Tech stocks are the darlings of investors these days, but when Illinois was young it was railroads that attracted investors’ attention and dollars.
As the Mormon faith began to grow, prejudice, hatred and violence were always close at hand.
"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.