Ninian Edwards, at the time chief justice of the Court of Appeals in Kentucky, became governor of the newly organized territory of Illinois. John Boyle, of the same State, at first received the appointment of Governor, but declined the office and accepted that of associate justice of the same court whereof Edwards was Chief Justice. Edwards was desirous of filling the vacancy, and at the recommendation of Henry Clay, received the appointment from President Madison, his commission bearing date April 24, 1809.

In his letter to the president, Henry Clay spoke of Judge Edwards as follows: "The honorable appointments which this gentleman has held (first as a judge of our Superior Court, and then promoted to his present station), evince how highly he is estimated among us.” And in a letter of the same date to the Hon. Robt. Smith, he said: "His political principles accord with those of the Republican party. His good understanding, weight of character and conciliatory manners, give him very fair pretentions to the office alluded to. * I have no doubt that the whole representation from the State, when consulted, would concur in ascribing to him every qualification for the office in question."

Ninian Edwards was born in Montgomery county, Md., in 1775, and at the time of his appointment as governor was about 34 years old. He obtained his early education in company with and partly under the tuition of William Wirt, his senior by two years, and life long friend. After a collegiate course at Carlyle, Pa., he commenced the study of law, but before finishing it was sent to Kentucky to select lands for his brothers and sisters and open a farm. He located in Nelson county, and being furnished with ample means in a new country where the character of society was as yet unformed, and surrounded by companions whose pleasures and pursuits were in sensual indulgences, he fell into indiscretions and excesses for two or three years.* But in the then standard of society, this did not prevent his election to the Kentucky Legislature. Subsequently he broke away from his dissolute companions and habits, removed to Russelville, and devoted himself to laborious study. He soon attained eminence in his profession. Before he was 32 years old he had filled in succession the offices of presiding judge of the general court, circuit judge, 4th judge of the court of appeals, and chief justice of the State, which last he held when his associate justice, Boyle, received the appointment of territorial governor for Illinois. The two, to suit their respective inclinations, exchanged offices, Edwards, through the patronage of Mr. Clay, becoming governor, and Boyle chief justice. Governor Edwards was a large, fine looking man, with a distinguished air and courtly manners, who wielded a ready pen and was fluent of speech. The territorial judges appointed, besides Thomas, were Alexander Stuart and William Sprigg. The former was a Virginian, a man of fine education and polished manners, who, however, re

following convened it for business. But that body, entertaining doubts whether it was really a legislature or not, prepared a statement to congress, petitioning that power to constitue it a legal body, and adjourned temporarily to await action upon the case. Such are some of the inconveniences of government where original sovereignty does not reside in the people, but is derived from a power superior to them-an apparent anomoly in the theory of American governinent.-See Dillon's Ind.]

*Gov. Edward's Life, by his son.

+Judge Breesc, in the address of laying the corner stone of the new State House by Judge Caton, says: "And withall a good liver, of whom it is said he esteemed the turkey the most inconvenient of the poultry tribe, as it was too large for one and not large enough for two."

mained on the bench in Illinois but a short time, being changed to Missouri. His successor was Stanley Griswold, a good lawyer and an honest man, who, as Gov. Reynolds says in his Pioneer History, "paid his debts and sung David's Psalms." He was afterwards transferred to Michigan, and Thomas Towles became his successor. William Sprigg was born and reared in Maryland, where his brother attained to the high office of governor. His education was classical and he was deeply read in the law. He was a man of singular purity of heart and simplicity of manner-lacking totally in all the arts of the politician.*

Nathaniel Pope, a relative of the governor, was appointed secretary of the territory. He was born in Kentucky, at the Falls of the Ohio, in 1784. His education was collegiate, being one of the early graduates of Transylvania University, at Lexington. His natural endowments of head and heart, were very superior. To a fine - analytical mind, he added a genial and benevolent disposition, and great dignity of character. He selected the law for a profes sion, and soon mastered its intricacies. At the age of 21, he emigrated to St. Genevieve, then Upper Louisiana, where he learned to speak French quite fluently. Five years later, he was appointed secretary of the Illinois territory. As such, in the absence of the governor, he was empowered, under the ordinance of 1787, to discharge the duties of the latter's office. On the 25th of April, 1809, at St. Genevieve, before Judge Shrader, he took the oath of office, and coming to Illinois, inaugurated the new government on the 28th instant, by issuing his proclamation to that effect. The counties of St. Clair and Randolph were reinstated as the two counties of the Illinois territory. On the 3d of May, he appointed and commissioned Elias Rector attorney-general, John Hay sheriff, Enoch Moore coroner, and 17 justices of the peace.

On the 11th of Junefollowing, Governor Edwards assumed the duties of his office. He had taken the oath of office in Kentucky, before his departure. Upon his arrival at Kaskaskia, his Excellency was tendered a flattering public address by the citizens, in which he was asked to espouse the side of the "virtuous majority” by whose patriotic exertions the territory had been divided and his Excellency attained his high station, and to whom ought to be distributed the offices in his gift, rather than to those who never ceased to oppose the measure and heap calumnies and indig nities upon its friends. The governor, unwilling to become a partisan on either side, made a felicitous but non-committal reply. He re-appointed John Hay clerk of St. Clair county, and, as a curious instance of official self-succession to office in this country, we will mention that he held that public trust from thence on, until his decease, in 1845. In place of Rector, Benjamin H. Doyle had been appointed attorney-general, and he resigning, John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky, was appointed; but the latter, after holding the office a few months, also resigned, when his brother, Thomas L., succeeded him.

On the 16th of June, 1809, the governor, joined by Judges Stuart and Sprigg (Thomas being still absent in Washington), constitut

*Reynolds, in his Pioneer History, says that Sprigg accompanied Governor Edwards in his campaign against the Indians on Peoria Lake, in 1812, unencumbered by gun or other weapon indicating belligerency. "His pacific and sickly appearance, together with his perfect philosophic indifference as to war or peace, life or death made him the subject of much discussion among the troops. He was the only savant in the army."

ing a legislative body in the first grade of territorial government, under the 5th section of the ordinance of 1787, met and re-enacted such of the laws of the Indiana territory, with which the people, who for nine years had formed a part thereof, were familiar, and as were suitable and applicable to Illinois, and not local or special to Indiana. Many of these laws were those which, without change of phraseology, had either been originally imported or enacted by the authorities of the old Northwestern territory.

Thus was put into operation the machinery of civil government in the Territory of Illinois; but Governor Edwards, owing to the local political dissensions, growing out of the question of territorial division, which had degenerated into personal animosities, met with no inconsiderable difficulties in avoiding the meshes of these factions, struggling fiercely for respective ascendancy. He resolved not to be caught in the toils of either party, and for the interests and prosperity of the country, sought to ignore the entire question that it might pass into oblivion. At that day, the militia system, which had received the earnest recommendation of Governor Harrison, and which was also a necessity of the times, was in full and effective operation. With the dissolution of the Indiana territory, it became the duty of Governor Edwards to re-organize the militia for the new territory of Illinois. The separationists urged his Excellency to appoint none to office in the militia who had ever opposed the division of the territory; but this would have committed him contrary to his judgment. The anti-separationists pressed him to re-appoint all the old officers; but as a new commission would have voided all offenses for which any officer might have been tried and punished by dismissal, he refused to accede to that also. To steer clear of both Scylla and Charibdis, he referred the question to the people, by directing the militia companies to elect the company officers, and the latter to choose the field officers. With these orders, his Excellency retired from the field of contention to Kentucky, to wind up some unfinished court business, and upon his return, late in the fall, he issued an address tothe people, explanatory of his course, and commissioned the militia officers returned to him as elected.

The population of the territory, at the time of its organization, was estimated at 9000; the census of 1810 returned it at a total of 12,282-11,501 whites, 168 slaves, 613 of all others, except Indians -being an increase of some 400 per cent during the preceding decade. The frontiers had been steadily advanced by the adventurous pioneers. To the north, the settlements had extended to the Wood river country, in the present Madison county; eastward, on Silver creek and up the Kaskaskia river; south and east, from Kaskaskia, some 15 miles out on the Fort Massac road; the Birds had located at the mouth of the Ohio; at old Massac and the Ohio salines, there had been nuclei of settlements for some time; Shawneetown,* the nearest point on the Ohio to the salt wells, 12 miles west, had contained a few straggling houses

"Shawneetown, which derives its name from a dissatisfied band of that tribe of Indtanslocated there from 1735 to about 1760, was laid out by the direction of the United States goverment, in 1813-14, and for a quarter of a century was the principal town in the State. The site, chosen with reference to its contiguity to the United States salines, was an unfortunate one, being subject to repeated inundations. In 1813, a flood rose to the ridge poles on the roofs of many of the log houses, and swept 40 of them away, besides other damage to stock, fencing, etc, Petitions to change the location to the mouth of the Saline creek, 8 miles below, were disregarded.

since 1805; along the west side of the Wabash, opposite Vincennes, were scattered a few families, one McCawley having penetrated inland to the crossing of the Little Wabash by the Vincennes road, but the latter were mostly abandoned during the war of 1812. Indeed, the new settlements were very sparse and all feeble, and from 1810, until the close of the war, 4 years later, immigration was almost at a stand. Nine-tenths of the territory was a howling wilderness, over which red savages held dominion and roamed at will, outnumbering the whites at least three to

one.

CHAPTER XXII.

INDIAN TROUBLES IN ILLINOIS PRECEDING THE WAR OF 1812

The Country put in a State of Defence by the Organization of Rang. ing Companies and the Building of Block-house and Stockade Forts-Governor Edwards Sends an Envoy to Gomo's VillageBattle of Tippecanoe-Indian Council at Cahokia.

The British, after the war of Independence, relinquished with great reluctance, as we have seen, their hold upon the northwestern territory. The confederated tribes of the northwest only ceased their warfare when they found their last hope of British aid cut off by Jay's treaty at London, November, 1794; but this treaty did not cover all the outrageous pretensions of Great Britain. In her desperatewar with France, later, she boldly boarded American vessels on the high seas, searching for English-born seamen, impressing them into her marine service upon the ground of once an Englishman, always an Englishman," and denying expatriation and American citizenship by naturalization. Nor did she scrutinize very closely as to the nationality of the seamen impressed, as in the case of the Chesapeake, boarded off the coast of Virginia, where, of four of the crew taken as deserters, three were of American birth. In the retaliatory measures between France and England, to prevent trade and commerce with either power, our vessels, as neutrals, became the prey of both hostile nations. The affair of the Chesapeake intensified the feeling already deep; Jefferson ordered all British ships-of-war out of the waters of the United States, and congress laid an embargo on American vessels, forbidding them to leave port, to the great injury of American commerce.

In the West, British emissaries were busy arousing the northwestern savages to war against the United States. Harrison's zeal and activity in divesting the Indian titles to western lands, was no inconsiderable provocative. In September, 1809, he had held a treaty at Fort Wayne with the Delawares, Potawattomies, Miamis, Kickapoos, Weas and Eel River Indians, who, in consid eration of $2,350 as annuities, and $8,200 of presents in hand, ceded to the United States a large tract of country, comprising near three million acres of land in Indiana, extending up the Wabash above Terre Haute, and interiorly to include the middle waters of White river, and trenching upon the home and hunting ground of the great Shawnee warrior, Tecumseh, whose nation