13. Why did the county system prevail at first?
Section 3. The Representative Township-County System in the West.
[Sidenote: The town-meeting in Michigan.] The first western state to adopt the town-meeting was Michigan, where the great majority of the settlers had come from New England, or from central New York, which was a kind of westward extension of New England.[9] Counties were established in Michigan Territory in 1805, and townships were first incorporated in 1825. This was twelve years before Michigan became a state. At first the powers of the town-meeting were narrowly limited. It elected the town and county officers, but its power of appropriating money seems to have been restricted to the purpose of extirpating noxious animals and weeds. In 1827, however, it was authorized to raise money for the support of schools, and since then its powers have steadily increased, until now they approach those of the town-meeting in Massachusetts.
[Footnote 9: "Of the 496 members of the Michigan Pioneer Association
in 1881, 407 are from these sections" [New England and New York].
Bemis, Local Government in Michigan and the Northwest, J. H. U.
Studies, I., v]
[Sidenote: Settlement of Illinois.] The history of Illinois presents an extremely interesting example of rivalry and conflict between the town system of New England and the county system of the South. Observe that this great state is so long that, while the parallel of latitude starting from its northern boundary runs through Marblehead in Massachusetts, the parallel through its southernmost point, at Cairo, runs a little south of Petersburg in Virginia. In 1818, when Illinois framed its state government and was admitted to the Union, its population was chiefly in the southern half, and composed for the most part of pioneers from Virginia and Virginia's daughter-state Kentucky. These men brought with them the old Virginia county system, but with the very great difference that the county officers were not appointed by the governor, or allowed to be a self-perpetuating board, but were elected by the people of the county. This was a true advance in the democratic direction, but an essential defect of the southern system remained in the absence of any kind of local meeting for the discussion of public affairs and the enactment of local laws.
[Sidenote: Effects of the Ordinance of 1787.] By the famous Ordinance of 1787, to which we shall again have occasion to refer, negro slavery had been forever prohibited to the north of the Ohio river, so that, in spite of the wishes of her early settlers, Illinois was obliged to enter the Union as a free state. But in 1820 Missouri was admitted as a slave state, and this turned the stream of southern migration aside from Illinois to Missouri. These emigrants, to whom slaveholding was a mark of social distinction, preferred to go where they could own slaves. About the same time settlers from New England and New York, moving along the southern border of Michigan and the northern borders of Ohio and Indiana, began pouring into the northern part of Illinois. These new-comers did not find the representative county system adequate for their needs, and they demanded township government. A memorable political struggle ensued between the northern and southern halves of the state, ending in 1848 with the adoption of a new constitution. It was provided that the legislature should enact a general law for the political organization of townships, under which any county might act whenever a majority of its voters should so determine.[10] This was introducing the principle of local option, and in accordance therewith township governments with town-meetings were at once introduced in the northern counties of the state, while the southern counties kept on in the old way. Now comes the most interesting part of the story. The two systems being thus brought into immediate contact in the same state, with free choice between them left to the people, the northern system has slowly but steadily supplanted the southern system, until at the present day only one fifth part of the counties in Illinois remain without township government.
[Footnote 10: Shaw, Local Government if Illinois, J. H. U.
Studies, I., iii.]
[Sidenote: Intense vitality of the township system.] This example shows the intense vitality of the township system. It is the kind of government that people are sure to prefer when they have tried it under favourable conditions. In the West the hostile conditions against which it has to contend are either the recent existence of negro slavery and the ingrained prejudice in favour of the Virginia method, as in Missouri; or simply the sparseness of population, as in Nebraska. Time will evidently remove the latter obstacle, and probably the former also. It is very significant that in Missouri, which began so lately as 1879 to erect township governments under a local option law similar to that of Illinois, the process has already extended over about one sixth part of the state; and in Nebraska, where the same process began in 1883, it has covered nearly one third of the organized counties of the state.
[Sidenote: County option and township option.] The principle of local option as to government has been carried still farther in Minnesota and Dakota. The method just described may be called county option; the question is decided by a majority vote of the people of the county. But in Minnesota in 1878 it was enacted that as soon as any one of the little square townships in that state should contain as many as twenty-five legal voters, it might petition the board of county commissioners and obtain a township organization, even though, the adjacent townships in the same county should remain under county government only. Five years later the same provision was adopted by Dakota, and under it township government is steadily spreading.
[Sidenote: Grades of township government.] Two distinct grades of township government are to be observed in the states west of the Alleghanies; the one has the town-meeting for deliberative purposes, the other has not. In Ohio and Indiana, which derived their local institutions largely from Pennsylvania, there is no such town-meeting, the administrative offices are more or less concentrated in a board of trustees, and the town is quite subordinate to the county. The principal features of this system have been reproduced in Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas.