Published December 15, 2019
By Reg Ankrom
By 1822, the William Ross family and companion
settlers in Pike County were determined that their town of Atlas would replace
Coles’ Grove as county seat. Elections in August that year, however,
demonstrated the goal was not going to be easy. Supporters of Atlas and Coles
Grove each elected a set of county officials—two sets of county commissioners,
sheriffs, and coroners, who took office in Atlas and Coles Grove. The Ross
family’s chief antagonist was John Shaw, a wealthy landowner. As strongly as
the family sought to locate the county seat in Atlas, Shaw and his supporters
were determined to keep it in Coles Grove.
The case of the duplicate elections, county
seats, and officeholders went before circuit Judge John Reynolds, a future
Illinois governor, who initially decided in favor of Coles Grove. Reynolds
reversed himself, however, acknowledging that he had not given proper
consideration to the election documents for commission candidates David Dutton,
James Seeley, and Ossian Ross, who supported Atlas. He also declared Leonard
Ross and Daniel Whippel, both Atlas supporters, elected sheriff and coroner.
Each of these “Ross candidates” had pledged to support the candidacy of
Nicholas Hansen as representative in the state legislature. Hansen was from
Schenectady, New York, and in 1822 became the first person elected to the
Illinois General Assembly from Pike County. He promised to work in the
legislature to relocate the county seat to Atlas. By December 30, 1822, the
legislature passed his bill to fix the permanent seat of Pike County and named
five commissioners to complete the work. The majority were Ross men, which
augured well for Atlas.
One might expect this to be the end the
controversy over the location of the Pike County seat. It was not. In fact, it
set up the greatest constitutional struggle in Illinois history.
As an applicant for statehood in 1818,
Illinois had been forced into freedom. Congress rebuffed the southern-dominated
Illinois legislature’s attempt to bring Illinois into the Union in as a slave
state. Failing then, they tried again using the U.S. constitution’s “equal
footing doctrine,” which guaranteed new states the right to any domestic institutions
found in the original 13 states. The first states all had slavery. Legislators
in 1823 decided to ask voters to approve a constitutional convention whose aim
was to write slavery into the state constitution.
A referendum required a two-thirds vote in
each house. The senate had the votes. Voting on February 11, 1823, the house,
however, fell short by one vote, Pike County Representative Nicholas Hanson’s.
Slavery proponents in Pike County and the legislature had counted on Hansen’s
vote. He kept his promise to vote for pro-slavery candidate Jesse Burgess
Thomas to the U.S. Senate in exchange for his bill expected to make Atlas the
Pike County seat. Slavery advocates assumed Hanson would favor a slave-writing
convention. He did not.
On February 14, 1823, the pro-slavery majority
in the House of Representatives reconsidered its decision of a month earlier,
by which it seated Hansen instead of John Shaw, a known slavery proponent. It
ejected Hanson and replaced him with Shaw, with whose vote the referendum issue
passed.
Atlas was the location of one of four Pike
County precincts where votes were cast in the referendum on August 2, 1824. The
official record showed Pike voters defeated the slave measure 165 to 19, and
even Shaw’s precinct at Coles Grove turned it down. The greatest mystery of the
election was that the 100 votes cast in the Atlas precinct—94 against and 6 for
slavery—were not counted.
John Wood, a New York transplant, who with
Vermonter Willard Keyes since February 1820 farmed on squatted land nine miles
northwest of Atlas. They had worked 18 months in the Military Tract to turn out
the vote against slavery. On the morning of the election, they and 48 other men
rode to Atlas to cast all their votes against slavery. Wood considered his
efforts to stop slavery in Illinois his greatest accomplishment. But those
votes, the second largest vote against slavery in the state, did not get
counted.
It was the malfeasance of James W. Whitney that
stole Atlas’s vote. Whitney, a lawyer, was something of a mystery. He showed up
on October 18, 1819, at the state capitol in Kaskaskia, his thin hair combed to
the back of his head and tied off with a strip of buckskin. He was plainly
dressed, had little money, and relied on friends for nighttime accommodations.
A Pike County historian suggested there was a “hidden sorrow. . .a delicate
matter to touch on” in Whitney’s past. He was ambitious enough. Soon after his
arrival in Pike County, he simultaneously held the offices of Pike County
clerk, circuit clerk, and justice of the peace. He was in Kaskaskia to promote
himself as one of eight candidates for the four seats as associate justices of
the first Illinois Supreme Court. In that, he failed.
Whitney
was indicted for misconduct in office. The indictment was dropped when
he agreed to resign all three Pike County offices he held. Not long after, he
moved to Wood’s new settlement at Quincy.
For the Ross Family and other residents of
Atlas, the dream of county offices was not to be. Ross’s old enemy John Shaw
saw to that. Although controversially seated in the House of Representatives,
Shaw worked to assure Atlas would never be Pike’s county seat. By 1833, settlers
were pouring into Pike County, and Shaw insisted that county officials follow
the letter of the law. That law required county governments to be as close to
the geographic center of a county as possible to give county residents equal
access to its offices. A tract was available near Pike’s geographic center for
$1.25 an acre. It was a fine tract. But the county was unable to raise the money.
William Ross, who saw the future of
his town of Atlas slipping like sand through his fingers, stepped in and
provided the $200 needed to buy the land. In appreciation, Ross was given the
privilege of naming the town. He named it for his native Massachusetts
town, Pittsfield.
Sources
“Disgraced County Clerk Creates ‘Third
House,’”
Quincy Herald Whig,
June 17, 2018.
History of Pike County
.
Chicago: Chas. C Chapman & Co., 1880. Reproduction by the Pike County Historical
Society, 200-202, 231, 241, 251, 259,
260, 363, 780-782.
“How John Wood Found Quincy,”
Quincy Herald
Whig,
May 1, 2014.
Jess M. Thomas,
The Jess M. Thomas Pike
County History
as Printed in Installments in The Pike
County
Republican, Pittsfield, Illinois
, Pittsfield: The
Pike County Republican(?), 1967, 4-11.
“Obscure County Clerk Certified Fraudulent
Pike County Election,”
Quincy Herald Whig,
June 2, 2018.
Reg Ankrom, “Atlas Shrugged Off As Thriving
Illinois Metropolis,”
Quincy Herald-Whig,
April 21, 2018.
Theodore Calvin Pease,
Illinois Election
Returns, 1818-1848.
Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society,
1923, 28.
“The True John Wood,” Speech to POLIS, Quincy
University, May 2, 2018.
