When the Founding Fathers imagined our part of the country in 1787, they agreed that any north-south border between new states should be "drawn through the southerly bend of Lake Michigan." If their plan had been carried out, everything north of a line from Gary, Ind., to Davenport, Iowa, would be in Wisconsin today, including Chicago, Rockford, and Galena. But when Illinois was created in 1818, national politics twisted fate in another direction.

At the time, slave-holding southern states and free northern ones were wrestling to control Congress. Whenever a new slave state was admitted to the Union, opponents would balance it with a free one. So when Mississippi entered in 1817, northerners hustled to compensate. Illinois was their best bet, but most of its population lived in the Ohio Valley. "In case of national disruption," a leading politician warned, "the interest of the state would be to join a southern and western confederacy."

If Illinois had a Great Lakes port, though, its northern half would develop business ties to New York and New England. Northerners, therefore, moved the border 60 miles north in 1818 to give the new state a city on Lake Michigan. Although Wisconsin was robbed of 8,500 square miles, there was no one living here at the time to protest. When that "national disruption" ultimately came in 1860, Illinois delivered the presidency to Lincoln and fought with the Union rather than joining the Confederate cause. Losing Chicago was probably a small price to pay for that greater gain.

- Wisconsin Historical Society 
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org

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