A. PRE-TERRITORIAL ORIGINS

CHAPTER I.

ORIGINS OF THE GENERAL PROPERTY TAX IN ILLINOIS.

The organization of Illinois as a territory in 1809 involved no radical change in the character of the existing institutions. No new code of law was substituted for the one in force in the territory when the change in the form of government was made. On the contrary, the old code was carried over in its entirety and used as the basis for the new, subject to such modifications and changes as were deemed appropriate by the territorial legislature.1 The system of raising public revenues by levying a tax upon property according to its value was one of the inheritances received by the new government from the old. Consequently one must look to the pre-territorial legislation for the primary sources of the general property tax system in the state.

The pre-territorial history of Illinois is the history of a small group of French settlements, established about 1700, which led an unprogressive life for nearly a hundred years before they were submerged by the flood of settlers from the seaboard states after the close of the Revolution. The political control over this group of settlements was subject to frequent change during the century, passing successively from France to England, from England to the State of Virginia, and from Virginia to the United States.

The French Period, 1699-1763.

The period of French domination began with the establishment of the mission stations of Kaskaskia and Cahokia as outposts of the great French empire in the

1Laws of the Territory of Illinois, 1809-1811, p. 1; Laws of Illinois Territory, 1812, p. 5.

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Mississippi valley, which had been the dream of Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV.2 It closed at the end of the Seven Years' War, in 1763, when France was forced to cede her claims to the region to England.3 In so far as any direct bearing on the problem in hand is concerned, the period during which the settlements were under the control of the French is unimportant. The population remained small, probably not exceeding two thousand persons at any time, and such governmental functions as were performed seem to have been exercised largely through military and ecclesiastical authorities. In the annals of the villages, as kept by the parish priests, there is no evidence of the levy of any tax or of the existence of any formal financial system.

2C. W. Alvord, "Illinois; the Origins", Military Tract Papers (Illinois State Reformatory Print), no. 3, p. 7. The French settlement, of which these two villages were the beginning, was situated in the bottom lands of the Mississippi River, in the south-western part of Illinois. Cahokia was founded in 1699 and Kaskaskia a year later.

"The actual transfer was made in 1765. Illinois Historical Collections, II, xxv.

Alvord, Origins, p. 9.

J. B. Dillon, History of the Early Settlement of the Northwestern Territory (Indianapolis, 1854), p. 60; Joseph Wallace, History of Illinois and Louisiana under the French Rule (Cincinnati, 1893), p. 309 et seq.; E. G. Mason, Kaskaskia and its Parish Records (Fergus Historical Series, no. 12, Chicago, 1881).

Ill. Hist. Coll., V; Mason, op. cit.

It is known that some income was obtained from fines. Thus, in one place the record shows that a fine of twenty-five livres, payable in deer skins, was imposed upon those selling liquor to savages or slaves. It was specified that the proceeds from the fines should go for the support of the poor. Ill. Hist. Coll., V, 117. Licenses for trade were issued but whether fees were charged for them is not known. Ibid, II, 1xviii.

The effect of the early French settlement upon the financial system of the state was indeed so slight that one might remain entirely ignorant of the fact that there had been any early settlement, were it not for the legacy of some land title disputes and for the common fields of some of the villages which were several times the subject of legislative attention in later years. Art. 8, Const. of 1818; Private Laws, 1826-7, p. 22; Laws, 1909, p. 425.

The English Period, 1763-1778.

The change from French to English domination seems to have been accomplished without disturbing, to any great extent, the local customs of the settlements. The English supplied a military government, the expenses of which were provided for without appeal to the French settlers.8

The County of Illinois, 1778-1784.

A similar arrangement was continued after the occupation of the region in 1778 by George Rogers Clark in the name of the State of Virginia. An act of the Virginia legislature in October, 1778, provided that the expenses of the military government and of those officials to whom the inhabitants were not accustomed should be paid out of the state treasury, but that the expenses of the civil government to which the population was accustomed should be paid in the same manner as formerly. During this period an independent local government was maintained in a very efficient form in Cahokia and in a less efficient form in Kaskaskia1o; but the sphere of governmental activity was small and the cost formed no problem.11 The record book

"Dillon, op. cit.

Ill. Hist. Coll., II, xxv; Captain Phillip Pittman, The Present State of the European Settlements on the Mississippi, etc. (London, 1770), pp. 43, 55.

In 1768, however, the English did establish, at Fort Chartres, one of the French villages founded about 1720, a court of law with seven judges. This was said to have been the first court of common law jurisdiction west of the Allegheny Mountains. E. G. Mason, Old Fort Chartres (Fergus Historical Series, no. 12, Chicago, 1881), pp. 41, 42. This court proved to be a failure. Alexander Davidson and Bernard Stuve, History of Illinois (Springfield, 1874), p. 165.

Ill. Hist. Coll., II, lii et seq.; C. E. Boyd, "The County of Illinois," American Historical Review, IV, 624.

Another act specified that the religion and customs of the inhabitants were to be respected. Mason, op. cit., p. 49 et seq.

10Ill. Hist. Coll., II, 1xiii et seq., cxlvii et seq.; Alvord, Origins, p. II et seq.

11Ill. Hist. Coll., II, Introduction.

of Colonel John Todd, the first county lieutenant, shows no evidences of taxes collected.

It is true that the inhabitants were sometimes levied upon for supplies for military purposes. But these levies were not really taxes, for, although they were compulsory in character, the contributors were to be reimbursed.12 In form, however, they were very similar to taxes. The record reads that "the justices of the court of Kaskaskia assessed the inhabitants of the village according to their wealth, and that by August 31, (1779) there had been delivered into the store-house 54,600 pounds of flour..."13 In Cahokia, also, each person was compelled to furnish supplies according to his means. 14 For a large proportion of the people, the levies were practically taxes; the supplies were not paid for until years later, and by that time the orders had passed out of the hands of the original owners for the most part, many of them having been sold to speculators for a mere pittance.

The Northwest Territory, 1784-1800.

When Virginia resigned her claims to the region in favor of the central government, in 1784, a different kind of history began in the Illinois country. For a little time, it is true, the French were left largely to their own devices; but when attention did begin to be paid to them, local institutions were no longer respected. A well defined attempt was made to change radically their system of local government in order to make it identical with that of the eastern section of the Northwest Territory, of which Illinois now became a part. Thus the history of Illinois after 1784 cannot be interpreted in the same manner as the history of the preceding years. It is no longer the story of a succession of careless, military governments, maintained from some far-away treasury by an authority which cared little whether the inhabitants made use of a particular form of local government; it becomes the story of a civil 12Ibid., p. lxxvi. 13Ibid., p. lxxvii. 14Ibid., p. lxxxiii.

government seeking to organize, in thorough manner and according to a uniform plan, a very large district. To this government there arises the problem of so changing and molding the institutions in the French settlements as to make them conform to the large scheme for the government of the entire north-western region.

It is not necessary to speak in detail of the movement of population from the eastern states to the region northwest of the Ohio River, which began in real earnest soon after the Revolution and continued with ever increasing rapidity, until the whole territory was thickly settled; or of how the region, originally organized under one jurisdiction, was divided time and again into independent, selfsustaining parts until the present arrangement of state boundaries was evolved. It is important, however, to recall this much. When the Northwest Territory was first divided, Ohio was formed. The remainder was called the Territory of Indiana. As soon as the region embraced within the wide boundaries of this territory had developed strength enough to undergo the operation, further divisions were made whereby the territories of Michigan and Illinois were formed. Such divisions and adjustments continued for many years; the boundaries of Illinois, for example, were not definitely fixed until 1840. So between 1784 and 1809 the settlements in the Illinois country were organized successively as a part of the Northwest Territory, of the Indiana Territory, and, finally, as the Territory of Illinois.

It was almost inevitable that a movement such as this should diminish to the point of extinction the influence of the French settlements upon the institutions and customs of the country. The nature of the process of organization made any other result almost an impossibility. Through the early period of Northwest Territorial government, these far western settlements were ignored. Indeed they had no effective representation in the law-making bodies of the territorial governments until 1805.15 The first attempts

15 Shadrach Bond was the representative of Knox County in the legislative assembly of the Northwest Territory in 1798. J. B. Dillon, History of Indiana (Indianapolis, 1859), pp. 391, 392.