abnormally developed. Under stress of real or fancied wrongs, it was
natural for settlers in these frontier regions to meet for joint
protest, or if the occasion were grave enough, to enter into political
association, to resist encroachment upon what they felt to be their
natural rights. Whenever they felt called upon to justify their
course, they did so in language that repeated, consciously or
unconsciously, the theory of the social contract, with which the
political thought of the age was surcharged. In these frontier
communities was born the political habit that manifested itself on
successive frontiers of American advance across the continent, and
that finally in the course of the slavery controversy found apt
expression in the doctrine of squatter sovereignty.[322]

None of the Territories carved out of the original Northwest had shown
greater eagerness for separate government than Illinois. The isolation
of the original settlements grouped along the Mississippi, their
remoteness from the seat of territorial government on the Wabash, and
the consequent difficulty of obtaining legal protection and efficient
government, predisposed the people of Illinois to demand a territorial
government of their own, long before Congress listened to their
memorials. Bitter controversy and even bloodshed attended their
efforts.[323]

A generation later a similar contest occurred for the separation of
the fourteen northern counties from the State. When Congress changed
the northern boundary of Illinois, it had deviated from the express
provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, which had drawn the line through
the southern bend of Lake Michigan. This departure from the Magna
Charta of the Northwest furnished the would-be secessionists with a
pretext. But an editorial in the _Northwestern Gazette and Galena