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vii vii Introduction The title of this book refers both to the current state, or condition, of Southern Illinois and to the historical antecedents that make it so different from the rest of Illinois that it sometimes seems like a separate state. The book focuses primarily on the region south of U.S. Route 50, from Salem south to Cairo, and describes the underlying geology, the role a glacier played in shaping Southern Illinois, the presence of prehistoric and later Indians, the settlement by southerners, the region’s colorful twentieth-century history, and life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Parts of the book are revisionist: they offer new details about old assumptions and provide new ways of looking at things. A good many revisions concern the Civil War era. The story of Southern Illinois wishing to secede at the beginning of the Civil War is easily its most exaggerated stereotype— but is arrived at only by ignoring how most Southern Illinoisans actually behaved. The southern third of Illinois was settled predominantly by southerners, the majority of whom were fleeing poverty. Many had lived by hunting and on “hog, hominy, and honey” on small farms in the Appalachian hills and uplands. Others were too poor to own land but might work as laborers or sharecroppers on farms owned by others. Contrary to what is sometimes written and taught, southern settlers did not introduce slavery to Illinois. France was the first European nation to control large parts of Illinois, and it was the French who introduced black slavery. Those who are unaware of this have naturally assumed that the region’s southern settlers brought slaves with them. This is partly true, for some southern settlers did bring slaves, but small farmers and those too poor to own land were generally too poor to own slaves, and in any event, many landowners from Kentucky, Virginia, and elsewhere came to Southern Illinois to free their slaves. Because most early settlers in Southern Illinois left behind few or no financial assets in the South, they had little reason to return and fight for the Confederate States of America. Relatedly, the aristocratic plantation society of the South often regarded poor whites as little more than “white trash” and treated them accordingly. Southern Illinois ’ settlers remained in the region because it offered them a better life than they had known elsewhere. This commitment to a new life in the North helps to explain an important phenomenon that occurred during the first sixteen months of the Civil War: Southern Illinoisans in the sixteen southernmost counties, from Benton south to Cairo, enlisted in the Union Army at a far greater rate (about 40 percent of eligible men) than did residents of the remainder of the state (about 28 percent). This detail was generally overlooked by northern newspapers in the 1860s and has seldom been mentioned since. To put it another way, some facts about viii Southern Illinois have been ignored for so long by so many as to create a fictional history of the region. There was, for example, no “army” of Southern Illinoisans that rushed south to enlist in the Confederate Army at the start of the Civil War, although this story has been repeated many times. The largest group to leave for the South consisted of only thirty-four men, most of whom departed from Marion on May 25, 1861. Thirty of the thirty-four had been born or raised in the South; only one had been born in Southern Illinois. They were placed in the 15th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, and some fought and died at Shiloh and elsewhere. Others deserted or returned home to protect their families from Civil War passions manifested by their neighbors. The popular story that John A. Logan saved Southern Illinois from secession with an August 19, 1861, speech on the Marion square is more folklore than fact. Logan did make an effective recruiting speech that contributed to the region’s high enlistment rate, but by the time he made it, Captain (later General) Ulysses S. Grant had already mustered in a Union Army regiment of Southern Illinoisans at Anna; the thirty-four hotheads who wished to secede had been gone for eighty-six days; and for nearly four months thousands of Union troops had controlled or occupied strategic parts of Southern Illinois, including the Illinois Central Railroad, the East St. Louis waterfront and rail lines, the city of Cairo, some of the area’s bridges, and parts of...

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