In 1806, a congressional committee reported on the various memorials and petitions from Illinois, but the report led to no legislation and thus settled nothing, and in 1807 petitioning continued.(200) Illinois again petitioned for separation from the remainder of Indiana Territory, this petition bearing seventeen signatures. An inclosed census is lost, but a population of five thousand is spoken of. A new and significant paragraph occurs: “When your Memorialists contemplate the probable movements which may arise out of an European peace, now apparently about to take place, they cannot but feel the importance of union, of energy, of population on this shore of the Mississippi—they cannot but shudder at the horrors which may arise from a _disaffection in the West_....” A government was needed, and that of Indiana Territory was not acceptable to the people of Illinois. One hundred and two inhabitants of Illinois sent a counter-petition, in which they said that Illinois had paid no taxes and needed no separate government, also that the committee that prepared the above petition was not legally chosen. Most of the signers of the petition were Americans, while most of the signers of the counter-petition were French, forty-two of the latter being illiterate.(201) The report of a congressional committee on the petition was adverse,(202) as was also a report on three petitions for division that came from Illinois in the spring of 1808.(203) In the following December, the representative of Indiana Territory in Congress was appointed chairman of a committee to consider the expediency of dividing the territory, and to this committee petitions both for and against division were referred. This territorial delegate was in favor of division, and his committee presented a favorable report, in which the number of inhabitants of Indiana east of the Wabash was estimated to be seventeen thousand, and the number west of the Wabash to be eleven thousand—numbers thought to be sufficiently large to justify division, and an estimate which the census of 1810 proves to have been almost correct. In February, 1809, the bill providing for the division so ardently desired by Illinois was approved, the division to take place on the first of the next March. The western division was to be known as Illinois Territory and was to have for its eastern boundary a line due north from Vincennes to the Canadian line.(204) In the debate in the House of Representatives, preceding the passage of the bill for division, the arguments in its favor were that the Wabash was a natural dividing line; that a wide extent of wilderness intervened between Vincennes and the western settlements; that the power of the executive was enervated by the dispersed condition of the settlements; that to render justice was almost impossible; that the United States would be more than compensated for the increased expense by the rise in value of the public lands. Opponents of