General Notes

1 The Approbation of My Own Conscience

(excerpt)


                      John Pope was born on March 16, 1822, in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Kaskaskia, Illinois, where he grew up privileged and well-placed socially, enjoying the finest a half-settled prairie had to offer. His mother, Lucretia Backus Pope, had a college education and came from a New England family with roots in America reaching back two hundred years: one ancestor, the Reverend William Hyde, was cofounder of Hartford, Connecticut; a second, John Haynes, governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s.
      John Pope's paternal lineage was equally distinguished. His uncle, John Pope, for whom he was named, was a United States senator from Kentucky. His grandfather, William Pope (the family seems to have eschewed middle names for their male offspring), served in the colonial army and married the aunt of Ninian Edwards, a future governor of Illinois. Young John's first ancestor in America, Nathaniel Pope the elder, owned the land on which Robert E. Lee was later born and had a daughter who married George Washington's great-grandfather. John's father, the younger Nathaniel Pope, was one of the most illustrious men in Illinois.1
        Nathaniel Pope had come to Kaskaskia from Kentucky at the turn of the nineteenth century, having attended Transylvania University at Lexington for one year and read law in his brother John's office. Nathaniel moved easily in the pioneer community, and in 1809, when Congress authorized the organization of the Illinois Territory, he was appointed territorial secretary. That year also he married Lucretia Backus.
      Although Nathaniel owed his appointment to the influence of his brother John and of Henry Clay, he proved worthy of the job. When the new governor, his cousin Ninian Edwards, was detained several months in Kentucky, it fell to Pope to organize the territory. He drew county lines, settled boundary disputes, and appointed territorial officials. Six years later, under the authority of the legislature, he revised the Laws of the Territory of Illinois, a massive two-volume work that became known simply as Pope's Digest.2
      Pope's popularity won him election as territorial delegate to Congress in the fall of 1816. In Washington, he became an aggressive champion of statehood for Illinois. When in 1818 the territory petitioned for admission to the Union, Pope was asked to draw up the necessary resolution. In doing so, he turned what might have been a prosaic parchment into a dynamic entreaty for Illinois's preeminence in the Northwest Territory.
      The fifth article of the Ordinance of 1787 had stipulated that there should be formed from the Northwest Territory no fewer than three nor more than five states, and the ordinance proceeded to define the boundaries of the future states of Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. Troublesome to Pope was a proviso that permitted Congress to "form one or two states in that part of said territory which lies north of an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend of Lake Michigan." As Wisconsin had applied for statehood north of that line, Pope realized Illinois would be deprived of access to Lake Michigan; specifically, it would lose control of the tiny settlement of Chicago. Enlisting the help of his brother John and of Henry Clay, and displaying what the distinguished early Illinois lawyer Thomas Hoyne called "the forecast of a truly great statesman," Pope induced both houses of Congress to agree that the ordinance of admission he had drawn should supersede the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787. Pope's ordinance drew the northern boundary of Illinois at its present 42°70' latitude. To the chagrin of Wisconsin's less-enterprising delegates, Illinois was admitted to the Union with Chicago snugly inside its boundaries. Thomas Hoyne summarized the debt Illinois owed Pope when he observed, "No prescience could have supposed that in sixty years the part of Illinois included by that change of boundary, would have given her the fourth largest city of the Union, and that in the fifteen counties, organized out of the territory then taken from Wisconsin, there would be a majority of the population of this state, by the census of 1880, while three-fourths or four-fifths of all the wealth of the state would be found north of the southern bend of Lake Michigan."3
      Impressive too were Pope's efforts on behalf of public education. Ordinarily, states carved from the Northwest Territory were granted 5 percent of the revenue from the sale of public lands to finance road building. But Pope won an exception. Certain that roads would be built with or without state aid, he convinced Congress to allow the state of Illinois to retain 3 percent of land-sale proceeds for the furtherance of learning. Pope also laid the foundation for an educational grant that gave the state government the thirty-sixth section of land in every township of Illinois, which might then be sold or rented for the benefit of a general school fund. For this too Thomas Hoyne paid tribute to Pope: "The organization and support of schools was with Judge Pope and the men of that day, one of the primal objects secured to the state, through their efforts, for posterity. The people of this generation owe them the acknowledgment of that service."4

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1Paul M. Angle, "Nathaniel Pope, 1784-1850, a Memoir," Illinois State Historical Society: Transactions for the Year 1936, Publication No. 43 (Springfield, 1936), 111-12: DAB, 15:77.
2DAB, 15:77-78; Merlin G. Cox, "John Pope, Fighting General from Illinois: (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1956), 4-8; Angle, "Nathaniel Pope," 111-12.
3Thomas Hoyne, "The Lawyer as a Pioneer," in Chicago Bar Association Lectures, Part One, Fergus Historical Series No. 22 (Chicago, 1882), 72-73; Ninian W. Edwards, History of Illinois, from 1778 to 1833; and Life and Times of Ninian Edwards (Springfield, Ill., 1870), 254-55; John Moses, Illinois: Historical and Statistical, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1889), 1:237, 242, 276-82; DAB, 15:78.
4DAB, 15:78; Hoyne, "Lawyer as Pioneer,"73-74.
 

General John Pope



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