During the second decade of the nineteenth century, a colony of English emigrants was established in southeastern Illinois, at a place in Edwards County known afterwards as English Prairie. Interesting in itself as being a typical experiment in transplantation and in assimilation to frontier conditions, this settlement has attracted unusual attention because of the war of pamphlets it evoked, and the political prominence of some of its detractors.

Agricultural emigration was, at that period, a subject of much importance in Great Britain, and the English Prairie settlement became the nucleus around which the contention was waged. At the close of the Napoleonic wars, England's rural interests were much depressed. Hopes had been entertained that, with the return of peace, conditions for the farmer would improve, but these expectations proved fallacious, prices continually lowered, rents and wages increased, distress was widespread, and agrarian discontent alarming. Added to this, the political situation was grave. The domination of the Tory party, the reactionary tendency of foreign affairs, and the general national impoverishment led to the growth of a strong Radical party, which demanded manhood suffrage, abolition of the Corn Laws, and abrogation of the time-honored privileges of the upper classes. Mobs and disturbances were frequent, and there was developed a strong sentiment in favor of emigration to the United States, where political freedom, combined with the prospects of cheap lands, offered an enticing prospect to the harassed rural population of England.

The emigrants were not merely of the laboring classes, but frequently were men of substance and property, who sold good estates to reinvest in uncultivated lands in America, and to pave the way for the removal thither of large colonies of Englishmen. Among the promoters of such enterprises were Morris Birkbeck and George Flower, both of them owners of considerable estates not far from London. The former was of Quaker origin, and his growing dissatisfaction with affairs in England made him open to the suggestion of emigration. Meeting in London the well-known American diplomat, Edward Coles, returning from a mission to Russia, the latter's account of the wide stretches of virgin prairie lands in the then Territory of Illinois fired his imagination, and determined him to transplant himself and family thither, purchase a considerable area, and found an English colony for the relief of the island's distressed agriculturists. His friend Flower joined him in this resolution, and in the summer of 1816, went out in advance to the United States, where Birkbeck and his family followed him the next spring.

Nothing daunted by the difficulties and hardships of frontier conditions, Birkbeck and Flower bought a large tract of unbroken prairie in southeastern Illinois, began the building of log huts and the importation of furniture, and established themselves and their delicately-reared families on this border-land of civilization. Their optimistic, and even enthusiastic, reports, soon led to the accession of a considerable number of their English friends and neighbors. Some of the newcomers were disappointed in the situation. After the long, tedious ocean voyage, and the still longer and far more tiresome westward journey by land, they would fain have returned to the comparative ease and comfort of their English homes. Detractors arose, who took advantage of the sometimes ill-considered letters of the discontents, and utilized these to decry all English emigration to America. Others urged the intending English emigrant to go no farther than the Eastern part of the United States, where civilized conditions already existed. Prominent in the ranks of the latter was William Cobbett, the famous Radical leader and pamphleteer. Self-exiled from England to avoid prosecutions for libel and consequent fines, Cobbett was employed in rutabaga culture on Long Island. It was commonly reported by his enemies that he had been subsidized by land speculators in the vicinity of New York and Philadelphia to attract and retain in that neighborhood the well-to-do English emigrant who was proposing to make investment in American lands. Be that as it may, Cobbett began an attack upon the Birkbeck-Flower Illinois settlement, which at once brought it into notoriety. Wielding one of the most popular and trenchant pens of his day, the political oracle of thousands of Englishmen, he certainly was a formidable antagonist.

Birkbeck had recently (1817) published Notes on a Journey in America, and (1818) Letters from Illinois—honest, straightforward books, if somewhat optimistic in tone. Cobbett replied with A Year's Residence in the United States of America (New York, 1818, and many subsequent editions), in which he made a savage attack on English Prairie, using as a weapon the journal of his follower, Thomas Hulme, lately returned from a visit to Illinois. Birkbeck and Richard Flower (father of George, the first founder), answered the strictures of Cobbett; and various other emigrants added their testimony. From this mass of controversial literature, we have chosen for inclusion in volume x of our series those publications which appear to us best to exemplify Western life and conditions, and contain the most varied descriptions of an English immigrant's impressions and experiences.

Thomas Hulme was an honest English farmer, with strong Radical tendencies, and in earnest sympathy with democratic institutions as he found them in America. The Introduction to his Journal of a Tour in the Western Countries of America—which we herein extract and reprint from Part III of his friend Cobbett's A Year's Residence—contains some autobiographical material. In explaining his object in coming to America, he declares: "I saw an absence of human misery. I saw a government taking away a very small portion of men's earnings. I saw ease and happiness and a fearless utterance of thought everywhere prevail." The only question with him was, in what region of America would it be best for him to settle. His visit to the "Western Countries" was undertaken with a view to examining agricultural and social conditions there. Travelling over the usual Pennsylvania road to Pittsburg, he voyaged down the Ohio, and thence went through Illinois. His notes along the way contain shrewd but useful observations on the route, the people he encountered, prices, and wages. Hulme has nothing adverse to say of the West. Cobbett, who first published this journal, uses it as a text; but in making it serve this purpose of detraction, he obviously wrests Hulme's words from their meaning. We have thought it desirable to reprint Hulme's Journal apart from the mass of diatribe with which Cobbett originally enveloped it.

Richard Flower, whose Letters from Lexington and the Illinois (London, 1819), and Letters from the Illinois (London, 1822), herein reprinted, were first published in reply to Cobbett, was a man of culture and refinement, owner of a considerable estate in Hertford. In 1818, at the age of sixty-three, he sold his property and joined his eldest son, George, in promoting the colony to Illinois. The first winter in America was passed at Lexington, Kentucky, awaiting the preparation of a residence at Albion, the new Illinois town founded by his son in Edwards County. After his removal thither (July, 1819) he passed the rest of his life at this settlement, holding religious services for the infant colony, and in many ways serving as a medium of enlightenment and refinement in this distant region. He died in 1829. His Letters are eminently sane and sensible. His comments upon the American character are appreciative and kindly, his chief strictures being upon the subject of slavery.

The major portion of our volume is devoted to a reprint of John Woods's Two Years' Residence ... in the Illinois Country (London, 1822), detailing with precision the experiences of a well-to-do English farmer seeking a home in the new world. Woods was a matter-of-fact person, whose book has no pretensions to literary style; but it does present faithfully the average Englishman's impressions of persons and things in the United States of 1819-21. Landing in Baltimore, Woods bought conveyances that transported his family and goods over the new National Road to Wheeling, whence a flat-boat furnished their means of carriage down the Ohio River to Shawneetown, then the principal port of Illinois. From this point the immigrants walked overland to English Prairie, sending the baggage around by way of the Wabash and its tributaries. Arrived at the settlement, Woods bought of American pioneers lands that had already received some cultivation, and settled contentedly to build up a new farm in these rich regions. His experiences were typical; and while he expressly disclaims attempting to influence others intending to remove from England, yet his favorable pictures could not have failed of their effect.

His comments upon American life are shrewd and kindly. On the whole, he says, "we have received as good treatment as we should have in a tour through England; but the manners of Americans are more rough than those of Englishmen." Gifted with penetration that permitted him to discover the good qualities beneath the rude exterior, he makes an interesting portrayal of the backwoodsman, giving us an amusing although not a sarcastic record of an imaginary conversation imbued with some of the peculiar Americanisms of his time. More interesting, perhaps, from the point of view of our series, is the account he gives of the towns on the Ohio, and the progress of settlement, compared with those of the travellers of 1803-09. He finds older towns falling into decay, new ones springing into existence, and over it all the trail of the speculator. The extent and cheapness of public lands is a subject for comment, and the land laws and methods of survey are minutely detailed.

In view of the strictures of later English writers, their flippant comments and inappreciative criticisms, the plain, straightforward descriptions of these farmers of English Prairie give a just and wholesome account of the American West at the beginning of the third decade of the nineteenth century. One further service the English settlers performed for Illinois, and civilization. When a new constitution for the state was agitated—one that should admit slavery to its borders—it was the sturdy opposition of the English leaders that turned the scale in favor of freedom. In this struggle (1824-25), Morris Birkbeck once more met his friend Edward Coles, now become governor of Illinois. Although a Virginian, Coles was opposed to the extension of slavery, and stood shoulder to shoulder with Birkbeck in this great fight. Largely to English devotion to free institutions, it was due that the attempt to foist the "peculiar institution" upon the new West failed, and the state which was to shelter and train Abraham Lincoln was made a free land.

In the preparation of notes to this volume, the Editor has had the assistance of Louise Phelps Kellogg, Ph.D., Edith Kathryn Lyle, Ph.D., and Mr. Archer Butler Hulbert.

R. G. T.

Madison, Wis., November, 1904.

Hulme's Journal of a Tour in the Western Countries of America—September 30, 1818-August 8, 1819.

Extracted and reprinted from William Cobbett's A Year's Residence in the United States of America: London, 1828.