In 1795, notwithstanding the decreased population, and perhaps in the hope of checking the decrease, St. Clair County was divided by proclamation of Governor St. Clair. The division was by an east and west line running a little south of the settlement of New Design.[179] St. Clair County lay to the north, Randolph County to the south of the line.[180]
The early laws of the Northwest Territory throw light upon the conditions existing upon the frontier. Minute provisions for establishing and maintaining ferries, with no mention of bridges, indicate the primitive methods of travel.[181] Millers were required to use a prescribed set of measures and to grind for a prescribed toll, the toll for the use of a horse-mill being higher than that for a water-mill, unless the owner of the grain furnished the horses.[182] Guide-posts were to be put up at the forks of every public road.[183] No stray stock should be taken up between the first of April and the first of November, unless the stray should have broken into the inclosure of the taker-up.[184] In those days stock was turned out and crops were fenced in. Prairies or cleared land were not to be fired except between December 1 and March 10, unless upon one's own land.[185] The following rates of county taxation were prescribed:
Horses, per head, not more than $.50
Neat cattle, not more than .12-½
Bond servant, not more than 1.00
Single man, 21 yrs. or older, with less than $200 worth of property, not more than 2.00 nor less than .50
Retail merchants, not more than 10.00[186]
A bounty, varying at different times between 1799 and 1810 from 50 cents to $2 per head, was given for killing wolves.[187] Imprisonment for debt, a law antedating by many years similar laws in several of the other parts of the United States, was practically abolished.[188] A frontier region does not have that social stratification which makes oppression of the debtor class easy. A county too poor to build a log jail without difficulty is not likely to be so senseless as to make a practice of confining and boarding its debtor class.
For the purpose of taxation land was to be listed in three classes according to value. No specification as to the value of the respective classes was prescribed. The tax was eighty-five, sixty, or twenty-five cents per one hundred acres, according as land was first, second, or third class. No unimproved land in Illinois was to be listed higher than second class.[189]
The laws above cited were enacted by the legislature of the Northwest Territory. In May, 1800, that territory was divided, the western part, including Illinois, becoming Indiana Territory. This made the Illinois country more distinctly frontier by again reducing it to the first grade of territorial government, Indiana Territory, as such, not being represented in Congress until December, 1805.[190] Among the reasons advanced for dividing the Northwest Territory was the fact that in five years there had been but one court for criminal cases in the three western counties.[191]