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Excerpt from Centennial History of Decatur and Macon County Writing of this history began years ago when reporters of The Review wrote down the words of men and women whose lives went back to the beginning of the county. Thus we have the history of Decatur as seen and made by people who were here when the cen tury was new. Among those whose eyes saw and whose ears heard happenings herein described as they saw and heard were Jerome R. Gorin, Willis Johnson, Sr., Richard J. Oglesby, Jane M. Johns, and scores of others. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Decatur has a long history of patriotic service, both on and off the field of battle. Decatur volunteers participated in six major campaigns including the Black Hawk War (1832), the Mexican War (1846–1848), the Civil War (1861–1865), the Spanish-American War (1898), World War I (1917–1918), and World War II (1941–1945). Their record of distinguished service includes the presence of five generals and six Congressional Medal of Honor winners in the Civil War. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the first national veterans' organization, was founded in Decatur immediately after the Civil War. In World War II, soldiers from Decatur served in North Africa, Italy, the Philippines, and Germany. Equally impressive, however, is the tradition of the Decatur Canteen, which served food to transient soldiers from the time of the Civil War onward. Local volunteers rolled bandages, collected food, and recycled bales of paper and heaps of scrap metal. Citizens planted victory gardens and bought war bonds and savings stamps. Wartime Decatur: 1832–1945 documents the vigorous wartime culture based on community involvement and a strong sense of patriotism.
Macon County occupies nearly 600 square miles of fertile farmland in the geographic center of Illinois. Abraham Lincoln made his first Illinois home here, on a pleasant bluff overlooking the Sangamon River, near presentday Harristown. On May 10, 1860, he was first nominated for the presidency in Decatur, the county seat. During the World War I era, Macon County boasted over a dozen hamlets and villages, including Warrensburg and Maroa, which both enjoyed opera houses and busy train stations. Maroa was home to John Crocker, who became a famous banker, while nearby Forsyth produced Black Bart, the infamous bank robber. After World War II, Decatur became known as the soybean capital of the world. And today, agricultural and industrial workers depend on one another, growing and processing the corn and soybeans that have made Macon County a self-sustaining economic engine.
In the pre-Civil War and Civil War periods the Illinois black code deprived blacks of suffrage and court rights, and the Illinois Free Schools Act kept most black children out of public schooling. But, as McCaul documents, they did not sit idly by. They applied the concepts of “bargaining power” (rewarding, punishing, and dialectical) and the American ideal of “community” to participate in winning two major victories during this era. By the use of dialectical power, exerted mainly via John Jones’ tract, The Black Laws of Illinois, they helped secure the repeal of the state’s black code; by means of punishing power, mainly through boycotts and ‘‘invasions,’’ they exerted pressures that brought a cancellation of the Chicago public school policy of racial segregation. McCaul makes clear that the blacks’ struggle for school rights is but one of a number of such struggles waged by disadvantaged groups (women, senior citizens, ethnics, and immigrants). He postulates a “stage’’ pattern for the history of the black struggle—a pattern of efforts by federal and state courts to change laws and constitutions, followed by efforts to entice, force, or persuade local authorities to comply with the laws and constitutional articles and with the decrees of the courts.