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Great article. As someone who grew up and was educated in Illinois, I never heard of any of this.
Although California was a “free state,” sone of the very first laws passed by the state legislature made it legal to arrest Native people “on the complaint of any resident citizen” and auction them off to the top bidder for four months, while their children could be “apprenticed” to whites until they reached adulthood. If that wasn’t bad enough, 1860 amendments to the law kept the children in servitude until they turned 25 years old while any Native adults arrested for simple vagrancy could be sentenced to serve as an “apprentice” for up to ten years. These laws would only be partially repealed in 1863, with the status of those already enslaved not addressed until ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments.
Unfortunately, things haven’t changed that much in southern Illinois to this date.
From a redneck standpoint, you wouldn’t know you weren’t in central Mississippi.
I think it was Bobby Norfolk on the St. Louis Public Radio that told the story of slaves in Missouri looking across the the river at a “free” state. I remember the part where “freedom papers” were mentioned and that they couldn’t stay but had 10 to get through IL.
I also know that because of the German immigrants St. Louis was anti-slavery.
As is the case in other states, Illinois’ borders mask the many geographic, cultural, economic and ethnic regions that exist within it. Southern Illinois is one of those regions. I grew up in northeast Illinois and was taught the region south of US Highway 40 was more ‘‘south’’ than ‘‘north’’ leading up to the Civil War. No specifics were given, though.
I grew up there too. So did my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Lake County, north of Chicago. There’s a lot in this article that I had never heard of. Like the freedom papers, kidnapping gangs, and the law requiring white men to interrogate black people. However, I did know there has always been a big cultural divide between Northern and Southern Illinois that exists to this day.
Have you ever experienced the “drawls” around Peoria? I never knew what a “warshing” machine was. On a tangent, just ordered the referenced book. Looks like a good read.
I grew up in Chicago where Lincoln was absolutely lionized and people like his General Carl Schurz (and other German born citizens like him who had fled from repression in Europe) were likewise highly honored. I recall one Southerner remarking that “If it hadn’t been for those deutschers in Illinois, we could have won the war.” But we never heard that there was even a hint of slavery in our borders.
But then I was completely flummoxed when at age 21 I was driven through Southern Illinois–I had no idea that such a region even existed in the state; I had assumed that Illinois was basically Chicago all the way down. When a radio station called itself “The Prairie Farmer” station and played odd (to my ears) music (WLS) I had no clue as to what that meant.
Did you know that Prairie Farmer bought the station from the ‘World’s Largest Store’ in the late 1920s? Sears, Roebuck founded it, hence the call letters.
And WCFL was for “Chicago Federation of Labor”.
When I was a student at the U of I, it seemed to me that every person I met who grew up south of Interstate 80 invariably would say “we don’t have a Southern accent in my town, but the people 20 miles south of us do”.
Paternal side is from St Clair County across from St Louis. Never knew this info but am not surprised that there would be a “gray area” near a Border State (MO). I’ll bet you a donut that racial covenants in property contracts existed in that area up thru the 1960s as they did in the so-called “northern states”, although I haven;t researched that. They certainly do up til the early 70s in my small Texas town unsurprisingly.
Ha! That is so true! My sister lived in Decatur for ten years. Each time I turned east on Hwy 121 I would say to others in the car, “You are now leaving the 21st century.”
I grew up in Northern Illinois and I was taught that slavery existed in Illinois in elementary school, primarily in the southern part of the state. I went to graduate school in the southern part of the state and it was well known that slaves who tried to escape over the border into Illinois were captured and sent back south. Now, this was many years ago, and maybe it is no longer a requirement to take a class on the history of Illinois, but when I was a kid, I had to take that class…no college, but elementary school.
Illinois is a very diverse state and the south is more like Kentucky then Illinois. It is really impossible to say that no schools and no teachers taught this to their students.
The southern part of IL was filled with “copperheads”, who were southern sympathizers. Stephen J Douglas, opponent of Abraham Lincoln for the Senate seat, and participant in the historic debates, was a proponent of many southern things. argued that the residents of a territory should decide on the free- vs slave-status of the territory.
Following the Revolution of 1848, many Germans came to St Louis. Many of the beer companies were founded by Germans. Pulitzer was a German. Fritz Siegal was a German colonel of the National Guard, and he played a key role as the Confederates attempted to seize the Armory with its collection of firearms. The Germans were opposed to slavery and to all forms of non-liberal thinking.
When I was at U of I, 70-75, I knew quite a few southern IL students. I was completely amazed at their stories and at their accents. The U of I, BTW, is set in the cornfields of central IL, and is a “pat of butter in a sea of grits” (the description of UNC-CH as well). Of course, central IL has many amazing places, including Allerton, the country hall of a coal baron. It has the wonderful “fu dog garden” and the “sun singer” statue.
FWIW: In 1830 in LA, several black families owned slaves.