As the northern prairies became accessible by the lake route and the stage roads, New England and New York poured a steady stream of homeseekers into the Commonwealth.  By the middle of the century, this Northern immigration had begun to inundate the northern counties and to overflow into the interior, where it met and mingled with the counter-current.  These Yankee settlers were viewed with hostility, not unmixed with contempt, by those whose culture and standards of taste had been formed south of Mason and Dixon’s line.[305]

This sectional antagonism was strengthened by the rapid commercial advance of northern Illinois.  Yankee enterprise and thrift worked wonders in a decade.  Governor Ford, all of whose earlier associations were with the people of southern Illinois, writing about the middle of the century, admits that although the settlers in the southern part of the State were twenty, thirty, forty, and fifty years in advance, on the score of age, they were ten years behind in point of wealth and all the appliances of a higher civilization.[306] The completion of the canal between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River, however much it might contribute to the general welfare of the State, seemed likely to profit the northern rather than the southern portion.  It had been opposed at the outset by Southerners, who argued soberly that it would flood the State with Yankees;[307] and at every stage in its progress it had encountered Southern obstruction, though the grounds for this opposition were more wisely chosen.

Political ideals and customs were also a divisive force in Illinois society.  True to their earlier political training, the Southern settlers had established the county as a unit of local government.  The Constitution of 1818 put the control of local concerns in the hands of three county commissioners, who, though elected by the people, were not subjected to that scrutiny which selectmen encountered in the New England town meeting.  To the democratic New Englander, every system seemed defective which gave him no opportunity to discuss neighborhood interests publicly, and to call local officers to account before an assembly of the vicinage.  The new comers in northern Illinois became profoundly dissatisfied with the autocratic board of county commissioners.  Since the township might act as a corporate body for school purposes, why might they not enjoy the full measure of township government?  Their demands grew more and more insistent, until they won substantial concessions from the convention which framed the Constitution of 1848.  But all this agitation involved a more or less direct criticism of the system which the people of southern Illinois thought good enough for Yankees, if it were good enough for themselves.[308]