Historically Speaking: Which way to democracy? The debate around courthouse square

If you want a window into an earlier time when the country was seriously divided – not unlike our present moment – look no further than the Bureau County Courthouse in Princeton in the years leading up to the Civil War.

In the mid-19th century, the issue of slavery was at the root of whether our young nation would ultimately survive. It was vigorously debated in and around the courthouse as well as in our local newspapers (yes, plural). At stake was whether our nation would move, even slowly, in the direction of freedom and equality for all.

Slavery was, in a sense, first on trial in Bureau County in 1843, when Rev. Owen Lovejoy was indicted for harboring Nancy, a formerly enslaved woman.

In the early years of the county, before an official courthouse was built, a wood frame building on the southeast corner of the public square served as the town hall, county courtroom and Hampshire Colony Church. After a weeklong trial drawing a large crowd, Lovejoy was acquitted in the same building where he preached. The judge ruled Nancy had become a free person when her Kentucky owner brought her onto the free soil of Illinois.

Once the new courthouse was built in 1845, it handled not only official county business but also served as a venue for meetings about the national conflict over slavery. That debate intensified into an uproar in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, allowing the extension of slavery into western territories. In October that year, Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, author of the controversial act, came to Princeton to defend it. Holding forth on the courthouse steps, he was not well received. Owen Lovejoy appeared and rebutted him (as Abraham Lincoln had done two days before in Peoria).

By the time famous antislavery leader Frederick Douglass came to Princeton five years later, the slavery conflict had split the nation in half. Though Douglass had become increasingly pessimistic that slavery would be abolished without violence, he spoke for almost two hours to “a dense crowd of people at the Court House” on the essential “unity of the races” (Bureau County Republican, Feb. 24, 1859).

In November 1865, after the Civil War had brought about slavery’s demise, its abolition was celebrated at Converse Hall across from the Courthouse on the northwest corner of South Main Street. There, Princeton’s John Howard Bryant introduced famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Expressing his joy slavery was no more, Garrison admonished the audience: “We must bury in the same grave with (slavery) our prejudices against those whose skins are not of our color” (BCR, Nov. 2, 1865).

Six years later, in 1871, Susan B. Anthony, national leader of the women’s suffrage movement, spoke at the same hall. She argued forcibly for women’s right to vote, invoking the Declaration of Independence and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. (Only recently has the amendment’s provision that insurrection is a disqualifier for holding public office become almost as well known.)

The causes of these 19th century activists who addressed the people of Bureau County were connected, as were the activists themselves. Garrison, Douglass, and Lovejoy had all worked with one another in the antislavery movement. And Douglass and Anthony collaborated in the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage causes. Douglass was present with Anthony at the famous national Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

It may seem novel now that public squares in small towns were once scenes of vigorous debate over the nation’s character. Walk from one corner of the courthouse square to the other and you will have symbolically traversed decades of the struggle to make the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality for all a reality.

We may not be able to actually hear the voices of a Frederick Douglass or a Susan B. Anthony in town anymore, but they’re still speaking to us. It would be good to take heart from their spirit and resolve during this momentous election year for our democracy.

• Having spent her work life documenting the history of social movements, Sarah Cooper now likes to plumb the often hidden history of Bureau County. She lives in Princeton.