Born a Yankee, bred a Westerner, wedded to the mistress of a Southern plantation, Douglas represented a Commonwealth whose population was made up of elements from all sections. The influences that shaped his career were extraordinarily complex. No account of his subsequent public life would be complete, without reference to the peculiar social and political characteristics of his constituency.
The people of early Illinois were drawn southward by the pull of natural forces: the Mississippi washes the western border on its gulf-ward course; and the chief rivers within the State have a general southerly trend.[[302]] But quite as important historically is the convergence of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee on the southern border of Illinois; for it was by these waterways that the early settlers reached the Illinois Territory from the States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. The apex of the irregular, inverted triangle of Illinois, thrust down to the 37th parallel of latitude, brought the first settlers well within the sphere of Southern influence. Two slave States flanked this southern end. Nearly one-half of Illinois lay south of a direct, westward extension of Mason and Dixon's line.
In the early days, the possession by the Indians of the northern areas accentuated the southern connections of Illinois. At the same time the absence at the North of navigable waterways and passable highways between East and West, left the Ohio and its tributaries the only connecting lines of travel with the remote northern Atlantic States. Had Illinois been admitted into the Union with the boundaries first proposed, it would have been, by all those subtle influences which go to make public sentiment, a Southern State. But the extension of the northern boundary to 42° 30' gave Illinois a frontage of fifty miles on Lake Michigan, and deflected the whole political and social history of the Commonwealth. This contact with the great waterways of the North brought to the State, in the course of time, an immense share of the lake traffic and a momentous connection with the northern central and northern Atlantic States. The passing of the Indians, the opening up of the great northern prairies to occupation, and the completion of the Illinois-Michigan canal made the northern part of Illinois fallow for New England seeding. Geographically, Illinois became the connecting link in the slender chain which bound the men of the lake and prairie plains with the men of the gulf plains. The inevitable interpenetration of Northern and Southern interests in Illinois, resulting from these contacts, is the most important fact in the social and political history of the State. It bred in Illinois statesmen a disposition to compromise for the sake of political harmony and economic progress, a passionate attachment to the Union as the sine qua non of State unity, and a glowing nationalism. Illinois was in short a microcosm: the larger problems of the nation existed there in miniature.
When Illinois was admitted to the Union in 1818, all the organized counties lay to the south of the projected national road between Terre Haute and Alton, hence well within the sphere of surrounding Southern influences. The society of Illinois was at this time predominantly Southern in its origin and characteristics.[[303]] Social life and political thought were shaped by Southern life and Southern thought. Whatever points of contact there were with the outside world were with the Southern world. The movement to make Illinois a slave State was motived by the desire to accelerate immigration from the South.
But people had already begun to come into the State who were not of Southern origin, and who succeeded in deflecting the current of Illinois politics at this critical juncture. The fertile river bottoms and intervening prairies of southern Illinois no longer sufficed. The new comers were impelled toward the great, undulating prairies which expand above the 39th parallel. The rise of new counties marks the volume of this immigration;[[304]] the attitude of the older settlers toward it, fixes sufficiently its general social character. This was the beginning of the "Yankee" invasion, New York and Pennsylvania furnishing the vanguard.
As the northern prairies became accessible by the lake route and the stage roads, New England and New York poured a steady stream of homeseekers into the Commonwealth. By the middle of the century, this Northern immigration had begun to inundate the northern counties and to overflow into the interior, where it met and mingled with the counter-current. These Yankee settlers were viewed with hostility, not unmixed with contempt, by those whose culture and standards of taste had been formed south of Mason and Dixon's line.[[305]]
This sectional antagonism was strengthened by the rapid commercial advance of northern Illinois. Yankee enterprise and thrift worked wonders in a decade. Governor Ford, all of whose earlier associations were with the people of southern Illinois, writing about the middle of the century, admits that although the settlers in the southern part of the State were twenty, thirty, forty, and fifty years in advance, on the score of age, they were ten years behind in point of wealth and all the appliances of a higher civilization.[[306]] The completion of the canal between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River, however much it might contribute to the general welfare of the State, seemed likely to profit the northern rather than the southern portion. It had been opposed at the outset by Southerners, who argued soberly that it would flood the State with Yankees;[[307]] and at every stage in its progress it had encountered Southern obstruction, though the grounds for this opposition were more wisely chosen.
Political ideals and customs were also a divisive force in Illinois society. True to their earlier political training, the Southern settlers had established the county as a unit of local government. The Constitution of 1818 put the control of local concerns in the hands of three county commissioners, who, though elected by the people, were not subjected to that scrutiny which selectmen encountered in the New England town meeting. To the democratic New Englander, every system seemed defective which gave him no opportunity to discuss neighborhood interests publicly, and to call local officers to account before an assembly of the vicinage. The new comers in northern Illinois became profoundly dissatisfied with the autocratic board of county commissioners. Since the township might act as a corporate body for school purposes, why might they not enjoy the full measure of township government? Their demands grew more and more insistent, until they won substantial concessions from the convention which framed the Constitution of 1848. But all this agitation involved a more or less direct criticism of the system which the people of southern Illinois thought good enough for Yankees, if it were good enough for themselves.[[308]]
In the early history of Illinois, negro slavery was a bone of contention between men of Northern and of Southern antecedents. When Illinois was admitted as a State, there were over seven hundred negroes held in servitude. In spite of the Ordinance of 1787, Illinois was practically a slave Territory. There were, to be sure, stalwart opponents of slavery even among those who had come from slave-holding communities; but taken in the large, public opinion in the Territory sanctioned negro slavery as it existed under a loose system of indenture.[[309]] Even the Constitution of 1818, under which Illinois came into the Union as a free State, continued the old system of indenture with slight modification.[[310]]
It was in the famous contest over the proposed constitutional convention of 1824 that the influence of Northern opinion respecting slavery was first felt. The contest had narrowed down to a struggle between those who desired a convention in order to draft a constitution legalizing slavery and those who, from policy or principle, were opposed to slavery in Illinois. Men of Southern birth were, it is true, among the most aggressive leaders of the anti-convention forces, but the decisive votes against the convention were cast in the seven counties recently organized, in which there was a strong Northern element.[[311]]