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Originally Posted by iheartthed
I... don't believe they were dumb enough to not realize the potential economic bonanza for Illinois that came with direct lakefront access, and I think that had to be their primary motivating factor for putting the state boundary where they did. Connecticut and Massachusetts were fighting hard for lake access in the late 1700s but were cutoff by New York. Yet, at the same time Illinois was willing to give that up? That would've been an enormous blunder.
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I don’t think the early Illinois people quite realized the full potential of future Chicago even if they knew it would probably be an important location. The state passed an infrastructure plan to link Galena to Cairo before the railroads realized halfway that they made a directional blunder.
The state would later sell Chicago canal land to escape bankruptcy after the infrastructure plan and economic panic crashed the state’s finances.
But Illinois residents were panicked at the time that Missouri was going to be admitted before them, and that the slavery conflict would logjam the entire statehood process for them. Like DC, but during an era where quick industrialization was essential to success.
The state completely falsified its population for admittance since it was significantly below the constitutional limit of the time.
Nathaniel Pope was literally promising to Congress in 1817 that Illinois with Chicago would absolutely fight against confederacies, and that the U.S. military needed access to the Chicago River just in case.
Wisconsin tried to sway Chicago by promising the town could one of the two future senators all to itself if they didn’t go with Illinois, but the decision went otherwise.
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Extending the boundary, Pope argued, would also keep an “equilibrium of sentiment” between North and South “that would forever oppose the formation of separate and independent confederacies on the north, south, east and west.” John Moses, an Illinois politician and banker, wrote in his 1882 “History of Illinois” that Pope acted on his own in introducing the amendment. “The securing of the adoption of the … amendment, fraught with such material results, was of his own motion, and on his own responsibility, without the instruction or advice of his constituents.”
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https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/12...-200-years-ago