The Two Illinoises, A State Divided Against Itself

Drive from Chicago to Cairo and you travel through what feels like two different states, two different countries, perhaps two different centuries. The distance is about three hundred and seventy miles by road. The cultural distance is considerably greater.

Northern Illinois was shaped by New England Protestantism, German and Scandinavian immigration, manufacturing, and the economic gravity of Chicago. It was antislavery, Republican, and urban in its orientation from the beginning. Southern Illinois, called Little Egypt by its own residents, was settled from the South. Kentucky and Tennessee families crossed the Ohio River and brought with them Southern accents, Southern crops, a Southern suspicion of centralized power, and a complicated, often hostile relationship with the idea of Black equality. The region's major cities, Cairo at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, Carbondale, and Metropolis, look south culturally as much as north.

During the Civil War, this divide nearly tore the state apart. Southern Illinois counties produced significant numbers of Copperheads, Northern Democrats who opposed the war. Coles County, where Lincoln's stepmother lived, saw the deadly Charleston riot between Union soldiers and Copperheads in eighteen sixty-four. The Democratic legislature obstructed the war effort. Governor Richard Yates, a Republican, dissolved the legislature in eighteen sixty-three to prevent them from passing resolutions he believed would cripple the state's contribution to the Union cause.

This divide has never fully closed. It manifests today in maps of Illinois elections that show a vast bloc of rural, conservative counties surrounding a dense cluster of Democratic votes in the collar counties of Chicago. The state that produced Abraham Lincoln also produced a political geography that still argues, two centuries on, about what Lincoln actually meant.