The Jury in Lincoln's America

Introduction

1 Introduction Abraham Lincoln’s America When the young Abraham Lincoln moved to Indiana with his family in 1816, permanent settlement in the developing states of the Old Northwest Territory was just under way. In 1830, when the Lincoln family crossed the Wabash River to relocate in central Illinois, the states and territories of what was then the emerging Midwest—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri—were still a sparsely populated frontier with a population of just over 1.5 million people, representing only one-eighth of the entire population of the United States. However, after 1830, the region was on a fast track of population growth. Ohio had 1.5 million people by 1840 and nearly 2 million by 1850, and Indiana’s population had increased by 300,000 between statehood in 1816 and 1840. In 1830, Michigan’s population had been less than 32,000, but over the next ten years, it blossomed to more than 200,000; by 1850, the state population numbered 400,000. Wisconsin’s population grew from 30,000 in 1840 to more than 300,000 in 1850. The Lincolns were not the only people who recognized the region’s promise and hoped to take advantage of all it had to offer.1 2 p The Jury in Lincoln’s America By 1840, the population of the emerging Midwest had surpassed 3 million . In the 1840s, there were few large cities in the region, but by 1850, the population of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago had reached 115,000, 78,000, and 30,000, respectively. In Illinois, the population grew from just over 157,000 in 1830 to nearly 860,000 by 1850. Also by that year, the population of the entire region had exceeded 5 million. An observer of this astonishing population growth shared his views of it in the Sangamo Journal , a newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, writing that “the child was then alive who would live to see two million population in Illinois, and that by 2000 A.D. there would be 3,000,000.”2 Settlers in the region were a “conglomeration of peoples,” migrating in homogeneous groups and creating a complex patchwork of ethnic and cultural settlement. They came from the eastern and southern United States and from across the Atlantic Ocean, and some groups predominated in certain areas. Tennesseans and Kentuckians, like the Lincoln family, settled in the southern half of Indiana and in Illinois; New Yorkers settled in Michigan and Wisconsin; and German, Irish, Norwegian, and Scot settlers were also establishing a noticeable presence in the midwestern states. By comparison with other states, few New Englanders and people of foreign nativity settled in Indiana. People from slaveholding states comprised the largest group of setters in that state: in 1850, southern-born settlers made up 44 percent of American-born residents in Indiana. What foreign settlers there were in Indiana tended to be German, whereas Illinois settlement patterns were divided between immigrants from Germany and those from Ireland . In the southern half of Illinois, nearly all of the American-born settlers were from Kentucky and Tennessee. In the northern section, settlers hailed mostly from Ohio. More than 135,000 New Yorkers settled in Michigan by 1850; they also predominated in Wisconsin, but New England provided a significant number of settlers there as well. In Iowa in 1850, southerners and northerners had settled in basically equal proportions.3 Although the overwhelming majority of residents of the emerging Midwest were white, the population also included Native Americans, immigrants , and people of color. A New Englander speaking of Wisconsin in the 1840s wrote: “The five races of both continents [are] present . . . the Yankee is in his own latitude, and retains in full his unique identity. Men with European tongues gather in here like the dispersed of the tribes of Introduction p 3 Israel. All say welcome to each other. The Frenchman shortens his mustaches , and becomes American . . . Irishman you recognize by his hardy form and native brogue. . . . Jews and Germans are here. . . . I see . . . a respectable representation of the people of color, and one small band of natives—real red men, but wearing paints of different colors on their cheeks.” This observer was certainly naive in his harmonious depiction of Wisconsin, but he was accurate in noting that varying groups, both ethnically and racially defined, coexisted in the Midwest.4 By 1860, nearly 7 million people, 22 percent of...