History Knox
.Each Saturday Mark Jordan authors a column reflecting on the community's history
MOUNT VERNON — The founding fathers of this nation saw the storm clouds of the future, even as they were forging our independence from Great Britain.
The Continental Congress fumed over the issue of slavery as Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence.
The only way they found to unite 13 stubborn colonies was to table the debate on slavery for later.
Later kept looming more and more ominously as the following decades advanced. Things came very close to a head in 1820, when the country seemed on the verge of the Civil War which ultimately would not arrive until more than 40 years later.
One of the players who staved off that disaster ended up his days right here in Mount Vernon, coming to his own sad end before the national disaster burst into flame.
Jesse Burgess Thomas was a representative from Illinois who happened to find himself in the right place at the right moment to make a historical proposal. It all came about because of the continuing westward expansion of the U.S. population.
Through those early decades of the nation, a precarious balance of power between states which allowed slavery and states which outlawed it.
In 1818, the territory of Missouri applied for statehood. Free states said that since it was north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Missouri should only be admitted if it outlawed slavery.
Many slaveowners, however, had already located themselves in the territory.
For the next two years, the debate raged, and it looked like it might tear the young country apart.
An opportunity for a solution emerged when the northern portion of the state of Massachusetts broke off and petitioned Congress to be accepted as a new state, Maine.
Maine planned to remain a free state, with slavery outlawed. Jesse B. Thomas saw the moment, and advanced a compromise:
Even though he himself was from a free state, he would propose the acceptance of Missouri into the union as a slave state — balanced by the admission of Maine as a free state — but only on condition that the southern legislators would endorse a compromise plan that guaranteed all other northern future states in the gigantic Louisiana Territory would enter the union as free states.
The compromise was hotly debated, but with some politicking by president James Monroe and speaker of the house Henry Clay, the plan was provisionally approved, pending further discussion.
It was labeled The Missouri Compromise.
When the southern legislators attempted to bring it back up for a vote, they discovered that Clay had already forwarded it to the president, who had already signed it into law.
Thomas’ compromise was thus controversial, satisfying no one, but bridging the gap, in the classic tradition of politics (something no longer practiced in this country).
But it held a nervous peace in the country until 1854, when it was repealed and replaced by a plan which would allow settlers in new states to make their own choice about slavery.
This led to open warfare in Kansas, and the slow but steady slide toward Civil War, which finally broke out in 1861.
Thomas did not live to see his compromise repealed.
He had originally come from Shepherdstown, Virginia (now West Virginia), but had moved to Illinois when he was appointed as a district judge. He then ran for Congress and served as an Illinois senator from 1818 to 1829.
By the time Thomas retired from Congress, he was in his mid-50s. He refused to run for a further term, and moved to Mount Vernon.
Here, Thomas became a prominent citizen, involved in the operation of local banks.
He was one of the founding members of Knox County Historical Society, and a source of many stories of local life in the 1830s through 1850s later used by historian A. Banning Norton to flesh out his 1862 history of Knox County.
While he generally got along well with his fellow residents, he could be stern when he felt trespassed upon, such as when some locals helped themselves to some timber on his property.
He placed a newspaper ad: “Jesse B. Thomas, hereby cautions all persons (indiscriminately) against cutting, destroying, or removing timber from or otherwise trespassing upon his lands on the Hamtramck section, as I have given my agents (Messrs. John Roberts and John Warden) positive instructions to prosecute all.”
Once a lawyer, always a lawyer!
On the 1850 census, Thomas is seen living in Mount Vernon with his wife Rebecca. Their three employees are 48-year-old Rebecca Harrison, and two teenage Irish girls, Ann Kilkenny, 17, and a girl named Bridget, 15, whose last name isn’t even given.
All of this would soon end, however.
Just a year later, Rebecca Thomas would pass away from illness, at age 75.
After she died, Jesse descended into a deep depression. His beloved wife gone and his legislative legacy crumbling before him in the increasingly pessimistic national headlines, Thomas’ health and sanity began to sharply decline.
In a fit of despair, he slashed his throat on May 3, 1853, according to the Democratic Banner, though his official Senate bio claims May 2, and his tombstone at Mound View Cemetery says that it was May 4.
Most sources agree that Thomas was 76 years old.
Just over a year later, the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and the nation began its excruciating slide toward Civil War.
