NPR reports:
While Abraham Lincoln lived in Illinois, he never lived in a free state. The Great Emancipator’s home had slavery from the early 1700s until 1863, two years before Lincoln died. There were even slaves in his town of Springfield.
“Illinois has ever been a synonym of liberty, enterprise and progress…(yet) our own State once tolerated slavery,” wrote Ethan A. Snively in the 1901 Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society. For a time, “Illinois was as absolutely a slave State as was Mississippi.”
“No attempt was made to conceal the traffic in slaves,” according to the 1904 book, “History of Negro Servitude in Illinois,” by N. Dwight Harris. “Frequent notices of desirable negroes ‘for sale’ and ‘wanted’ appeared in the Western Intelligencer (newspaper) of Kaskaskia.” Slave auction notices appeared there, too.
There's more:
Illinois, first territorial governor, slave owner and lawyer Ninian Edwards, whose slave-owning son of the same name became Lincoln’s brother-in-law in Springfield, decided that the Ordinance allowed for so-called “voluntary servitude,” where a black person could “voluntarily” contract with a white person to work for a specified period. “It was a way around the slavery question,” says Illinois State Historian Sam Wheeler. “Some of those contracts didn’t last the traditional seven years, but 99. So it was basically slavery under another name.” That name was indentured servitude.
The Land of Lincoln:
By 1845, Illinois’ slave population had increased to nearly 5,000, according to Roger Bridges’ article in the 2015 Fall/Winter Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. By this time, an increasing number of free blacks had established homes in the state as well. Perhaps not coincidentally, Illinois intensified its black codes.
Those laws prevented blacks from being in Illinois for more than ten days, or else they could be arrested, fined repeatedly and auctioned. Free blacks and their children had to show certificates of freedom and register with the county shortly after their arrival in Illinois. “Slaves or servants” had to have written permission to travel more than ten miles from their master’s homestead or risk whipping. Blacks couldn’t gather in groups of three or more to dance or make “revelry,” or they could be lashed. And, to perpetuate their enslavement, blacks couldn’t vote or testify in court.
An article well worth your time.
