illinois

The fertile plains of Illinois have served as a center for commerce and transportation since prehistoric times. Located in the center of the North American continent, Illinois has boundaries that are largely defined by three great rivers—the Mississippi, Ohio, and Wabash—and by the southern shore of Lake Michigan. A Paleo-Indian culture existed in Illinois at least as early as 8000 B.C.E. About 1000 C.E. a great Woodland (or Mississippian) Indian culture established its capital at Cahokia, near present-day East St. Louis. Here at least twenty thousand inhabitants built huge earthen mounds, fortified their city with an elaborate log stockade, conducted trade with peoples on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and dominated the economic and political life of the Mississippi River valley. Cahokia had been abandoned for two hundred years or more when the first Europeans arrived. In 1673 Jacques Marquette, a French Jesuit priest, and Louis Jolliet (Joliet) explored the Fox and Illinois rivers by canoe and met with peaceful Illini and Kaskaskia Indians. With their Indian guides the two French explorers reached the Mississippi River. Jolliet observed that a canal dug at the strategic portage where the Chicago River disappeared into the sandy marshes along the shore of Lake Michigan would link the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. On a return voyage in 1675, Marquette established his first mission, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, on the north bank of the Illinois River. By 1680 the location of Marquette's mission was occupied by the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia (or Grand Village of the Illinois) and had grown to nearly seven thousand residents under the leadership of the French adventurer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who also built Fort Crevecoeur, near the present site of Peoria, and Fort St. Louis, at Starved Rock near La Salle, in 1680 and 1682, respectively.

For nearly a century French priests and soldiers slowly established outposts along the rivers of the Illinois country, including the Holy Family mission at Cahokia (near the ancient mound city) in 1699 and Kaskaskia, on the banks of the Mississippi, in 1703. Fort de Chartres developed from a rude wooden stockade to a formidable stone fortress between 1720 and 1753, and was intended to serve as the headquarters of an anticipated French colonial empire stretching across most of the central part of North America. Unable to transplant great numbers of settlers, the French colonial administration monitored trade with the Indians and governed with only a modest military presence. Overextended and outnumbered by the expansion of British colonization into the Ohio River valley, the French ultimately lost a war for empire in North America. In 1763, following the French and Indian War, the British gained control of all French lands in North America under the terms of the Treaty of Paris and, after delays caused by Pontiac's War, the British military peacefully took possession of the great Fort de Chartres. With the arrival of the British, many of the French abandoned Illinois and relocated across the Mississippi in the area around St. Louis, Missouri. In 1774 the British Parliament, anxious to assure their French subjects in the Mississippi valley that they would be well and effectively governed, passed the Quebec Act, placing all of the area that would become the Old Northwest, including Illinois, under the control of British authorities in Canada. This action nullified claims to this area by colonies such as Virginia, and was viewed as one of the "Intolerable Acts" by the Americans on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

During the American Revolution, George Rogers Clark led a Virginia militia unit across southern Illinois on foot to attack a surprised British garrison at Kaskaskia on 4 July 1778. Clark claimed all of Illinois for his native state. Virginia relinquished its claim on 1 March 1784, and Illinois (along with Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and all of Minnesota east of the Mississippi River) became part of the Northwest Territory governed under the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787. Conflicts between Indians and land-hungry white settlers defined the territorial period, and in 1811 the ineffective territorial governor, Ninian Edwards, sadly informed native chiefs: "My Children, I have found it almost impossible to prevent white people from rushing to your towns, to destroy your corn, burn your property, take your women and children prisoners, and murder your warriors." Still, Indian resistance led by Tecumseh's federation slowed white settlement, and the massacre of the garrison at Fort Dearborn (CHICAGO) in 1812 spread terror throughout the frontier.

Following the War of 1812, Indian resistance to white settlement was largely eliminated, and settlers streamed into southern Illinois, via the Ohio River, from Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. Meanwhile, pioneers from New England and the Middle Atlantic states arrived in northern Illinois, often through the Great Lakes. The distinct political and cultural differences still evident in Illinois can be traced to this early settlement pattern. On 3 December 1818 the Illinois Territory became the nation's twenty-first state, with a northern boundary set at 42§30' to provide a generous shoreline on Lake Michigan and land for fourteen northern counties. At the time of its admission to the Union, Illinois probably had only about thirty-five thousand white inhabitants and several thousand slaves, most of them scattered on hardscrabble farms alongcrude trails in the southernmost part of the state between Shawneetown, on the Ohio River, and Kaskaskia. Much of the land along the Mississippi, known as the "American Bottom," was swampy, prone to flooding, and notorious for its disease-carrying mosquitoes. With the exception of the lead mining district around Galena in the state's northwest corner, the population in the first decades of statehood remained in the southernmost parts of the state. This rough, hilly region was called "Little Egypt" by the early pioneers, because they felt the land between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers resembled the Nile River delta; as a result of this perceived resemblance, residents in this region named one of their most important towns Cairo. State government was housed at Kaskasia in a small, rented cabin that eventually was carried away by flood waters, and the state's first governor, the semiliterate Shadrach Bond, favored the introduction of slavery as a means of providing a much-needed work force. By 1820 Illinois had fifty-five thousand inhabitants and the capital was moved to Vandalia, the terminus of the new National Road (today U.S. Route 40).

During its formative years the state government grappled with myriad problems resulting from the state's rapid and diverse development. An effort to amend the state's constitution to allow slavery was defeated in an 1824 referendum by a vote of 6,640 to 4,972. However, sympathy for slavery remained strong in southern Illinois, which bordered on the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri. In 1837 Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper publisher, was murdered in Alton and his press destroyed. In 1832, following the brief but bloody Black Hawk War, the Sauk and Fox Indians were forced to relinquish all claims to lands in Illinois. The Illinois governor proved powerless in his feeble attempts to quell anti-Mormon sentiment in western Illinois; in 1844 a vigilante-militia in Carthage murdered the charismatic leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons),

Joseph Smith, and his brother, Hyrum. Several thousand of Smith's followers, under the leadership of Brigham Young, soon abandoned their settlement at Nauvoo and began their journey to Utah. In 1837 the legislature once again moved the capital, this time to Spring field—in the very center of the state and closer to the most fertile and rapidly developing regions. The first decades of statehood witnessed an extraordinary growth in the state's population; it reached nearly half a million people by 1840, almost a tenfold increase since statehood just two decades earlier. Key to this amazing growth, as settlers filled the rich prairie lands of central and northern Illinois, was an excellent transportation system. Steamboats navigated the Mississippi, Ohio, Wabash, and Illinois rivers, facilitating the movement of settlers and goods. The legislature approved "an Act to establish and maintain a general system of internal improvements" in 1837, and this led to the construction of the one-hundred-mile Illinois and Michigan Canal. Opened in 1848, it linked the rising metropolis of Chicago with the Illinois River at La Salle, from which river traffic could proceed from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. The canal was not commercially successful because it soon faced competition from railroads. Chartered in 1851, the Illinois Central Railroad (for which Abraham Lincoln served as an attorney) used federal and state subsidies, along with $25 million of private capital, to construct more than seven hundred miles of track connecting Chicago with Cairo and Galena to form a Y across the fertile prairie. By the mid-1850s Illinois had the nation's most modern network of railroads and Chicago had become the Midwest's railroad center.

In 1860, the year an Illinois Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president, following his loss to Stephen A. Douglas in the nationally significant election for the U.S. Senate just two years earlier, the state's population had swelled to 1,715,000; over a quarter of a million of them served in the Civil War, and thirty-four thousand died fighting for the Union. Although pro-slavery, Confederate sympathizers (COPPERHEADS) in Illinois organized themselves as the Sons of Liberty or Knights of the Golden Circle and opposed the Union cause, sometimes with violence, there was otherwise little opposition to the war in the state. Meanwhile, Chicago prospered as the Union's central warehouse for military operations in the West.

Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, farmers transformed vast stretches of prairie grassland into neat, square fields of corn and other grains, and pasture for cattle and hogs. However, farm foreclosures caused by high taxes, overproduction, low prices, and exploitation by railroads led to unrest in rural areas. Meanwhile, in Chicago and other industrial centers, and in coal mining towns, expansion brought overcrowding, poor working conditions, and a new flood of immigrant labor. When the major political parties ignored their plight, farmers responded by supporting third-party movements, such as the Grangers and the Populist party. In a victory for rural agitators, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Munn v. Illinois (1877) established the principle that state legislatures could regulate railroads. Workers sought to join unions, and violent labor clashes and strikes occurred throughout the state. In 1873 a rail strike virtually shut down the state, as did another strike in 1877. At the Hay-market Riot in 1886, a bomb killed seven Chicago policemen and led to the execution of four alleged anarchists the following year. The Pullman strike of 1894 ended with President Grover Cleveland ordering federal troops into Chicago to restore order. Illinois advanced as an agricultural and industrial giant, becoming the nation's third most populace state in 1890, with Chicago (devastated by fire in 1871 but quickly rebuilt) emerging as the nation's "Second City." The state was the national leader in wheat and corn production and second in livestock; it was also a leader in the mining of bituminous (soft) coal. At the same time that steel, farm equipment, and industrial machinery manufacturing grew in the northern cities of Joliet, Rock Island-Moline, Peoria, and Rockford, Chicago, with its port and railroad facilities, steel mills, manufacturing plants, Union Stockyards, and MEATPACKING businesses served as the hub of commerce in the north central United States. By the early twentieth century the Illinois poet Carl Sandberg could rightly proclaim Chicago the "Hog Butcher of the World" and the "City of Big Shoulders."

Political power in Illinois has traditionally rested in county courthouses and city halls, where local party organizations choose candidates, make key decisions on issues, and dole out favors and patronage. The Democrats and Republicans have generally shared power on a fairly equal basis throughout the state's history. In pre-Civil War Illinois the slavery issue gave Democrats an edge over Whigs and, later, Republicans. However, between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Republicans maintained the upper hand, largely due to the party's strength in the prosperous and rapidly growing northern and central regions of the state, and to its successful efforts to defeat reapportionment of the state legislature. Viewing with alarm the rise of Chicago with its huge and largely ethnic population (mainly Irish and eastern European), "downstate" Republican politicians successfully fought off all reapportionment schemes that would have appropriately recognized Chicago's rapidly growing population, which was 12 percent of the state's total in 1870, 35 percent in 1900, and 44 percent in 1930. Illinois's outmoded constitution of 1848 was replaced in 1870 by a poorly crafted document that neglected to provide home rule for cities, left the office of governor relatively weak, and set up an unorthodox system of cumulative voting that allowed voters to cast a ballot for one, two, or three candidates for the state House of Representatives, thus assuring at least one Republican or Democrat from every district.

Political rivalries in Illinois have traditionally been bitter and complex. Despite the efforts of reform-minded leaders such as Democratic governor John Peter Altgeld (1893–1897) and of a number of Progressives during the early twentieth century, political reform came slowly, and corruption and party patronage have characterized the state's political history. When congressional districts were redrawn, following the 1940 census, Chicago still had less than its correct share of districts. The courts had to force the state legislature's reapportionment in the 1960s; and when no agreement could be hammered out by 1964, all 177 members of the Illinois General Assembly were elected at large. A new state constitution in 1970 finally provided home rule to municipalities, established more equitable tax policies, and strengthened the governor and the state supreme court; but the unorthodox system of cumulative voting was not abandoned until 1981. Political patronage remained a scandal throughout most of the twentieth century in both Chicago and Springfield; and a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1990 (Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois) only altered rather than eliminated the practice. Illinois has more than thirty-six thousand elected officials, and some observers believe politics is so pervasive because so many political units comprise the complex fabric of Illinois government. There are 102 counties in Illinois, 1,300 cities and villages, 1,400 townships, and over 2,500 special governmental districts responsible for such diverse matters as libraries, airports, community colleges, water and sanitation, parks, and mosquito abatement. Illinois also has 960 elected school boards.

Throughout the twentieth century Illinois occupied a place among the nation's agricultural, commercial, and industrial leaders. It was home to such corporate giants as Sears, Montgomery Ward, International Harvester, Kraft Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, John Deere, and Caterpillar Tractor. The Great Depression hit Illinois even harder than other states, and in the early 1930s the state received more federal relief money than New York and Pennsylvania combined. Governor Henry Horner (1933–1941) used a suspension of the property tax to aid farmers and persuaded the legislature to enact taxes on gasoline and liquor (legal after the repeal of Prohibition) to fund relief efforts, but the economy did not fully re-cover until the nation began building up for war in 1940. Following World War II, Illinois enjoyed several decades of prosperity and growth. The completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 transformed Chicago into an international port by linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and by 1970 Chicago's O'Hare Airport was the nation's busiest. Illinois led the nation in corn and soybean production in 1971. The nation's first commercial nuclear power plant was built near Morris, Illinois, in the late 1940s, and Illinois, with its internationally renowned universities—the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois—provided an ideal location for research centers such as AT&T's Bell Laboratories, DeKalb Genetics, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Argonne National Laboratory.

In 1970 the state had a population of more than 11 million, a 10 percent increase over 1960. Illinois retained the twenty-four seats that it had held in the U.S. House of Representatives since the redistricting following the 1910 census. (It would lose four of these seats by the end of the century.) More than half the state's population lived in the Chicago metropolitan area. Although Chicago was then the nation's second most populous city, only two other cities in Illinois, Peoria and Rockford, had populations exceeding one hundred thousand. The completion of the Sears Tower in Chicago in 1974 (then the world's tallest building) called attention to Illinois as an economic powerhouse. However, in the late 1970s Illinois, like other Midwestern states in the nation's "Rust Belt," appeared to be in economic decline. Manufacturing plants relocated abroad in search of cheap, nonunionized labor, and farm prices declined due to overproduction (although the number of farms dwindled from 255,700 in the late nineteenth century to 80,000 in the late twentieth century). Illinois's coal production, once second only to Pennsylvania, dropped to sixth nationally by 1991, and production was only 30 percent of that of the nation's leader, Wyoming. Illinois lost manufacturing jobs, and its unemployment climbed from 7.1 percent in 1978 to a staggering 8.6 percent in 1986.

However, by the early 1990s Illinois had recovered, and a new economic base featuring banking, research, and new technologies emerged. The lands west and north of Chicago became the "silicon prairie," the fastest-growing high-technology corridor in the nation. Foreign capital poured into Chicago's revitalized banks. The accounting firm of Arthur Andersen provided financial services to corporate giants throughout the world, and though Chicago no longer housed stockyards, slaughterhouses, or giant grain elevators, the Chicago Board of Trade employed thirty-three thousand people and helped set prices for agricultural commodities throughout the world.

Because of its central location and extensive economic infrastructure, Illinois will likely continue to serve as a vital center of trade, transportation, and commerce in North America. With its large and ethnically diverse population, the "Prairie State" continues to be viewed as a political bellwether and a microcosm of the nation. Those wanting to gauge the mood of folks in the heartland continue to ask, "Will it play in Peoria?"

By 2000 Illinois's population had grown to 12,419,293, an expansion of 8.64 percent over 1990, but an increase that lagged the national growth rate of 13.1 percent. The state's Hispanic population grew by nearly 70 percent in the 1990s and comprised 12.3 percent of the population in 2000; African Americans comprised 15.1 percent of the total. All the population growth occurred in the northern part of the state. In 2000, 17.5 percent of the state's children lived in poverty despite Illinois's renewed prosperity. Political power in Illinois, still balanced between Republicans and Democrats, was located in three district geographic segments: Chicago, "downstate," and the "collar counties," comprised of sprawling suburbs and expanding cities surrounding the great metropolis. From 1977 and into the opening years of the twenty-first century, the Republicans held the governor's office, including during the four terms (1977–1991) of James "Big Jim" Thompson, a popular moderate Republican who managed to forge compromises with a legislature usually controlled by Democrats. His Republican successors, lacking his charisma, found dealing with the Democrats problematic, and because of declining state revenues in 2000, the funding of education and basic government services remained a chronically contentious issue.

Although the Illinois legislature failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, thereby killing all chances of its becoming part of the U.S. Constitution, women in Illinois made significant gains in attaining state office. While the 1971–1972 General Assembly had only four female members, legislatures in the 1990s had more than forty. Reflecting the state's ethnic diversity, minority representation in the state legislature increased, from five African Americans in 1950 to more than twenty in the 1990s. In 1978 Roland Burris became the first African American to win statewide office when he was elected comptroller (he was subsequently elected attorney general); and in 1992 Carol Moseley Braun became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate by any state. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Hispanics held seats in both the Illinois Senate and the House.

Bibliography

Bridges, Roger D., and Rodney O. Davis. Illinois: Its History and Legacy. St. Louis, Mo.: River City, 1984.

Davis, G. Cullom. "Illinois: Crossroads and Cross Section." In Heartland: Comparative Histories of Midwestern States. Edited by James H. Madison. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Howard, Robert P. Illinois: A History of the Prairie State. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman's, 1972.

Nardulli, Peter F., ed. Diversity, Conflict, and State Politics: Regionalism in Illinois. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

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