Illinois is admitted as the twenty-first U.S.…
July 1818 CE
The Illinois-Wabash Company was an early claimant to much of Illinois.
The Illinois Territory had been created on February 3, 1809, with its capital at Kaskaskia, an early French settlement.
During the discussions leading up to Illinois's admission to the Union, the proposed northern boundary of the state has been moved twice.
The original provisions of the Northwest Ordinance had specified a boundary that would have been tangent to the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Such a boundary would have left Illinois with no shoreline on Lake Michigan at all. However, as Indiana had successfully been granted a ten-mile northern extension of its boundary to provide it with a usable lakefront, the original bill for Illinois statehood, submitted to Congress on January 23, 1818, stipulates a northern border at the same latitude as Indiana's, which is defined as ten miles (sixteen kilometers) north of the southernmost extremity of Lake Michigan, but the Illinois delegate, Nathaniel Pope, had lobbied to have the boundary moved further north, and the final bill passed by Congress has done just that; it included an amendment to shift the border to 42° 30' north, which is approximately fifty-one miles (eighty-two kilometers) north of the Indiana northern border.
This shift adds eighty-five hundred square miles (twenty-two thousand square kilometers) to the state, including the lead mining region near Galena.
More importantly, it adds nearly fifty miles of Lake Michigan shoreline and the Chicago River.
Pope and others envision a canal that will connect the Chicago and Illinois rivers, and thus, connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.
The capital remains at Kaskaskia, headquartered in a small building rented by the state.
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