, "half a
century behind the intelligence of the age.”2 A m inister in Upper
Alton wrote that his greatest obstacle was "the prevalent influence
of those f ir s t se ttle rs s till in the m ajority here, who were poor
non-slaveholders in the southern states from whence they came, a
class almost as hopeless, and more ignorant and degraded than
either the Dutch or Irish."®
The authors of such harsh judgments were usually Northern­
ers. These la te r arriv als began to appear in considerable num­
bers by the 1830’s, often using the Erie Canal-Great Lakes
thoroughfare and disembarking from th eir boats or alighting from
th eir stages at Chicago, where some of them remained, while others
fanned out into the p rairie hinterland. Pioneer farmers they
^Thomas Ford, A History of Illin o is from its Commencement
as a State in 1818 to 1847 if Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co.. 1854). p. 880.
2a. S. Avery, M etropolis, Massac Co., 111., May 16, 1857,
American Home Missionary Society Collection, University of Chicago.
The le tte rs in th is collection are a ll reports to the home office
of the society.
^William Barnes, Upper Alton, 111., Sept. 10, 1855, ib id .
Cf. H. Patrick, Mount Vernon, 111., Mar. 2, 1857, ib id .
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4
were, many of them, but in each group of arrivals there was also
a sprinkling of those pioneers of ideas, as Dixon Ryan Fox has
labeled them, the f ir s t teachers and doctors, merchants and bank­
ers, jo u rn alists, artisans, and lawyers. Some were educated,
others had money, nearly a ll were ambitious for p ro fits. These
men of wealth, education, and energy quickly assumed economic and
p o litical leadership in the northern part of the state. For ex­
ample, John Wentworth graduated from Dartmouth in 1836 and came
west to become editor of the Chicago Democrat in the same year.
Soon he was also its owner, and within six years of his arrival
he was representing his d istric t in Congress. Norman B. Judd,
who came from New York in 1836, was made Chicago’s f ir s t munici­
pal attorney the following year. In 1842, he was elected alder­
man, and in 1844, he began sixteen years of service in the state
senate.
Under the driving leadership of such men, northern Illin o is
quickly became the faster-growing and more progressive part of the
state. Even the sympathetic Ford conceded that despite a head
sta rt of half a century, the southern communities were ten years
behind in "wealth, and a ll the appliances of a higher civ iliza­
tio n ."1 That northern Illin o isan s were contemptuous of th eir
backward brethren to the south is not to be wondered at. Likewise
i t is not surprising that the inhabitants of "Egypt" were sus­
picious of the sharp Yankee with his superior airs and his busi­
ness acumen reputedly attained by practice in the sale of wooden
nutmegs. Thus there was not one Illin o is but two.O ne was the
iFord, op. c it.. p. 281.
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5
product of the Southern uplands, the other was largely a composite
of bustling Northerners and hard-working foreigners. Because of
th is diversity of cultural background, a lin e drawn from north to
south through Illin o is was a spectrum of changing attitu d es. Es­
pecially upon the question of slavery was Illin o is unready to act
with any unity. “Talk of 'sectionalism * in the Republic!” wrote
a Chicago Tribune correspondent in 1857. "There is not between
South Carolina and M assachusetts. . . . a more deadly h o stility
than between the ninth and f ir s t Congressional d istric ts in th is
State."'*'
And so i t was th at Illin o is mirrored b etter than any other
state the conflict between the older and the newer Northwest, and
was a reproduction in m iniature of the larger sectionalism that
was soon to prove stronger than the Union.^
Whatever the degree of northern superiority, the middle
part of the century was a period of tremendous growth and striking
progress in a ll parts of the state. The best evidence of th is is
Chicago Daily Tribune. Feb. 14, 1857. Cf. Chicago Dally
Democratic-Press, Jan. 28, 1854; also the address of D.J. Baker
at the State Fair 0f the Illin o is A gricultural Society on Oct. 11,
1855, Transactions of the Illin o is S tate A gricultural Society.
II, 56. p
,rtEven the forms of local government reflected the d iffe r­
ent antecedents of the two sectors. Twenty-nine of the hundred
counties, mostly in the north, had adopted the township organiza­
tion by 1854. The southern part of the state had clung unanimously
to the older county organization. The township form was considered
to be more democratic, although also more complex and expensive.
In 1859, a move to return to the county system in Fulton County
was opposed by one newspaper "because i t centralizes too much
power in the hands of a few.” Chicago Daily Democratic-Press.
Jan. 11, 1854; Canton Weekly R egister. Mar. 29,~1859. The la tte r
citation was taken from the collection of source m aterials at the
University of Illin o is gathered by Arthur Charles Cole, hereafter
referred to as "Cole’s Notes."
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to be found in a comparison of the census figures for 1860 with
those for 1850. They reveal, f ir s t of a ll, th at the population
of Illin o is in th at decade increased more than that of any other
state in the Union, leaping from 851,470 to 1,711,951. In the
ten-year period, Illin o is had moved from eleventh to fourth place
in the nation and had assumed her position as the leading common­
wealth of the M ississippi Valley.
The source of th is impressive increment was partly natural
increase, as the number of those born in the state changed from
545,618 in 1850 to 706,925 in 1860. But these native Illino isan s
were either too young or too poorly educated to assume many roles
of leadership in the state during the ante-bellum p eriod .^ Far
more significant in its impact was the accretion caused by immi­
gration. By 1850, the old sources of settlers in the Upper South
were drying up. The neighboring states of Indiana and Ohio con­
tinued to furnish many se ttle rs, as did the Northeast, but the
most marked increases were in foreigners, especially Germans and
Irish . The table upon the following page demonstrates that while
natives of the Northeast and the older Northwest constituted about
the same percentage of the population in 1860 that they had ten
years earlier, those born in slave states fe ll from 17 to 10.5
^Seventh Census of the United States: 1850. Appendix
(Washington: Robert Armstrong, 1853), p. 714. Population of the
United States in I860. Compiled from the O riginal Returns of the
Eighth Ceqsus (Washington: Government Printing O ffice, 1864J7~*p.
103.
% or example, the upper house of the state legislature
in 1858 contained only one native Illin o isan among its 25 members.
Alton Daily Morning Courier. Jan. 10, 1858, "Cole’s Notes."
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R
e
p
ro
d
u
c
e
d TABLE 1

w
ith
PLACES OF BIRTH OF ILLINOISANS IN 1S50 AND 1860*
p
e
rm
is
s
io Population Percentage of Total Percentage of
n
Increase in
o
f 1850 1860 1850 1860 1860 over 1850
th
e

c
o
p
y State as a whole 851,470 1,711,951 100.00 100.00 101.06
rig
h
t Born in Illin o is 343,618 706,925 40.36 41.29 105.73
o
w
n
e Born in slave states 144,809 179,769 17.01 10.50 24.14
r. and D.C.
F
u
r
th Born in New England 36,542 71,316 4.29 4.17 95.16
e
r
rep Born in other states of
ro Old Northwest 98,425 204,167 11.56 11.93 107.43
d
u
c
tio Born in New York, New
n
Jersey, and Pennsylvania 112,007 220,807 13.15 12.89 91.80
p
ro
h
ib Born in foreign countries 111,892 324,643 13.14 18.96 190.14
ite
d

Born in Germany 38,160 130,804 4.48 7.64 242.78
w
ith
ou Born in Ireland 27,786 87,573 3.26 5.12 215.17
t
p
e l
r
m
is
sio *Coraputed from Seventh Census of the U.S.. Appendix, pp. ix, xxxvi, xxxvii;
n Eighth Census of the U.S.. Population, pp. 103-04.
.
8
per cent of the to ta l. Their places were taken by the Germans
and Irish who more than trebled th eir numbers during the decade.
This was a trend which had been going on for some time
before 1850, a trend whereby Illin o is became increasingly Northern
and foreign and decreasingly Southern in her ancestry. Here again
the state mirrored the nation as a whole, wherein the South was
suffering a decline in numerical and p o litica l strength. Never­
theless, while on the wane, the Southerners’ power in both cases
was s till formidable. In addition to the 179,769 natives of slave
states counted during the 1860 census in Illin o is, many of those
born in Illin o is, Ohio, and Indiana traced th eir ancestry back to
the South. In the lower part of the state especially, the old
se ttle rs and th eir descendants dug into th eir psychological
trenches, resolved not to be overwhelmed by Northern numbers.
With the doubling of the sta te ’s population during the
decade there naturally went a m ultiplication and growth of urban
areas. New industries, larger markets, and, above a ll, the build­
ing of the railroads, generated new towns and stimulated the older
ones. From her twice strategic position as a lake port and r a il­
road center Chicago led the way, jumping from 29,963 to 109,260,
and thereby moving in ten years from tw entieth to ninth place
among the nation’s c i t i e s . S o m e leading towns of the past, like
Galena, were being challenged by newer centers like Peoria, which
by 1860 had become second larg est in the state. Other fledgling
communities luxuriated in hopes of future greatness. Cairo was
^-Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census. House Executive
Document 116. Thirty-Seventh Congress, Second Session, p. 242.
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