Why was Illinois so popular?

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Canal Stories, a series brought to you by the Canal Corridor Association celebrating the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the communities that were shaped by its legacy. During the era, the state of Illinois saw explosive growth. The Illinois and Michigan Canal contributed to this growth, but were there other facets occurring at the time to spur interest along? Yes, there were. Brought to you by Wayne Duerkes, PhD.

From statehood in 1818 to the Civil War, the state of Illinois saw a huge increase in its population. The state was ripe with opportunities for personal and financial success for the migrants pouring in. But what contributed to Illinois getting such a large share of the new settlers? How did these sojourners base their decision to move to Illinois? Well, the long and short of it boils down to Antebellum marketing; and the most prolific source of marketing came from published travel experiences and gazetteers.

During the antebellum period, authors published a myriad of narratives to describe travel experiences that specifically focused on Illinois. They wrote narratives to describe the journey, the new home, and more importantly, what would be required of future immigrants to make it permanently in the American West. Travelers produced roughly 400 separate works concerning the Illinois country in the three decades after statehood in multiple languages. The collective body of literature became its own genre of narrative histories and solidified itself as an indelible mark on the period’s travel culture and the people. This genre, which portrayed the West as a fertile land full of abundant vitality through descriptive imagery, contributed to the population growth in the Illinois country during the epoch. Additionally, the narratives’ descriptions of daily life demonstrate the pervasive shared experience of the settlers. Shared experience is the foundation of group and regional identity.

The success of these works was based on the imagery presented to its audience. Colorful imagery built from carefully formulated descriptive language offered potential settlers a portrait of the landscape and of daily life on the Illinois prairies. The imagery’s consistency throughout most of the works is obvious in both its splendor, possibilities, and challenges. Despite the authors’ various original backgrounds, the common threads in the writing spoke to the general concerns that potential immigrants had concerning a place they had never seen. Very little direct evidence links a particular immigrant to a travel narrative, but the volume of works and quantities printed indicate both their popularity and influence. This collective body of work, with its repetitive imagery, appealed to travelers seeking a new start, an underlying component towards forming a group dynamic.

The popularity of this medium cannot be understated. First, what are published travel experiences? This genre of literature included travel guides, immigrant guides, migrant guides, new settler accounts, and gazetteers to name a few. Gazetteers were geographic dictionaries that expounded on a specific place. All of these were published with the strict intent of describing a place and its local environ to would be settlers. With an average of 22 per year, Illinois received unprecedented coverage. The authors of the time knew that interest in cheap land was rampant in the United States and Europe and they capitalized on their experiences (or in some cases, lack of experience) to sell books. Additionally. Illinois was blessed to have a vast litany of prolific writers that wished to push their agenda of growing their region. Names like Birkbeck, Flowers, Faux, Cobbett, Peck, Colton, Jones, Armstrong, Farnham, and Burlend amongst many more had much of their work printed in several versions. Many foreign printers were hired by American boosters to publish volumes made to give people from Europe the do’s and don’ts of immigration to Illinois. These publishers printed their volumes in a variety of European languages to attract more immigrants.

But in reviewing these volumes, a peculiar trend becomes obvious. Despite mentioning their area within the state once or twice, authors talked of Illinois as a whole. The writing made Illinois the destination. Many did include small write ups of each county or larger communities, but they read basically the same from place to place and the writing was decidedly in favor of the positive. Therefore, the average reader came to see Illinois as the destination. This is important when considering the thought process of the first wave settlers, succeeding waves were generally participants in chain migration. Chain migration is when additional kin and kith migrate to the same place as the first wave settler.

The hot topic in most of the travel guides, as well as many east coast newspapers, was the “proposed” or “forthcoming” Illinois and Michigan Canal. This coupled with the fact that the northern portion of the state was slowly being release for land purchases focused a majority of this era’s migrants to head to northern Illinois. By 1850, the population majority had swung to the north and this all happened in a short 30-year time frame.

The consequences of this population data proved critical to the young state. As population in the northern part grew, so did the number of legislatures and potential Illinois supreme court justices. As most of the people in both sections of the state originated from parallel sections of the country, this began to equalize governmental positions with northern and southern United States ideologies. As a result, the General Assembly adopted a new state constitution that forbade slavery in the state which eliminated the old Black Codes that had legalize slavery through semantics.

The published travel experiences provided potential Illinoisans the opportunity to begin to understand the new land. It also created an unrealized sense of community. Many readers of these volumes had the capacity to share with those around them on how the written narratives lived up to, or fail to, meet the written description.

That concludes today’s Canal Story. Thank you so much for joining us as we continue our journey through the history of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. If you have enjoyed this episode, pass it along to your family and friends, be sure to leave us a like or drop us a comment, and we will see you again very soon.