The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-70 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS173 extraordinary contribution. For this is a study which raises our historical consciousness and shows us just how much historians can learn from a sophisticated use of folklore sources. Dan T. Carter Emory University The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 182570 . By Don Harrison Doyle. (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1978. Pp. xiii, 289. $12.50.) Professor Doyle presents an interesting socio-historical analysis of Jacksonville, long a center for collegiate education and for the rehabilitation of the physically and mentally handicapped in Illinois. Reviewing the founding of the town in the mid-1820's and of Illinois College, Jacksonville's liberal arts institution now celebrating its sesquicentennial, Professor Doyle moves directly to those issues which contributed both to dissent and cohesion within the community through its period of strongest growth. Conflicting religious beliefs were from the start a source of contention; soon, clashes between pro- and antislavery thought would spark new and fierce animosity among local citizens. Like other areas in central Illinois generally, Jacksonville attracted settlers widely—from both the North and the South. Thus the emotionalism found in Southern evangelical Protestantism contrasted sharply with the more solemn religious practices of New England Congregationalism and Middle State Presbyterianism. Differences regarding slavery were bound just as readily to emerge in this NorthSouth society, causing both ill will and unpleasant confrontation. While antislavery thought tended to emanate from Illinois College and its New England educated faculty, by no means was it limited to townspeople strictly northeastern in background. Their discord was reduced somewhat by the ever-presence of "boosterism," a united effort by the community to secure afirm and even illustrious future for the town. In some respects Jacksonville's success at boosterism was exceptional. It was able to lure the railroads, Joseph Capp's textile factory, two institutions of higher learning (Illinois College and a Female Academy which would become MacMurray College), and three separate state facuities to rehabilitate the mentally retarded, the deaf and dumb, and the blind. But determined as they were, Jacksonville's town fathers were unable to persuade the state legislature to locate either the capital or the state land-grant college in their city. When Springfield won the seat of government in 1837, still Jacksonville's citizens persevered. Only with their failure to obtain the university when given its charter in 1867 came disillusion and a decline in boosterism: at that pointJacksonville began to glory more in its past than in whatever its future might hold. Doyle brings out numerous other facets of nineteenth century 174CIVIL WAR HISTORY Jacksonville history. He describes in detail its demographic make-up, comprising Northerners, Southerners, Germans, the Irish, and blacks. And he refers, if too briefly, to its Portuguese contingent, Protestants from the island of Madeira who settled in the town in 1849 and would servemainly as domestics forJacksonville's well-to-do. Jacksonville was also marked by two traits common to nineteenth century urban life on the American frontier: it suffered from undue mobility ofits population, and from inbreeding. In any decade through 1870, fully one-fourth of the population would move on, only to be replaced by newer immigrants, themselves just as transient. The stabilizing force of the town was its wealthy and intellectual elite who resided mainly on "college hill" and remained close through political and social ties, and through intermarriage. Doyle's book, while ample in its survey of the town's history, might have been stronger had he placed Jacksonville in perspective to other Illinois communities of the time. Since the work grew out ofa pilot study including Vandalia and Galesburg, as well as Jacksonville, it is unfortunate that Doyle chose to omit any comparison with these towns or with Springfield and Champaign—the former, Jacksonville's major rival, and the latter its chief competitor for the university site. Thus one wonders whether Jacksonville's "sister cities" shared its drive to excel, whether its elite enjoyed a truly unique influence locally, and to what extent mobility of the populace was a common denominator. For one who has lived in Jacksonville as I have, reading this book stirred fond memories and answered lingering questions about this town evidently so...