Three questions determined Illinois’ fate for statehood

Law and Public Issues

By Ann M. Lousin

Ann M. Lousin has been a professor at The John Marshall Law School since 1975. Before then, she was a research assistant at the 1969-1970 Illinois constitutional convention and parliamentarian of the Illinois House of Representatives. Her treatise “The Illinois State Constitution: A Reference Guide” was published in December 2009. She can be contacted at 7lousin@jmls.edu.

Posted April 26, 2018 1:23 PM

In November and December of 1817, the legislature of Illinois Territory set in motion the procedures to petition the U.S. Congress to admit the territory as a state. (See my column of Dec. 4, 2017, “200 years ago, Illinois took step to statehood”) The next step was delivering the petition, formally called a memorial, to Nathaniel Pope, the territorial delegate to Congress.What must Pope have thought when he received the memorial in early January, 1818?He supported statehood for Illinois, but had no knowledge of …

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