Governor Edward Coles and the Vote to Forbid Slavery in Illinois, 1823-1824

Abstract

Governor Edward Coles and the Vote to Forbid Slavery in Illinois, 1823-1824. By David Ress. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2006). Pp. Vii, 203. Illus., notes, bib., index. Paper $35.00. Illinois alone among the states in antebellum America had occasion to express itself by statewide referendum on the issue. In 1824, the people of Illinois rejected a call for a constitutional convention, the expected purpose of which was to amend the 1818 Constitution to make the state more accommodative to slaveholding or even to declare Illinois a slave state. The leading anti-slavery protagonist for a vote on calling the convention was the former Virginia slaveholder, Edward Coles, who had just become the second governor of the state of Illinois when the convention controversy erupted. It was a controversy that his anti-slavery efforts had in part provoked. Coles, born in 1786 into the Virginia social and political aristocracy, secretary in his mid-twenties to President James Madison, emissary for Madison to the Tsar of Russia, friend of Thomas Jefferson, and heir to a modest Virginia estate that included approximately twenty slaves, had found abhorrent. After serving Madison, he considered remaining a Virginian and working his inherited farm with the hired labor of the slaves he wanted to set However, he could see that this idea would deeply unsettle his family and friends. As a result, he left Virginia and chose a life on the frontier in Illinois. Coles, however, did not just migrate to the frontier as did so many of his fellow Virginians. David Ress, a journalist with the Richmond, Virginia Times-Dispatch, begins his engaging biography of Coles, Governor Edward Coles: And The Vote To Forbid Slavery In Illinois, 1823-1824, at the critical turning point in the Virginia slave holder's life. In the spring of the year 1819, having determined that he could not live the role of a Virginia slaveholder, the thirty-four year old Coles was on a flat boat heading down the Ohio River with seventeen persons who were his bondsmen, two families totaling five adults and twelve children. Ress vividly recounts the extraordinary moment of Coles' mid-river announcement to the seventeen that they were free. He had not previously told them that they were on their way to Illinois and that they would be given their freedom. The effect, Ress quotes Coles to say, was electrical. (p. 15.) This extraordinary crew then proceeded to Illinois where Coles took up farming just east of Edwardsville in Madison County and assisted the freedmen in establishing themselves in farming there as well. Illinois, of course, had just become a state when Coles and his freedmen arrived. He had made earlier exploratory trips with this emancipation mission in mind, including a stay in the Illinois Territory in 1818 when statehood was being considered, and he appears to have taken up his pen at that time under the pseudonym Agis to campaign against allowing in the new state. Despite his involvement in the controversy, however, as Ress describes, Coles did not fully appreciate the strength of slaveholding interests within the state. He saw Illinois as free. In fact, some traditional slaveholding existed, principally in the southwest part of the state, a remnant of the earlier French presence in the area, while at the same time, there was a generous use in the state of longterm indentures, slavery for a period of years, as the Illinois Supreme Court called them in Phoebe O. Jay in 1828. Indeed, slave holding had such a powerful constituency in Illinois that the first state Constitution (1818) in Article VI explicitly protected existing long-term indentures, assuring their presence for decades, and as to slavery, rather than a complete ban, barred only that hereafter.. .introduced. In light of the general rule of law that a child of a female slave was a slave, as a practical matter, this prospective ban arguably allowed for no end to slaveholding in Illinois unless, as seemed unlikely, a court would interpret the female slave giving birth as introducing into the state. …