Slavery In Illinois

Cumpston1862

First Sergeant
Joined
Sep 10, 2013
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Mustered Out
While travelling to a Civil War event this spring one of my pards was using his smartphone to look for history related events as we were passing through different areas. While passing through southern Illinois he found a bunch of information about slavery in Illinois. This was news to me and quite frankly made no sense as Illinois is a northern state and should not have had slaves as far as I knew. Apparently they allowed slaves to work in southern Illinois for the expressed purpose of mining coal and salt between the years of 1816-1848.

I am not up to speed on the particulars and I do not profess to be an expert on the subject so I don't want to get into any nit-picking with anyone here. I was quite surprised to hear that the state of Illinois being a northern state even permitted this to happen and because of that I figured many here had not heard of this either. So I decided to share.

Here are a few links that I found while trying to learn more on the matter.

Illinois Slave Counties.jpg



http://www.state.il.us/hpa/lovejoy/illinois.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/illinois-teachable-moment_b_4172108.html

http://www.nps.gov/resources/place.htm?id=52
 
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