The Jefferson-Lemen Compact | Page 8

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 consistently voted against them. He was nevertheless one of the committee of three appointed to revise and engross the completed instrument.
The result was a substantial victory for the Free-State Party; and had the Convention actually overridden the prohibition contained in the original Territorial Ordinance, as it was then interpreted, it is evident, from the tone of the address to The Friends of Freedom, that the Lemen