Illinois's War: The Civil War in Documents

Introduction

 Introduction Illinois was at the heart of the national crisis over slavery. Many Northerners saw Illinois, with its booming city on the lake, its rich agricultural fields and growing industries, as a model of what the West should be: a dynamic, enterprising society that fairly rewarded free white labor. The state’s geography was also pivotal. Bordered by two slave states—Missouri and Kentucky—and three major commercial arteries—the Mississippi, Ohio, and Wabash Rivers—Illinois was an entry point for countless runaway slaves. As slaves acted to free themselves, river towns such as Alton, East St. Louis, and Cairo became the scene of dramatic escapes , and equally dramatic rescue efforts by Illinoisans operating a loose network that stretched into Canada—the famous Underground Railroad—set up to aid fugitives in their flight to freedom. Illinois statesmen played starring roles in the crisis. Its leading U.S. senator, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, attained national prominence by shepherding the Compromise of 1850 through a bitterly divided Congress. Four years later he sent shockwaves across the nation by authoring the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1860 the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to the White House precipitated secession and civil war. As the war unfolded, Illinois proved essential to the Union cause. Only the more populous states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio sent more troops into battle on the Union side. Most of the 259,000 Illinoisans who served did so in the western theater, where Union troops outfought the Confederates early and built momentum toward ultimate victory. The state was home to several of the Union’s best field commanders, including Ulysses S. Grant, the chief architect of those successful western campaigns. Illinois supplied key resources, such as coal and foodstuffs that fueled the Union’s wartime industries and fed its massive armies. Illinois’s largest city, Chicago, itself played a significant role in Union victory. The city’s diverse residents responded enthusiastically to the calls for volunteers. Camp Douglas, located on the city’s south side, was a major training site for troops and later a notorious prison for captured Confederates. Chicago’s industries answered the demand for war resources, while its superior railroad and canal connections made it a hub for the collection and transport of supplies and men into battle. Illinois underwent sweeping changes in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. But amid the multitude of issues that Illinoisans confronted, certain broad themes stand out. First, the deep political divisions that beset Illinois in these years—over the expansion of slavery, the place of blacks in society, and the policies of the federal government both during and after the Civil War—grew out of the state’s demographic transformation. Throughout the antebellum decades  illinois’s war migrants from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and other slave states settled southern and central Illinois. Overwhelmingly rural in economic orientation, these “upland Southerners” brought with them a socially and politically conservative culture that emphasized limited government and personal autonomy. Beginning in the 1830s, however, Illinois’s population slowly diversified with the arrival of newcomers attracted to the availability of cheap land and an abundance of new jobs linked to the steady growth of the state’s economy. Midwesterners from Indiana and Ohio, immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, and Yankees from the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast poured into Illinois in search of economic opportunity. Between 1850 and 1870, Illinois’s population nearly tripled, growing to over 2.5 million, as diverse settlers found irresistible Illinois’s verdant prairies and burgeoning cities. Most of the newcomers settled across central and northern Illinois, and the Yankees in particular brought a moralizing, progressive outlook that clashed significantly with the conservative worldview of upland Southerners. The era’s intense political battles reflected the growing influence of those segments of Illinois society who differed, sometimes sharply so, from the state’s initial upland Southern majority. The influx of new settler groups redefined the state’s political geography. As Illinois became more cosmopolitan, the center of gravity in state politics tilted steadily northward, giving rise to a new generation of political leadership. Initially it was Stephen Douglas who capitalized on the new demographic and economic currents shaping the Prairie State. Born in 1813 in Vermont, Douglas migrated to Illinois at age twenty, part of the Yankee diaspora then spreading out toward the frontier West. Settling at first in Jacksonville, Douglas studied law and soon entered into his lifelong passion, politics. Later Douglas moved to Chicago, invested heavily...