Statehood and the Prairie State

Illinois became the twenty-first state on December third, eighteen eighteen, admitted to the Union just thirty years after the Constitution was ratified. The territory had been sparsely settled, and to meet the minimum population requirement Congress required for statehood, census takers may have stretched the count. The total was reported as just over forty thousand. Historians have noted politely that the true figure was probably lower.

The name Illinois comes from the French rendering of the Algonquian word Illiniwek. The early settlers who flooded in after statehood came primarily from the South, crossing the Ohio River from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. They settled the southern third of the state first, which culturally resembled Appalachian frontier country. The northern part of Illinois, anchored eventually by Chicago, drew waves of New Englanders, and later, massive immigration from Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. This north-south divide was not merely geographic. It produced two states within one state, a tension over slavery, over culture, over economics that would persist and that still echoes today in Springfield's politics.

The prairie itself presented a problem. The deep-rooted grasses of the Illinois plain had built a thick, matted sod over ten thousand years of glacial deposition. Cast-iron plows broke or turned back. Settlers used axes to break the ground. The prairie, which early travelers called the sea of grass, was simultaneously one of the most fertile soils on earth and nearly impossible to farm with the tools available. That problem would soon be solved, and when it was, Illinois would feed a continent.