A fourth attempt to bring the proposal before Congress was made in January, 1807, in a formal communication from the Governor and Territorial Legislature. The proposal was a third time favorably reported by the committee of reference, but still without action by the House. Finally, in November of the same year, President Jefferson transmitted to Congress similar communications from the Indiana government. This time the committee reported that "the citizens of Clark county [in which was located the first Baptist church organized in Indiana], in their remonstrance, express their sense of the impropriety of the measure"; and that they also requested Congress not to act upon the subject until the people had an opportunity to formulate a State Constitution[16]. Commenting upon the whole proceedings, Dr. Peck quotes Gov. Harrison to the effect that, though he and Lemen were firm friends, the latter "had set his iron will against slavery, and indirectly made his influence felt so strongly at Washington and before Congress, that all the efforts to suspend the anti-slavery clause in the Ordinance of 1787 failed."[17] Peck adds that President Jefferson "quietly directed his leading confidential friends in Congress steadily to defeat Gen. Harrison's petitions for the repeal."[17]
It was about this time, September 10, 1807, that President Jefferson thus expressed his estimate of James Lemen's services, in his letter to Robert Lemen: "His record in the new country has fully justified my course in inducing him to settle there with the view of properly shaping events in the best interest of the people."[18] It was during this period of the Indiana agitation for the introduction of slavery, as we learn from an entry in his diary dated September 10, 1806, that Mr. Lemen received a call from an agent of Aaron Burr to solicit his aid and sympathy in Burr's scheme for a southwestern empire, with Illinois as a Province, and an offer to make him governor. "But I denounced the conspiracy as high treason," he says, "and gave him a few hours to leave the Territory on pain of arrest."[19] It should be noted that at this date he was not himself a magistrate, which, perhaps, accounts for his apparent leniency towards what he regarded as a treasonable proposal.
The year 1809, the date of the separation of Illinois from the Indiana Territory, marks a crisis in the Lemen anti-slavery campaign in Illinois.[20] The agitation under the Indiana government for the further recognition of slavery in the Territory was mainly instigated by the Illinois slave-holders and their sympathizers among the American settlers from the slave states. The people of Indiana proper, except those of the old French inhabitants of Vincennes, who were possessed of slaves, were either indifferent or hostile towards slavery. Its partisans in the Illinois counties of the Territory, in the hope of promoting their object thereby, now sought division of the Indiana Territory and the erection of a separate government for Illinois at Kaskaskia. This movement aroused a bitter political struggle in the Illinois settlements, one result of which was the murder of young Rice Jones in the streets of Kaskaskia. The division was advocated on the ground of convenience and opposed on the score of expense. The divisionists, however, seem to have been animated mainly by the desire to secure the introduction of slavery as soon as statehood could be attained for their section. The division was achieved in 1809, and with it the prompt adoption of the system of indentured service already in vogue under the Indiana government. And from that time forth the fight was on between the free-state and slave-state parties in the new Territory. Throughout the independent territorial history of Illinois, slavery was sanctioned partly by law and still further by custom. Gov. Ninian Edwards, whose religious affiliations were with the Baptists, not only sanctioned slavery, but, as is well known, was himself the owner of slaves during the territorial period.
It was in view of this evident determination to make of Illinois Territory a slave state, that James Lemen, with Jefferson's approval, took the radical step of organizing a distinctively anti-slavery church as a means of promoting the free-state cause.[21] From the first, indeed, he had sought to promote the cause of temperance and of anti-slavery in and through the church. He tells us in his diary, in fact, that he "hoped to employ the churches as a means of opposition to the institution of slavery."[21] He was reared in the Presbyterian faith, his stepfather being a minister of that persuasion; but at twenty years of age he embraced Baptist principles, apparently under the influence of a Baptist minister in Virginia, whose practice it was to bar from membership all who upheld the institution of slavery. He thus identified himself with the struggles for civil, religious, and industrial liberty, all of which were then actively going on in his own state.
The name of "New Design," which became attached to the settlement which he established on the upland prairies beyond the bluffs of the "American Bottom," is said to have originated from a quaint remark of his that he "had a 'new design' to locate a settlement south of Bellefontaine" near the present town of Waterloo.[22] The name "New Design," however, became significant of his anti-slavery mission; and when, after ten years of pioneer struggles, he organized The Baptist Church of Christ at New Design, in 1796, he soon afterwards induced that body—the first Protestant church in the bounds of the present State—to adopt what were known as "Tarrant's Rules Against Slavery." The author of these rules, the Rev. James Tarrant, of Virginia, later of Kentucky, one of the "emancipating preachers," eventually organized the fraternity of anti-slavery Baptist churches in Kentucky, who called themselves "Friends to Humanity."
From 1796 to 1809 Judge Lemen was active in the promotion of Baptist churches and a Baptist Association. He labored to induce all these organizations to adopt his anti-slavery principles, and in this he was largely successful; but, with the increase of immigrant Baptists from the slave states, it became increasingly difficult to maintain these principles in their integrity. And when, in the course of the campaign for the division of the Territory in 1808, it became apparent that the lines between the free-state and the slave-state forces were being decisively drawn, Lemen prepared to take a more radical stand in the struggle. With this design in view he asked and obtained the formal sanction of his church as a licensed preacher. In the course of the same year, 1808, he is said to have received a confidential message from Jefferson "suggesting a division of the churches on the question of slavery, and the organization of a church on a strictly anti-slavery basis, for the purpose of heading a movement to make Illinois a free state."[21] According to another, and more probable, version of this story, when Jefferson learned, through a mutual friend (Mr. S. H. Biggs), of Lemen's determination to force the issue in the church to the point of division, if necessary, he sent him a message of approval of his proposed course and accompanied it with a contribution of $20 for the contemplated anti-slavery church.
The division of the Territory was effected early in the year 1809, and in the summer of that year, after vainly trying to hold all the churches to their avowed anti-slavery principles, Elder Lemen, in a sermon at Richland Creek Baptist church, threw down the gauntlet to his pro-slavery brethren and declared that he could no longer maintain church fellowship with them. His action caused a division in the church, which was carried into the Association at its ensuing meeting, in October, 1809, and resulted in the disruption of that body into three parties on the slavery question—the conservatives, the liberals, and the radicals. The latter element, headed by "the Lemen party," as it now came to be called, held to the principles of The Friends to Humanity, and proposed to organize a branch of that order of Baptists. When it came to the test, however, the new church was reduced to a constituent membership consisting of some seven or eight members of the Lemen family. Such was the beginning of what is now the oldest surviving Baptist church in the State, which then took the name of "The Baptized Church of Christ, Friends to Humanity, on Cantine (Quentin) Creek." It is located in the neighborhood of the old Cahokia mound. Its building, when it came to have one, was called "Bethel Meeting House," and in time the church itself became known as "Bethel Baptist Church."
The distinctive basis of this church is proclaimed in its simple constitution, to which every member was required to subscribe: "Denying union and communion with all persons holding the doctrine of perpetual, involuntary, hereditary slavery." This church began its career as "a family church," in the literal sense of the word; but it prospered nevertheless, until it became a numerically strong and vigorous organization which has had an active and honorable career of a hundred years' duration. Churches of the same name and principles multiplied and maintained their uncompromising but discriminating opposition to slavery so long as slavery remained a local issue; after which time they were gradually absorbed into the general body of ordinary Baptist churches.
During the period of the Illinois Territory, 1809 to 1818, Elder Lemen kept up a most energetic campaign of opposition to slavery, by preaching and rigorous church discipline in the application of the rules against slavery. He himself was regularly ordained soon after the organization of his anti-slavery church. His sons, James and Joseph, and his brother-in-law, Benjamin Ogle, were equally active in the ministry during this period, and, before its close, they had two churches firmly established in Illinois, with others of the same order in Missouri.
"The church, properly speaking, never entered politics," Dr. Peck informs us, "but presently, when it became strong, the members all formed what they called the 'Illinois Anti-Slavery League,' and it was this body that conducted the anti-slavery contest."[23] The contest culminated in the campaign for statehood in 1818.