The Jefferson-Lemen Compact | Page 8

Congress for an Enabling Act, which was presented by the Illinois
Delegate, Hon. Nathaniel Pope. As chairman of the committee to which
this petition was referred, he drew up a bill for such an act early in the
year. In the course of its progress through the House, he presented an
amendment to his own bill, which provided for the extension of the
northern boundary of the new state. According to the provisions of the
Ordinance of 1787, the line would have been drawn through the
southern border of Lake Michigan. Pope's amendment proposed to
extend it so as to include some sixty miles of frontage on Lake
Michigan, thereby adding fourteen counties, naturally tributary to the
lake region, to counterbalance the southern portion of the State, which
was connected by the river system with the southern slave states. Gov.

Thomas Ford states explicitly that Pope made this change "upon his
own responsibility, ... no one at that time having suggested or requested
it." This statement is directly contradicted in {p.20} Dr. Peck's sketch
of James Lemen, Sr., written in 1857. He therein states that this
extension was first suggested by Judge Lemen, who had a government
surveyor make a plat of the proposed extension, with the advantages to
the anti-slavery cause to be gained thereby noted on the document,
which he gave to Pope with the request to have it embodied in the
Enabling Act.[24] This statement was repeated and amplified by Mr.
Joseph B. Lemen in an article in The Chicago Tribune.[25] It is a
well-known fact that the vote of these fourteen northern counties
secured the State to the anti-slavery party in 1856; but as this section of
the State was not settled until long after its admission into the Union,
the measure, whatever its origin, had no effect upon the Constitutional
Convention. However, John Messinger, of New Design, who surveyed
the Military Tract and, later, also the northern boundary line, may very
well have made such a plat, either on his own motion or at the
suggestion of the zealous anti-slavery leader, with whom he was well
acquainted. As Messinger was later associated with Peck in the Rock
Spring Seminary, and in the publication of a sectional map of Illinois, it
would seem that Peck was in a position to know the facts as well as
Ford.
In the campaign for the election of delegates to the Constitutional
Convention, slavery was the only question seriously agitated. The
Lemen churches and their sympathizers were so well organized and so
determined in purpose that they made a very energetic and effective
campaign for delegates. Their organization for political purposes, as
Peck informs us, "always kept one of its members and several of its
friends in the Territorial Legislature; and five years before the
constitutional election in 1818, it had fifty resident agents--men of like
sympathies--quietly at work in the several settlements; and the masterly
manner in which they did their duty was shown by a poll which they
made of the voters some few weeks before the election, which, on their
side, varied only a few votes from the official count after the
election."[23]

It is difficult to determine from the meager records of the proceedings,
even including the Journal of the Convention recently published, just
what the complexion of the body was on the slavery question. Mr. W.
Kitchell, a descendant of one of the delegates, states that there were
twelve delegates that favored the recognition of slavery by a {p.21}
specific article in the Constitution, and twenty-one that opposed such
action. Gov. Coles, who was present as a visitor and learned the
sentiments of the prominent members, says that many, but not a
majority of the Convention, were in favor of making Illinois a slave
state.[26] During the session of the Convention an address to The
Friends of Freedom was published by a company of thirteen leading
men, including James Lemen, Sr., to the effect that a determined effort
was to be made in the Convention to give sanction to slavery, and
urging concerted action "to defeat the plans of those who wish either a
temporary or an unlimited slavery."[27] A majority of the signers of
this address were Lemen's Baptist friends, and its phraseology points to
him as its author.
James Lemen, Jr., was a delegate from St. Clair county and a member
of the committee which drafted the Constitution. In the original draft of
that instrument, slavery was prohibited in the identical terms of the
Ordinance of 1787, as we learn from the recently published journal of
the Convention. In the final draft this was changed to read: "Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter be introduced," and the
existing system of indentured service was also incorporated. These
changes were the result of compromise, and Lemen