The settlement of Illinois, 1778-1830Boggess, Arthur Clinton
History
The settlement of Illinois, 1778-1830
Boggess, Arthur Clinton
Illinois -- History -- 1778-1865
The changes in government and in the land question in Illinois were
typical of changes in other frontier regions, but although worthy of note
as helping to make a more attractive place for settlement, they are by no
means sufficient to account for the great migration to the westward. Why
that migration took place and how it was accomplished are interesting and
important questions.
Emigration from New England resulted largely from financial and industrial
disorganization caused by the close of the war, and a year of such
continued cold weather as to produce a famine. This movement was
interesting, dramatic, and large in volume, but its influence upon
Illinois was slight, because the tide was stayed to the eastward of that
state.(285) Migration from the South was also large, and it was from this
source that most of the immigrants to Illinois came. In 1816 there was a
severe drought in eastern North Carolina, and many planters cut their
immature corn for their cattle, while great numbers sold their property
and joined the emigrants.(286) Kentucky, still a favorite place for
settlement, was in the midst of a land boom which reached such proportions
as to cause a large volume of emigration to Illinois, Missouri, and the
southwest. The buyer of Kentucky land was often a neighbor who wished to
enlarge his farm and work on a larger scale, or some well-to-do immigrant
who preferred the location to a more remote region. Land sold on credit
and at fictitious prices, the seller in turn buying land for which he
frequently could make only the first payment. Retribution did not come,
however, until after 1820, and for some years it seemed as if Kentucky was
to become a source of population, for it was to Illinois and Missouri, and
to a lesser degree to Alabama, what New England was to Ohio.(287) Probably
chief among the reasons for migration from the South was the increase of
slavery, with the resulting changes in industrial and social conditions.
Early in the century the growing importance of the cotton crop began to
hasten a stratification of opinion which was determined by physiographic
areas. The western parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina,
the northern part of Georgia, and the eastern parts of Kentucky and
Tennessee, respectively, being hilly and less fertile than the coastal
plain, became the center of the southern anti-slavery sentiment. On the
plain settled the wealthy planters, and later the poorer Germans and
Quakers settled in the uplands. Only when cotton-raising became very
profitable was slavery to intrude upon the latter location.(288)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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