through a mutual friend (Mr. S. H. Biggs), of Lemen's determination to force the issue in the church to the point of division, if necessary, he sent him a message of approval of his proposed course and accompanied it with a contribution of $20 for the contemplated anti-slavery church.

The division of the Territory was effected early in the year 1809, and in the summer of that year, after vainly trying to hold all the churches to their avowed anti-slavery principles, Elder Lemen, in a sermon at Richland Creek Baptist church, threw down the gauntlet to his pro-slavery brethren and declared that he could no longer maintain church fellowship with them. His action caused a division in the church, which was carried into the Association at its ensuing meeting, in October, 1809, and resulted in the disruption of that body into three parties on the slavery question—the conservatives, the liberals, and the radicals. The latter element, headed by "the Lemen party," as it now came to be called, held to the principles of The Friends to Humanity, and proposed to organize a branch of that order of Baptists. When it came to the test, however, the new church was reduced to a constituent membership consisting of some seven or eight members of the Lemen family. Such was the beginning of what is now the oldest surviving Baptist church in the State, which then took the name of "The Baptized Church of Christ, Friends to Humanity, on Cantine (Quentin) Creek." It is located in the neighborhood of the old Cahokia mound. Its building, when it came to have one, was called "Bethel Meeting House," and in time the church itself became known as "Bethel Baptist Church."

The distinctive basis of this church is proclaimed in its simple constitution, to which every member was required to subscribe: "Denying union and communion with all persons holding the doctrine of perpetual, involuntary, hereditary slavery." This church began its career as "a family church," in the literal sense of the word; but it prospered nevertheless, until it became a numerically strong and vigorous organization which has had an active and honorable career of a hundred years' duration. Churches of the same name and principles multiplied and maintained their uncompromising but discriminating opposition to slavery so long as slavery remained a local issue; after which time they were gradually absorbed into the general body of ordinary Baptist churches.

During the period of the Illinois Territory, 1809 to 1818, Elder Lemen kept up a most energetic campaign of opposition to slavery, by preaching and rigorous church discipline in the application of the rules against slavery. He himself was regularly ordained soon after the organization of his anti-slavery church. His sons, James and Joseph, and his brother-in-law, Benjamin Ogle, were equally active in the ministry during this period, and, before its close, they had two churches firmly established in Illinois, with others of the same order in Missouri.

"The church, properly speaking, never entered politics," Dr. Peck informs us, "but presently, when it became strong, the members all formed what they called the 'Illinois Anti-Slavery League,' and it was this body that conducted the anti-slavery contest."[23] The contest culminated in the campaign for statehood in 1818.

At the beginning of that year the Territorial Legislature petitioned Congress for an Enabling Act, which was presented by the Illinois Delegate, Hon. Nathaniel Pope. As chairman of the committee to which this petition was referred, he drew up a bill for such an act early in the year. In the course of its progress through the House, he presented an amendment to his own bill, which provided for the extension of the northern boundary of the new state. According to the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, the line would have been drawn through the southern border of Lake Michigan. Pope's amendment proposed to extend it so as to include some sixty miles of frontage on Lake Michigan, thereby adding fourteen counties, naturally tributary to the lake region, to counterbalance the southern portion of the State, which was connected by the river system with the southern slave states. Gov. Thomas Ford states explicitly that Pope made this change "upon his own responsibility, ... no one at that time having suggested or requested it." This statement is directly contradicted in Dr. Peck's sketch of James Lemen, Sr., written in 1857. He therein states that this extension was first suggested by Judge Lemen, who had a government surveyor make a plat of the proposed extension, with the advantages to the anti-slavery cause to be gained thereby noted on the document, which he gave to Pope with the request to have it embodied in the Enabling Act.[24] This statement was repeated and amplified by Mr. Joseph B. Lemen in an article in The Chicago Tribune.[25] It is a well-known fact that the vote of these fourteen northern counties secured the State to the anti-slavery party in 1856; but as this section of the State was not settled until long after its admission into the Union, the measure, whatever its origin, had no effect upon the Constitutional Convention. However, John Messinger, of New Design, who surveyed the Military Tract and, later, also the northern boundary line, may very well have made such a plat, either on his own motion or at the suggestion of the zealous anti-slavery leader, with whom he was well acquainted. As Messinger was later associated with Peck in the Rock Spring Seminary, and in the publication of a sectional map of Illinois, it would seem that Peck was in a position to know the facts as well as Ford.

In the campaign for the election of delegates to the Constitutional Convention, slavery was the only question seriously agitated. The Lemen churches and their sympathizers were so well organized and so determined in purpose that they made a very energetic and effective campaign for delegates. Their organization for political purposes, as Peck informs us, "always kept one of its members and several of its friends in the Territorial Legislature; and five years before the constitutional election in 1818, it had fifty resident agents—men of like sympathies—quietly at work in the several settlements; and the masterly manner in which they did their duty was shown by a poll which they made of the voters some few weeks before the election, which, on their side, varied only a few votes from the official count after the election."[23]

It is difficult to determine from the meager records of the proceedings, even including the Journal of the Convention recently published, just what the complexion of the body was on the slavery question. Mr. W. Kitchell, a descendant of one of the delegates, states that there were twelve delegates that favored the recognition of slavery by a specific article in the Constitution, and twenty-one that opposed such action. Gov. Coles, who was present as a visitor and learned the sentiments of the prominent members, says that many, but not a majority of the Convention, were in favor of making Illinois a slave state.