Published August 26, 2012
By Reg Ankrom
By the end of his
life, John Wood could look back on scores of achievements.
At 19, he was among the first Northeastern pioneers in the West. He was a
founder of Adams County and the city of Quincy and served several terms as
alderman and mayor. He became a state senator, Illinois’ 12th governor and,
during the Civil War, the state’s quartermaster general. At the age of 65, Wood
led the 137th Illinois Infantry volunteers into a fight against one of the
Confederacy’s most brutal generals, Nathan Bedford Forest.
Wood prospered in land speculation, farming, business and banking. His
philanthropy started churches — Catholic and protestant — and schools and
cemeteries. A humanitarian, Wood helped organize the county’s rescue of
thousands of Mormons who Gov. Lilburn Boggs had ordered out of Missouri during
the winter of 1838-39. And Wood and his wife, Ann, took into their own home
more than a dozen children whose families could not afford to keep them.
Of all his contributions to history and humanitarianism, Wood considered the
result of one of his earliest adventures in Illinois his greatest achievement.
From the spring of 1823 to the August 1824 election, he joined a fight to stop
the state legislature from legalizing slavery in Illinois.
In his search for land and opportunity, the 22-year-old Wood in February 1820
met Edward Coles in Edwardsville. Appointed by President James Monroe, Coles
was the federal agent for sales and transfers of land in the 3.5-million-acre
Illinois Military Tract between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. Congress
had set aside that land as bounty for veterans of the War of 1812, and Wood had
struck upon the idea of speculating in it.
The men of Illinois’ territorial legislature, who had drafted a state
constitution in early 1818, were southerners, and they expected to shape their
new state with southern institutions, including slavery. They had been
comforted by opinions of territorial Gov. Ninian Edwards, a slave owner
himself, that they would be able to keep their black property. Indeed, between
the time the Illinois Territory was created in 1809 to the time of statehood
nine years later, the number of slaves increased from 167 to 917.
New York Congressman James Tallmadge reminded Illinois’ territorial
representatives, however, that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited
expansion of slavery in the territory and he warned it would not become a state
if slavery was written into its constitution. As a result, the Illinois
Territory’s legislators sent a free-state constitution to Washington, reckoning
that once Illinois was in the Union, they could amend the constitution to make
it a slave state without congressional interference.
Illinois became the union’s 21st state on Dec. 3, 1818.
Although friends of slavery, the southern- dominated legislature opposed the
presence of free blacks in Illinois and began passing anti-black laws at once.
By March 1819, lawmakers had enacted a series of “Black Laws” to discourage
immigration and emancipation, restrict rights of black and mulatto residents
and require free blacks to post $500 bonds and carry papers to prove they were
free. Those who could not prove their freedom were subject to immediate arrest
and sale into slavery.
Coles was the son of a wealthy plantation owner in Albemarle County, Va., which
made his family neighbors with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James
Monroe. As president, Madison appointed Coles his personal secretary. President
Monroe named Coles minister to Russia in 1816 and federal land agent in
Edwardsville in 1819.
With an early conviction against slavery, Coles in 1814 had pleaded with
Jefferson, by then retired from public life, to lead a crusade for the gradual
end of slavery. Jefferson wished Coles well with the idea and declined to take
on the cause.
En route five years later to his new assignment at Edwardsville, Coles freed
the slaves (six adults and 11 children) he had inherited and provided 160-acre
farms and training to the adults in their new Madison County home.
John Wood had acquired his opposition to slavery growing up in Sempronius, N.Y.
Congregationalists there had formed a core in the central New York abolitionist
movement from which sprang a sophisticated station on the Underground Railroad
into Canada.
Traveling west, Wood spent more than a year in Cincinnati and the Ohio
Valley then continued on to Illinois. He was among an increasing
number of antislavery men moving into the state who met
Coles in the Edwardsville land office. Coles’ growing acquaintances and growing
reputation for integrity landed him on the ballot as one of four candidates for
governor in 1822.
Coles’ victory that August shocked slavery’s proponents in Illinois. Each of
the two pro-slavery candidates, Supreme Court Justices Joseph Phillips and Thomas
Browne, favored a slave constitution. But their contest split the pro-slavery
vote, 32 to 29 percent. James B. Moore of Monroe County took 6 percent of the
vote. Coles was elected with only 33 percent of the vote. Voters in Pike
County, which included today’s Hancock and Adams counties, where Wood resided,
gave Coles 85 percent of their vote.
In his inaugural address, Coles disturbed the mostly pro-slavery General
Assembly by demanding justice for blacks. He sought an end to an indenture
system that was slavery in all but name — indentures could last 99 years — and
asked for an end to the state’s Black Laws and what he called the kidnapping of
free blacks.
Legislators responded by launching a campaign for a referendum to initiate a
constitutional convention. They contended that the move was to enact economic
reforms that would improve conditions created by the economic Panic of 1819.
But since most members of the General Assembly favored slavery, anti-slavery
proponents were certain that its veiled purpose was to legalize
slavery in Illinois.
Enacting a constitutional convention required a two-thirds vote by each house
of the General Assembly. The senate had the votes. When the house fell one vote
short of passing the referendum, pro-slavery legislators unseated Pike County
Rep. Nicholas Hansen, who had deserted them once, and replaced him with Rep.
John Shaw, who voted for the referendum. The maneuver put the referendum on the
ballot for the Aug. 2, 1824, election.
In the cause he was about to undertake, Wood would help assure that Pike County
would not serve the interests of human bondage again.
Coles donated his four-year salary as governor to the anti-convention cause and
recruited friends, including John Wood, throughout the state to join him in his
crusade against a slave convention.
By that time Wood had achieved a sizable acquaintance and reputation among the
residents between the rivers, and over the next 18 months he promoted the
anti-convention cause. On the day before the election, nearly 50 men gathered
with Wood at “The Bluffs,” as Quincy was then known.
They saddled up and rode 40 miles south to Atlas in Pike County, the closest
polling place, where they would cast their votes the following day.
The convention lost across the state by a ratio of 57 to 43. In the Military
Tract, where Wood had fought slavery’s introduction into Illinois, the margin
against slavery was 90 to 10.
Reg Ankrom is executive director of the Historical Society. He is a member
of several history-related organizations, the author of a history of Stephen A.
Douglas and a frequent speaker on pre-Civil War history.
Sources
Berwanger, Eugene H. The
Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery
Extension Controversy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Ford, Thomas. A History
of Illinois from its Commencement as a State, 1818-1847. Vol 1. Chicago:
Lakeside Press, 1945.
Leichtle, Kurt E. and
Bruce G. Garveth. Crusade Against Slavery: Edward Coles, Pioneer of Freedom.
Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. 2011.
Litwack, Leon F. North
of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961.
Pease, Theodore Calvin.
Illinois Election Returns, 1818-1848. Springfield, Illinois: Illinois State
Historical Library. 1923.
Preliminary Report on
the Eighth Census. 1860. Washington: Government Printing Office. 1862.
Tillson, John. History
of Quincy. In William H. Collins and Cicero F. Perry, Past and Present of the
City of Quincy and Adams County, Illinois. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing
Company, 1905.
“Uncovering the
Freedom Trail in Auburn and Cayuga County, New York.”
http://www.co.cayuga.ny.us/
Washburne, E. B. Sketch
of Edward Coles, Second Governor of Illinois, and of the Slavery Struggle of
1823-4. New York: Negro University Press, 1969.
