Jefferson-Lemen Compact

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson made a covert pact with a frontier Baptist preacher named James Lemen: in exchange for Lemen's journey into the Northwest Territory to build an anti-slavery movement, Jefferson would use his political influence to support their cause. What unfolded over the following decades was a quietly revolutionary campaign that most Americans have never heard of. MacNaul reconstructs this forgotten alliance from original sources, tracing Lemen's establishment of his Baptist Church, the growth of the Baptist Association, and their determined work during the Illinois Constitutional Convention to ensure the territory would enter the Union as a free state. The book culminates in a remarkable coda: a letter from Abraham Lincoln to Lemen's son, acknowledging that the elder Lemen's decades of labor "set in motion the forces which finally made Illinois a free state." This is a story about the strange ways democratic change actually happens, through patient organizing by men who understood that the fate of a nation might turn on the convictions of a few hundred frontier settlers.