Illinois House of Representatives

Freeport question with the proposal of the Freeport Doctrine. This stated that if the people voted slavery down in a territory, it would stay down unless the territorial Legislature passed laws protecting it. This ultimately won Douglas the campaign for Illinois Senate, but would later cost him the 1860…

democracy, and more of a republic. The difference is that true democracy implies that power is held with the people, but with a republic, power is held in representatives, like the electoral college. The Electoral College, unlike Congress, is not a place. It is a group of 538, with electors limited to congressional influence, 1 elector for each House member, and 2 for Congress. Even District of Columbia gets 3 electors under the 23rd Amendment. Within every state’s election, the citizens are…

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 in a small log cabin in Kentucky. In 1816, his family moved to Indiana, where he worked to provide for his family. In 1830, he became a worker on a flatboat hauling freight in the town of New Salem, Illinois. Lincoln was self-taught in law and passed his exam in 1836, which lead to him becoming a lawyer in the State…

century because he fought to preserve the union and emancipated the slaves. Abraham Lincoln overcame many obstacles in his childhood, such as the death of his mother and the lack of proper education, to become one of the most successful lawyers in Illinois and president of the United States. Lincoln wrote three autobiographies in his lifetime. In the second autobiography to Jesse Fell, a long-time Republican…

national unity was heavily encouraged within America. James Monroe, elected President of the United States in 1816, agreed to this idea, resulting in the creation of the American System. Often identified with Henry Clay, Speaker of the House of Representatives, the American System was a program of national economic development. In the past, under the presidency of Jefferson, the United States was revolved around agrarianism. However, Monroe and Madison supported a Federalist program for…

John Hickman, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, spoke in 1859 to the Independent Democratic Convention regarding sectional conflict in the United States. In Hickman’s famous speech supporting the war, he stated, “There is an eternal antagonism between freedom and slavery.--The constitution of the human mind and the human heart makes it inevitable; and the one or the other must eventually gain the ascendancy,” (VS). The increasingly divergent social and…

smaller states are overrepresented. As Document H states, when there is a tie in the electoral votes, the result of the election would be determined by the House of Representatives where “each state casts only one vote[. This means that] the single representative from Wyoming, representing 500,000 votes, would have as much say as the 55 representatives from California, who represent 35 million voters”. Evidently, this is completely absurd, This system brings in the idea that some…

As a House Representative, Lincoln was strongly against the Mexican War: He believed that it was unnecessarily aggressive and unconstitutional. Furthermore, this war would encourage the expansion of slavery into the conquered territories. In order to end this war, Lincoln voted for the Wilmot Proviso. This legislation would stop any slavery from expanding into the land obtained during the Mexican War (Neely). However, this caused many of his constituents in Illinois to hate him because…

He claimed he should be free because he was enslaved while living in the free state of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory. The Court ruled that his request for freedom could not be granted because he did not possess any property. It went even further, stating that even though he was living in a free state he was still considered a slave and…

college, from the government and can also lead to legal status for these children. Senators Orrin Hatch, a republican from Utah, and Richard Durban, a democratic from Illinois, first proposed the DREAM Act in 2001, to congress, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. It was introduced as “H.R. 1918” in the House of Representatives and “S.1291” in the Senate, Over the next few years the DREAM Act would constantly be introduced but would fall short of approval. TIME AND TIME AGAIN It…