At the beginning of that year the Territorial Legislature petitioned Congress for an Enabling Act, which was presented by the Illinois Delegate, Hon. Nathaniel Pope. As chairman of the committee to which this petition was referred, he drew up a bill for such an act early in the year. In the course of its progress through the House, he presented an amendment to his own bill, which provided for the extension of the northern boundary of the new state. According to the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, the line would have been drawn through the southern border of Lake Michigan. Pope's amendment proposed to extend it so as to include some sixty miles of frontage on Lake Michigan, thereby adding fourteen counties, naturally tributary to the lake region, to counterbalance the southern portion of the State, which was connected by the river system with the southern slave states. Gov. Thomas Ford states explicitly that Pope made this change "upon his own responsibility, ... no one at that time having suggested or requested it." This statement is directly contradicted in {p.20} Dr. Peck's sketch of James Lemen, Sr., written in 1857. He therein states that this extension was first suggested by Judge Lemen, who had a government surveyor make a plat of the proposed extension, with the advantages to the anti-slavery cause to be gained thereby noted on the document, which he gave to Pope with the request to have it embodied in the Enabling Act.[24] This statement was repeated and amplified by Mr. Joseph B. Lemen in an article in _The Chicago Tribune_.[25] It is a well-known fact that the vote of these fourteen northern counties secured the State to the anti-slavery party in 1856; but as this section of the State was not settled until long after its admission into the Union, the measure, whatever its origin, had no effect upon the Constitutional Convention. However, John Messinger, of New Design, who surveyed the Military Tract and, later, also the northern boundary line, may very well have made such a plat, either on his own motion or at the suggestion of the zealous anti-slavery leader, with whom he was well acquainted. As Messinger was later associated with Peck in the Rock Spring Seminary, and in the publication of a sectional map of Illinois, it would seem that Peck was in a position to know the facts as well as Ford.