Alexander County IL Archives History - Books .....Chapter III The Illinois Territorial Government 1910
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Book Title: A History Of The City Of Cairo Illiniois

CHAPTER III

THE ILLINOIS TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENT



IT would be interesting to stop here and speak of the contest in and out of

congress to prevent the division of the Indiana territory and the organization

of the territory of Illinois, and of the public men who lost or won in the

heated controversy; but space will not admit of this being done.



   President Madison, March 7, 1809, appointed Nathaniel Pope, of the territory

of Louisiana, the secretary of the territory; and April 24th, he appointed

Ninian Edwards, of Kentucky, governor of the territory. The governor and the

judges promulgated thirteen laws in 1809, twelve in 1810, and five in 1811.

March 14, 1812, he ordered an election to be held the second day of April to

enable the people to express their preference as to whether the government

should pass from the first to the second grade; and the vote resulting in favor

of the change, on the 14th of September, he ordered an election to be held

October 8th, 9th and 10th, for the purpose of choosing a delegate to congress,

members of the legislative council and representatives to the general assembly,

of the territory. Shadrack Bond was chosen delegate to congress, Pierre Menard,

Benjamin Talbot, William Biggs, Samuel Judy, and Thomas Ferguson, members of the

legislative council, and George Fisher, Alexander Wilson, Philip Trammel, John

Grammer, Joshua Oglesby, Jacob Short, and William Jones, members of the

territorial house of representatives. Menard became president of the council and

John Thomas its secretary; George Fisher became speaker of the house and William

C. Greenup its clerk. The first territorial legislature or general assembly

convened at Kaskaskia November 25, 1812, and continued in session thirty-two

days and enacted thirty-seven laws. The salary of the Attorney General, B. M.

Piatt, was $175 per annum; those of the Auditor, H. H. Maxwell, and of the

Treasurer, John Thomas, were $150 each. The pay of the members of the

legislature was $2.00 per day. The second session of this assembly convened

November 8, 1813, and enacted thirteen laws, among them one to prevent the sale

of liquor to the Indians, and another to prevent the emigration of negroes and

mulattoes into the territory.



  The second territorial legislature convened on the I4th of November, 1814. It

made a contract with Nathaniel Pope for revising the laws of the territory. It

also passed an act for the incorporation of Shawneetown, and an act authorizing

the payment of $50.00 for every hostile Indian killed. On the 24th of December,

it adjourned until September 4, 1815. Re-assembling, it continued in session

thirty-nine days and enacted thirty-eight laws, one of which was to tax billiard

tables $150 per annum; another to punish counterfeiters of bank bills by fining

and whipping, and if they were unable to pay the fines, they were to be sold by

the sheriff at public sale to satisfy the judgments. The third legislature sat

from December 2, 1816, to January 14, 1817, and then took a recess to December

1st. It enacted twenty-eight laws at that session. One was to establish a bank

at Shawneetown with a capital of $300,000. Indiana had prohibited non-resident

lawyers from practicing in their courts; and in retaliation, this legislature

passed an act imposing a fine of $200.00 upon any Indiana lawyer found

practicing in the territory, and a fine of $500.00 against the judge who

knowingly allowed the Indiana lawyer to practice in his court. At this time

there was no very friendly feeling between the people of the two territories

because of the contest concerning the division of the territory of Indiana. The

second session convened December ist, and enacted fifty laws, among them the

only law it ever enacted relating to Cairo, the act to incorporate the City and

Bank of Cairo. It passed both houses of the legislature and was approved by the

Governor January 9, 1818. The final adjournment of the legislature took place

January 12, 1818, three days after the enactment of this law concerning Cairo.

The state was admitted into the Union December 3, 1818.



   The map of Illinois of 1822, by H. S. Tanner, Philadelphia, found at the

beginning of Chapter I, shows very well the advancement of the state at about

the time of its admission into the Union.



   We have thus given considerable space to our Illinois territorial government,

extending from February 3, 1809, to December 3, 1818, a period of nine years and

ten months. It is a meager outline, but it shows something of the general

condition of what is now our part of the state, which was indeed about all there

was then of it. In 1809, her population was about 11,000 and in 1818 it had

increased to nearly 50,000. The territory had become the third state of the five

states contemplated by the ordinance of 1787.



   We cannot take leave of this subject without some suitable reference to

Kaskaskia.



   Cairo owes it existence chiefly to Kaskaskia men. Let me name some of them:

Shadrack Bond, Elias Kent Kane, Henry S. Dodge, Michael Jones, Warren Brown,

Edward Humphrys, Sidney Breese, David J. Baker, and Miles A. Gilbert. All that

was done for and about Cairo, in 1817 and in 1818, was done at Kaskaskia; and

the very first movement toward a second attempt to build a city here was started

at Kaskaskia in 1835 and 1836, and chiefly by Breese, Baker and Gilbert.

Kaskaskia was the seat of almost all of the earlier operations of the Cairo City

and Canal Company, although its directors met now and then at Alton. That

company's banking operations under the act of January 9, 1818, were carried on

there and as late as 1839, 1840 and 1841. The Bank of Cairo, under said act,

issued its notes there which recited on their face that they were issued at

Kaskaskia. See two of its bank bills on another page.



   But we must not say more about Kaskaskia, about which so much has been said

and written. One volume could not contain it; for of and concerning it,

Frenchmen, Englishmen and Americans have told their stories. Like the Indian

tribe, from which it took its name, it has quite ceased to exist. The abrading

waters of the great river, near to which it stood so long, cared quite as little

for the Frenchmen and the Englishmen as for the Indian, and the old French post

and town, standing midway between Quebec and New Orleans, is now scarcely more

than a mere landmark in the center of a nation of almost one hundred millions of

people. It was one of the goals of the adventurers, explorers, and missionary

priests on their long and slow journeys between those distant French cities. It

was indeed a resting-place, and the society and customs, the religion and

amusements, they there found were to them like a return to their own beloved

France. It was civilized existence again, darkly shaded, it may be, by the

aboriginal life that everywhere breathed over the face of the vast country, But

to those who dwelt there, and perhaps more to the sojourners for a time, the

shadow of Indian life served only to brighten by contrast the short and narrow

strip of country which there skirted the great river.



   In the examination of our real-estate and court records here in Cairo, I have

found Nathaniel Pope's name so often mentioned, that I trust it will not be

regarded as entirely out of place to devote a page or two to this able man.



   He was born in Louisville in 1774; resided at St. Genevieve for a while, and

in the year 1808 removed to Kaskaskia; became the first secretary of the

territory; was the territory's delegate in congress from 1816 to 1818; was the

first United States judge in the state and held the position to the time of his

death, which occurred at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Yeatman, at St. Louis,

January 23, 1850. General Pope of the late Civil War was a son of the former.

Judge Pope is well known as the compiler of an edition of our statutes.



   We make this reference to Judge Pope chiefly to show that to him the people

of the state are indebted for the extension of the state's northern boundary

some sixty miles north of the southern extremity of Lake Michigan. The 5th

article of the ordinance of 1787 bounded our state, or the third of the proposed

states, by the Mississippi, Ohio and Wabash rivers and by a line from the Wabash

to the north boundary line of the territory and made its north boundary line "an

east and west line drawn through the southern bend or extremity of Lake Michigan."



   When the territorial government applied for admission into the Union, Pope

saw that the new state was to be shut out from the great lake, and hence he

determined to do what he could to have congress extend the north boundary line

of the state some distance further northward and thereby secure to the state the

great commercial advantages which he was sure the lake would afford it. This

desire and effort led to much controversy and engendered much bad feeling. The

ordinance, like many other great instruments after it, was called a compact

between the states and beyond the reach of congress, just as it was afterwards

urged that the 6th article of the ordinance relating to slavery was a compact;

but congress believed it was not bound by the lines described in the ordinance,

and accordingly extended the north line of the state northward to the latitude

of 42 degrees and 30 minutes, or for the distance of about 60 miles. It added

about four millions and a half acres of the finest land to Illinois. Wisconsin

was not a state then; but its people to this day regard that act of congress as

a most flagrant breach of law and justice.



   Prior to 1818, there were on the north bank of the Ohio, from the mouth of

the Tennessee to the mouth of the Ohio, four or five small settlements, villages

or clusters of houses, bearing the following names, Trinity, America, Caledonia,

Napoleon and Wilkinsonville, and last of all Fort Massac. Trinity, America,

Napoleon and Wilkinsonville have long since ceased to exist, and now few persons

are living who remember anything about them. Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, in the

year 1894, made a trip down the Ohio from Pittsburg to Cairo, described in his

"On the Storied Ohio" and stopped at what was once the place or site of

Wilkinsonville. It was named after General James Wilkinson, whom history

connects closely with Col. Aaron Burr's scheme or supposed scheme to set up a

separate government in the southwest. Dr. Thwaites took occasion to remark that

he found no one in the vicinity of the old site who had ever heard of

Wilkinsonville. He stopped there but a few hours, we suppose, and could have

seen but a very few persons; but had he talked with many he would probably have

found no one who could have told him much about the old post. Still it is

somewhat remarkable; for Wilkinsonville is found in almost all of the old maps

and gazetteers and in all of the Ohio River guides up to 1838 and probably

later. Burr passed there in 1805, and again December 31, 1806. President

Jefferson, in a message to the senate and house, January 28, 1807, informed them

that Burr had passed Fort Massac December 3ist with ten boats navigated by six

men each. Burr and his boats and men passed this point no doubt on the first day

of January, 1807. He left them somewhere down the river in the state of

Mississippi and sought to escape; but he failed in this and was arrested and

taken to Richmond and there tried for treason and acquitted.



   General Jackson with fifteen hundred men in boats left Nashville on the loth

day of January, 1813, and reached here January 27th, where they were detained

three days by ice in the Mississippi. His men were Tennesseeans and Kentuckians

chiefly, and all of them riflemen by long practice as hunters. The rivers were

then low. Game of all kinds abounded on the point here and in Kentucky and

Missouri. Jackson always maintained excellent discipline, but he also knew very

well there was such a thing as too much strictness with troops like those

freedom-loving hunters of the two states mentioned; and there is no doubt but

that during their three days' stay here the sharp crack of the rifle was heard

everywhere over the point and across the river in Kentucky and that their camps

here or over there were bountifully supplied with game.



   But Indians were here also. This part of the state had been set apart to them

by the Indian treaty of August 13, 1803. Most of them had gone from these parts

of the country, but now and then bands of them, passed through the country and

often their movements were attended with the severest cruelties to the people of

the settlements which lay in the line of their travels. One of their most

atrocious deeds took place on the Ohio just south of Cache River, where old

Trinity was soon thereafter established. It was on the 9th day of February,

1813, that ten Indians, coming along the Ohio from the Wabash country, reached

the three or four families resident just south of Cache River. They represented

themselves as friendly to the white settlers and were kindly received and given

the food they desired. Seeing that they were stronger than the few settlers

there and the latter suspecting nothing, they suddenly made an attack upon them

and cruelly murdered in the most inhuman manner five or six of them. One or two

of the white men escaped, and the Indians, fearing that others might soon come

to the relief of the settlers, hurried away, although a very considerable number

of persons assembled for their capture; but they crossed the river and escaped

from their pursuers. For some little time before this and a few years afterwards

such occurrences were not infrequent in the Illinois territory. One of the most

notable was the Fort Dearborn massacre of August 15, 1812.



   We mention these events to show something of the condition of the country

just preceding the admission of the state into the Union and the commencement of

the work of establishing a city here at this place.





Additional Comments:
Extracted from:



A HISTORY OF THE CITY OF CAIRO ILLINOIS

BY

JOHN M. LANSDEN

WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

CHICAGO

R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY

1910



COPYRIGHTED, 1910

BY JOHN M. LANSDEN



The Lakeside Press

R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY CHICAGO



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