| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James Simeone. Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2000. Pp. x, 289. $38.00.

James Simeone provides bracing and sophisticated understandings of complex, unstably dynamic, and often paradoxical politics and politicized issues in early Illinois. He employs such established sources as Clarence Walworth Alvord, Arthur Clinton Boggess, and Theodore Calvin Pease and some newer standard sources, rich travel literature, autobiographies, newspapers, early histories, and published documents. Laudably, Simeone includes very recent works, and he deftly links findings to pertinent current political and social theories. 1

Simeone's clarion thesis is that, buffeted and befuddled by sweeping changes, poor egalitarian white males (mostly upland southerners, whom Simeone dubs "white folks") in Illinois sought to create a "bottomland republic" grounded on implicit white supremacy and explicit slavery. The "big folks," including abolitionists and northerners, opposed them. Battles between the moderate ("milk-and-cider") faction and the absolutist ("whole-hog") faction sundered the white folks. Generational tensions also flared. These fault lines and others and the thesis are embodied in Simeone's analysis of the fight in 1823–1824 over the referendum to determine whether or not to call a constitutional convention to amend the state constitution to permit outright slavery (thereby overriding the intent of the Ordinance of 1787 and the Illinois State Constitution of 1818). Moderates among the white folks were decisive in defeating proconventionist forces. . . .

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