Leigh Morris

"A well-known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it," Charles Dudley Warner observed in The Hartford Courant way back on Au

Despite the strength of Il- linois’ pro-slavery forces, Ed- ward Coles managed to become the state’s second governor by the slimmest of margins.

Though Illinois was admitted
to the Union as a free state, slavery
continued for several years.
And to top it off, Illinois’ first
governor was a slaveholder.