The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois

1. Coping with Exclusion

1 Coping with Exclusion After the English had stacked their arms at Yorktown and the last strains of liThe World Turned Upside Down" had died away, the Continental Congress would come into possession of some 170,000,000 acres of virgin forest, fertile prairies, navigable lakes and rivers, and clear and sparkling brooks and springs stretching north of the Ohio and west of the AIIeghenies to the Mississippi, surely one of the richest prizes the fortunes of war had ever bestowed upon a victorious government in all the annals of mankind. What should the future of this vast territory northwest of the River Ohio be? How and by what rules should the land be sold to settlers? What structures of government should be erected there and what should the relation of those governments be to the thirteen original states and to the national government? Which institutions should be encouraged, which discouraged? What rights should the inhabitants have? The answers given by Congress to these questions would do much to condition the quality of the lives led by the human beings, red, white, and black, who would dwell there and do much to define the terms on which they would associate together. Congress on May 20, 1785, ordained that the northwest territory would be divided for sale into townships six miles square, each township to be subdivided into lots one mile square, of 640 acres, numbered from 1 to )6. Lot number 16 of each township was to be reserved for the maintenance of public schools. When each of the states of the Old Northwest entered the Union, Congress would turn the Section 16 lots over to the states with the stipulation that the moneys arising from the rent or disposal of the lots should be used in aid of public schooling. Ultimately Illinois received 985,066 acres of Section 16 lands, and the interest 1 Black Struggle for Public Schooling from the rental and sale of the sections invested in a permanent state school fund would comprise the largest source of yearly public-school revenue until 1855 and one of importance for decades thereafter.1 On July 13,1787, another congressional ordinance set forth a plan for organizing republican governments in the territory and for admitting them into the Union on an equal footing with the older states. Among its articles were one urging the new states to make provisions for education and one prohibiting slavery within their borders. Article 3 was an exhortation: "Religion, Morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Article 6 laid down an absolute prohibition: "There shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary Servitude in the said territory." 2 Ohio and Indiana incorporated Article 6 almost word for word into their first constitutions, and, besides, banned long indentures except for apprenticeship and forbade alterations in their constitutions that might open an avenue to slavery. But the Illinois constitution of 1818 offered a loophole by being evasive about indentures and by omitting any ban on changes in the constitution to permit slavery or a disguised form of it. This omission was deliberate. As soon as Illinois was accepted as a state of the Union, a number of its citizens began agitating for a convention to repeal or soften the nonslavery article in the state constitution. A furious battle ensued between proconvention (proslavery) and anticonvention (antislavery) parties, continuing until a referendum on August 2, 1824, resulted in 6,640 votes being cast against holding a convention and 4,972 for. The closeness of the vote on holding a convention and the political and social attitudes of Illinoisans on other issues less extreme than enslavement of blacks yet posing questions about granting them the same rights as whites, a subject to be discussed later in this chapter, were produced in part, though only in part, by demographic and cultural factors. Toward the middle of the antebellum period the pattern of immigration into the state shifted in such wise as to lead to the sectional differences that have been features of Illinois life and politics since. At first most of the settlers came from the slave states of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky and from the lower 2 Coping with Exclusion reaches of Indiana. Some two-thirds of the 53,387 white inhabitants in 1820 were of southern stock, with a...