Slavery on a Knife’s Edge: How Three Virginians Kept Illinois Free and Saved the Union

By Paul E. Ronan

Illinois’ contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War is well documented. Less well known is the very real danger that Illinois could have become a slave state. The decades long struggle to keep Illinois free from the looming shadow of slavery was spearheaded by three Virginians – Thomas Jefferson, James Lemen, and Edward Coles. Jefferson was the philosopher who early on recognized the threat and took action from Washington to forestall it. He commissioned James Lemen, a Revolutionary War veteran and true pioneer, to migrate to Illinois and organize and lead the resistance there. Edward Coles, raised on a Virginia plantation, brought the slaves he inherited to Illinois and freed them there. He became Illinois’ second Governor and led the crucial final effort that finally defeated the menace. This book details the efforts of these three men, and is an epic saga in American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669851271

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Copyright © 2022 by Paul E. Ronan.

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Rev. date: 10/18/2022

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Part I         Introduction

The Institution of Slavery

Illinois as the Key Battleground

A Profile of the Three Virginians

Why Virginia?

Part II       Roots of the Crisis–Developments Through 1800

Slavery in Virginia Before 1800

The Age of Enlightenment

Slavery in Illinois Before 1800

Thomas Jefferson’s Great Accomplishments

James Lemen

Edward Coles

End of the Eighteenth Century

Part III      1800–1809

State of the Nation

Reversal in Virginia

Illinois in Formation

Thomas Jefferson at the Crossroad

James Lemen’s Ascent

Edward Coles–A Crisis of Conscience

Part IV      1810–1818

A Nation Dividing

Illinois–Journey to Statehood

Thomas Jefferson in Full Retreat

James Lemen–Strength of Character and Leadership

Edward Coles–Diversion, Temptation, and Return

Part V       1819–1822 Prelude to Crisis

Nation Divided–The Missouri Crisis

Illinois and the 1822 Election

Thomas Jefferson–Changing Sides

James Lemen–The Rock at Sunset

Edward Coles Assumes the Leadership

1822 Summary

Part VI      1823–1824 Crisis

The Issue in 1823

The Vote in the Legislature

Shifting and Hypocrisy

The Twin Pillars: Enlightened Self-Interest and Morality

The Result

The Reward of Virtue

Immediate Aftereffects

Part VII     Afterward

Analysis

Edward Coles

Impact

Appendix A   The Jefferson-Lemen Compact

Appendix B   Geography, Demographics, and the Political Situation in 1824

Appendix C   Timeline

Appendix D   Order v. Justice As Related to Slavery in the Antebellum United States

Bibliography

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Size, Population, and Political Representation in the United States in 1824 (See appendix B for details.)

Figure 2: Geography of the United States in 1824

Figure 3: Relative Population of Virginia 1790–1820

Figure 4: North America in 1750 and 1763

Figure 5: Illinois in 1790

Figure 6: Jefferson’s Progression on Slavery

Figure 7: Illinois in 1809

Figure 8: Illinois in 1818

Figure 9: Plaque to Edward Coles Jr. in Christ Church, Philadelphia

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Population Data and Worst-Case Assumptions

Table 2: Virginia Population Growth 1700–1770

Table 3: Distortion in Apportionment of Illinois Legislature Seats in 1822 in Two Counties

PROLOGUE

R ESOLUTION OF SERIOUS conflicts seldom results in total agreement but often in a series of compromises that are temporary and fully satisfy neither side. Such was the history of the national conflict over slavery from the time of the founding of the United States. A peaceful permanent agreement proved impossible between disputants whose core beliefs on what constituted basic individual rights and on the very definition of humanity itself were diametrically opposed.

Both sides had dedicated advocates who believed in the righteousness of their positions. One side defined success as a well-ordered society in which they completely dominated another race of people, and viewed any expansion of rights for that subjugated class of people a loss of rights and power for themselves. The other side favored freedom for all people regardless of race. Both sides constantly attempted to convert the remaining large group of uncommitted people.

The pendulum of success oscillated from one side to the other from the founding of the nation to the Civil War. The tipping point occurred in August 1824 after which the fortunes of those favoring freedom steadily improved to a point where the oppressors chose secession and war to protect their fading position.

In a referendum in August 1824, the citizens of the state of Illinois defeated a final effort to legalize slavery. The national proslavery lobby would score some later successes such as tightening its hold on Congress and admission of a number of new slave states. However, slavery had been forever denied the foothold north of the Ohio River necessary to make it a permanent institution in the American Union.

Three Virginians—Thomas Jefferson, James Lemen, and Edward Coles—struggled for more than forty years to keep Illinois free of slavery. The combined efforts of these three men demonstrated decisively that selfless adherence to principles, a willingness to accept unpleasant personal consequences, and true leadership involving both contemplation and action—the idea and the deed—can overcome the forces of fear, peer pressure, greed, and ambition. It was not enough to simply cultivate and adhere to principles as individuals; the success of the antislavery efforts in Illinois required heroic efforts to convince, educate, organize, and lead others along the righteous path.

Although the contributions of these three Virginians are covered in detail throughout the book, a brief summary of their roles in the struggle to keep Illinois free follows.

Thomas Jefferson established at the national level the legislative foundation for prohibiting slavery in Illinois. He commissioned James Lemen to permanently move to Illinois as his special agent to oppose slavery at the territorial level while supporting Lemen’s efforts behind the scenes in Washington.

James Lemen erected the political and moral antislavery structure in Illinois that narrowly overcame repeated efforts to introduce slavery into the territory. In 1818, Illinois was admitted to the Union with a state constitution banning slavery.

Edward Coles, a latecomer to Illinois and the state’s second governor, organized and directed the effort that narrowly defeated the final and most serious challenge by the proslavery faction to end the ban on slavery in the state constitution.

The 1824 referendum in Illinois went almost unnoticed on the national scene, but it was, in fact, one of the key turning points in American history.

For a detailed timeline of the events recorded in this book, see appendix C.

PART I

Introduction

I N 1818, TO comply with the conditions that Congress had mandated for statehood (i.e., conformance to the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787), the drafters of the Illinois Constitution reluctantly included a provision banning slavery. They knew that once Illinois became a sovereign state, it would have unfettered authority to amend its own constitution. In 1822, the legislature of the three-year-old state approved the holding of a public referendum on whether to convene a state convention to amend the constitution. Ostensibly, the purpose of the convention was to correct minor issues in the original document, but its real purpose was to legalize slavery. Given the demographic changes underway in the new state, the proslavery forces recognized this opportunity as their best, and probably last, chance to do so.

Most of the early settlers immigrated to Illinois from slave states and were either proslavery or ambivalent about the institution. However, between the census of 1818 and the census of 1820, a new wave of antislavery immigrants from the northeast dramatically changed the makeup of the population. In 1820, the state legislature, elected based on the census of 1818, had a comfortable proslavery majority. These representatives recognized that theirs would be the last legislature in which they would have the two-third majority in both Houses required to call for a referendum on convening a constitutional convention. They quickly and by the narrowest margin approved such a referendum and scheduled it to be held at the next general election in 1824. Assuming electorate approval, the convention delegates would be chosen based on the makeup of the existing legislature, ensuring a solid proslavery majority and making the legalization of slavery a certainty.

In 1824, the United States faced a crisis dwarfing in importance the later, more publicized struggle for Kansas in the mid-1850s. The stakes could not have been higher. A vote to allow slavery in Illinois would have decisively altered the political, geographic, and demographic forces that were shaping the nation’s future, and would have turned them in a direction more favorable to the perpetuation of slavery.

The Institution of Slavery

Prior to the fall of the Roman empire, people were held in slavery as punishment for a crime or in restitution for an unpaid debt. It was also customary at the end of a successful war for the victor to enslave a portion (usually the elite) of the conquered people, extracting labor to offset the cost of war. Another subtler reason was to deprive the conquered people of the most intelligent and educated—and therefore most dangerous—elements of their society. These educated slaves were often employed as teachers in the victorious nation and had, at least, a chance of regaining freedom and blending seamlessly into their new society.

With the fall of Rome, chattel slavery, in which a human being is legally a piece of the owner’s personal, movable property, all but vanished from the western world. It reappeared in the fourteenth century as a reaction by the ruling class to the peasant revolts that swept across Europe in the wake of the Black Death. This new slavery had nothing to do with the ancient concept of enslaving the intelligent classes of a conquered nation. It was simply a way of lowering the cost of scarce labor.

Slavery developed in the United States as an extension of this need for cheap labor. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, European colonists in the Western Hemisphere employed indentured laborers who paid for their Atlantic passage by providing service for a fixed number of years. When the indenture system proved inadequate to meet the huge demand for labor in the New World, Africans were kidnapped and transported across the ocean to make up the deficit. Although originally classed as indentured servants, Black Africans’ terms of service were gradually transformed into perpetual, hereditary slavery. Most of the slaves who came to the North American territory that would eventually become the United States were brought, beginning in the seventeenth century, to the British colonies along the East Coast. A second path for the importation of slaves was via the Mississippi River to the Spanish and French possessions around New Orleans and up the river as far as Illinois, where the presence of Negro slaves was recorded as early as 1720.¹ Although slavery was virtually unknown in most of the territory north of the Ohio River, it was well, if sparsely, established in Illinois long before the first English settlers entered that area.

Prior to the Revolutionary War, slavery was a fact of life in all the English colonies of North America. Most prevalent in the southern areas, it was in rapid decline further north where cold climate limited the year-round usefulness of slaves and made the institution far less profitable. Economics was not the only force constraining the growth of slavery in the North. Quakers and New England Puritans condemned slavery as immoral. This contrasted with the Episcopal Church of England’s more accepting view of the institution primarily in the South. In the eighteenth century, attempts by several colonies, including Virginia, to ban slavery, or at least the slave trade, were invariably vetoed by the royally appointed governors under direction from the King.²

It was not until the United States was independent of Britain that some of the states began to end slavery. By 1804, all the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line, except New Jersey, had enacted laws that either abolished slavery immediately or provided for its gradual elimination. None of the states south of Pennsylvania followed suit. The representatives of these slave states in the Continental Congress prevented the inclusion of a clause in the Ordinance of 1784 (dealing with how the western territories would be governed) that would have banned slavery in all the US non-state territories after 1800. Having achieved a westward growth path for slavery’s expansion, the southern states then acquiesced in the passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that made slavery illegal in territories north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi Rivers—a vast territory where there were few slaves.

In spite of the emancipation of slaves in the northern states and the banning of slavery in the Northwest Territory, the final three decades of the eighteenth century (i.e., 1770–1800) witnessed slavery deeply embedding itself in the moral, political, social, and economic fiber of American society in the South.

Morality of Slavery

Compared to the ancient practice, the American brand of slavery was more pernicious and difficult to eradicate. The people enslaved had been forcibly removed from their native land and culture for no reason other than to provide a cheap and perpetual source of manual labor. No attempt was made to take from the African tribes their most intelligent members. Indeed, in many parts of the Antebellum South, it was a crime to teach reading and writing to slaves, who were considered an inferior race, permanently distinct from the rest of society. The differences in skin color and facial features meant that even if these slaves were eventually freed, they could never meld easily into society.

Many slaveholders had serious moral reservations about slavery. The principles of the Enlightenment were steadily eroding the concept of the primacy of received knowledge with its aristocratic rights and privileges that had dominated the Middle Ages. Many of the most intelligent slaveholders who had been educated in Enlightenment philosophy invented rationales to soothe their consciences. One such sophistry was that slavery was part of a divine plan in which they (the slaveholders) were God’s instrument for converting a degraded people and giving them a chance for salvation. Another was that the slaves were their owner’s responsibility and members of an extended family who were not capable of surviving on their own. A third was that slavery was an unfortunate but essential bulwark of the fragile new nation that could not be removed without threatening the entire structure—an argument that order must precede justice. It was this third argument that was the most seductive.

The protestant churches of the United States originally served as bonds of unity between North and South. One by one these bonds were severed by irresolvable disputes about the morality of slavery. Methodists split with Southern Methodists; Baptists split with Southern Baptists. The Catholic church,³ taking a middle-of-the-road position, thought it better for some to suffer injustice than to risk disruption of the existing social order that might result from immediate emancipation. This rationale that order must take precedence over justice was echoed by Anglican Bishop James Madison, president of the College of William and Mary, as he attempted to rationalize his toleration of slavery.

Winston Churchill estimated the number of slaves held by clergymen and religious orders at over six hundred thousand.⁴

Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, was appalled by what he saw of slavery in the United States during his visit in 1831–32. To de Tocqueville, democracy was virtually the same as equality of social condition (i.e., the ability of any individual to have an equal opportunity at achieving success or upward movement in society), and he considered slavery the ultimate denial of equality of social condition. He was particularly astonished by certain aspects of slavery, such as the status of the children of White slave owners and their Black slave concubines. These children were the legal property of the master (father) who could, and often did, sell them for profit since mixed blood (mulatto) slaves were considered more presentable as house servants than were slaves of full African ancestry. De Tocqueville predicted that although the American slave system would eventually end, Whites would not be able to accept freed Blacks as equals. The dichotomy of America’s founding principles versus the especially egregious form of race-based slavery astonished the French nobleman.

Returning to France following his visit to the US, de Tocqueville wrote numerous letters in the 1840s and 1850s to his American correspondents. In these letters, he expressed his abhorrence of slavery and its threat to democracy in the United States. Although he could propose no practical solution to slavery in those areas where it already existed, he vehemently opposed its extension to territories beyond where it presently existed. He hoped to see the day when the law would grant equal civil liberties to all inhabitants of the same empire, as God accorded the freedom of will, without distinction, to all on earth." De Tocqueville died in 1859, making no comment on the coming carnage of the Civil War and its causes.⁵

Southern slaveholders were insulted and threatened by these comments and observations from northerners and outsiders. Their pride and sense of honor were challenged, and dealing with these perceived slights overrode any doubts they may have entertained about slavery’s morality. They became strident in the defense of slavery as a positive good and condemned the rhetoric of the abolitionists, refusing to allow an open discussion of slavery within the slave states or even in the Congress of the United States.

In the North, a general indifference to the plight of the Negro slave prevailed. Many northern slaveholders had circumvented the intent of the post-nati laws (post-nati laws freed all slaves born after a certain date when they reached a specified age) by shipping slaves south for sale prior to the date on which they would legally have become free. Northern abolitionists, a small but vocal minority, were unable to overcome a tide of apathy concerning slavery in the South.

Political Impact of Slavery

At the end of the Revolutionary War, most Americans believed that slavery was at odds with the principles of liberty and equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence. As the economic justification for slavery weakened in the late eighteenth century, the Continental Congress, after narrowly failing in 1784 to ban slavery in all the territories, in 1787 passed the Northwest Ordinance (later ratified in 1790 by the First Congress under the new Constitution) forbidding slavery in the unorganized Northwest Territory, including Illinois. Since legislation by the Continental Congress required unanimous consent of all the states, this remarkable act was seen as reflecting the general view that slavery was wrong and was being placed on a path to ultimate extinction. At the 1787 constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the delegates agreed that the slave trade could be ended as early as 1808. It appeared the founders were serious about ending slavery.

Slavery in the North was gradually phased out after the Revolution. In 1776, Massachusetts and New Hampshire (which then included Vermont) freed their slaves. The states of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey enacted post-nati laws. These laws were intended to phase out slavery gradually, minimizing the impact to the slave owners. The Pennsylvania law, for example, freed all slaves born after 1780 upon reaching age twenty-eight. In most instances, the former slaves became free inhabitants of those states. By 1804, the eight northeastern states had either freed their slaves or put in place post-nati laws. The tide of freedom flowing from north to south had reached the southern border of Pennsylvania.

Regrettably, American slavery proved to be a durable and monstrous evil sustained by pride, greed, fear, racism, and resistance to change. These all-too-human weaknesses produced in the South a mindset that sturdily resisted peaceful efforts to end slavery or even to limit its growth.

The delegates to the 1787 constitutional convention had a tacit agreement not to let the development of the new Constitution falter on the issue of slavery. They believed that compromises on slavery were a temporary necessity if a viable Union was to be established. One of these compromises was to include in the Constitution the three-fifths provision, left over from the Articles of Confederation. Under this provision, a slave was to be counted as three-fifth of a free White person for establishing the relative populations of the states.

This clause had little political impact under the Articles of Confederation because the states were considered equal and each state had one vote in Congress where a unanimous vote was required for all legislation. Population data was only used to apportion federal expenses among the states.

When this three-fifth provision migrated to the new Constitution, it had an enormous political impact. The number of slaves in a state translated directly to additional congressmen and presidential electors for that state. The impact of the three-fifth rule was first felt in the presidential election of 1800, where, absent the three-fifth rule, John Adams would have been reelected. Virginia had twenty-one presidential electors versus New York’s twelve. Without the three-fifth rule, Virginia would have had fifteen electors and New York sixteen. This distortion of voting strength favoring the South made slavery that much harder to deal with peacefully.

Various historians have put forward the proposition that states’ rights and the limits of federal power, not slavery, were the primary factors leading to the Civil War. However, as slavery became more deeply entrenched in the southern economy and culture, the issue of states’ rights became as much a shield for slavery as the root cause of the disagreement between the sections of the country. The South, fearing that a powerful federal government might act against slavery, insisted on strict construction of the Constitution and literal interpretation of the Tenth Amendment reserving all non-enumerated powers to the states or the people. However, it should be noted that powerful proslavery southern presidents stretched the Constitution further than did any northern president when they considered it necessary to protect southern interests.⁶

Although the political advantages conferred on the South, particularly the three-fifth rule in the Constitution, were a considerable obstacle to ending slavery, the social structure that had evolved among the large plantation owners and their families also constituted a formidable barrier to change.

Social Impact of Slavery

The importation of slaves in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries gave rise to a rigid caste system in the South with the Tidewater aristocracy as the nobility and slaves at the bottom of the structure. To de Tocqueville, this system had all the faults of the European class divides, and he noted that an aristocracy ordinarily succumbs only after a prolonged struggle during which implacable and long-lasting hatreds among the different classes are ignited. These passions survive victory.⁷ Given the race hatred that developed during and after the Civil War, this statement was prescient.

Slavery in the South sustained an archaic, oligarchic social structure that steadfastly opposed change. An end to slavery in the southern states was fiercely resisted by the ruling elite (i.e., the major plantation owners), whose lifestyles and positions in society depended on slavery. In their view, even gradual emancipation would not only destroy that social structure but also unleash upon the country large numbers of vengeful freed Blacks. Many prominent southerners (including Thomas Jefferson) feared a race war if the slaves were freed, arguing that the slaves could never forget or forgive the indignities and outrages they had suffered.⁸

Because their states had a far larger percentage of Negroes than did