In a heated contest in Illinois in 1824 over the question of
calling a state convention to draft a constitution legalizing
slavery the people of Northern antecedents made their votes tell
and defeated the project. But, like other parts of the Northwest,
this State never became a unit on the slavery issue. Certainly it
never became abolitionist. By an almost unanimous vote the
Legislature, in 1837, adopted joint resolutions which condemned
abolitionism as "more productive of evil than of moral and
political good"; and in Congress in the preceding year the
delegation of the State had given solid support to the "gag
resolutions," which were intended to deny a hearing to all
petitions on the slavery question.
Throughout the great era of slavery controversy the Northwest was
prolific of schemes of compromise, for the constant clash of
Northern and Southern elements developed an aptitude for
settlement by agreement on moderate lines. The people of the
section as a whole long clung to popular, or "squatter,"
sovereignty as the supremely desirable solution of the slavery
question--a device formulated and defended by two of the
Northwest's own statesmen, Cass and Douglas, and relinquished
only slowly and reluctantly under the leadership, not of a New
England abolitionist, but of a statesman of Southern birth who
had come to the conclusion that the nation could not permanently
exist half slave and half free.
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