No national occurrence had a deeper impact on McDonough County than the Civil War, and there are two main reasons for that.
One is the cultural division that existed in this central Illinois county, between residents from southern states who were severely prejudiced toward Blacks, did not oppose slavery, and certainly didn’t want military violence to occur in their former home area, and other residents from northern states who had opposite views, realizing that slavery had no place in a nation which was supposedly committed to freedom, equality, and respect for everyone—so military action in the South was required.
The long state of Illinois was itself divided between a southern-dominated section in the lower half and a northern-dominated section in the upper half.
And McDonough County was right in the middle of that cultural division—as were some other nearby counties. No wonder that before the war the Underground Railroad operated in western Illinois—with notable help from the northern-based Allison and Blazer families near Macomb. And our county also had a violent group of men from pro-South areas that sought to stop those anti-slavery crusaders from secretly transporting Blacks to freedom.
To illustrate the deep division over slavery and the war in McDonough County, I reflected the attitudes of our two county seat newspapers, the Macomb Eagle and the Macomb Journal, in my book, Macomb: A Pictorial History. The Eagle, for example, viewed Abraham Lincoln as a destroyer of the nation and a threat to the lives of white people. In an 1864 article titled “The Victims of Lincoln’s Despotism,” the Union Army soldiers were “slaughtered on behalf of the negro.” And in another article from that year, the newspaper portrayed Republicans (Lincoln supporters, committed to the war) as people who often do violent acts against opponents of the military conflict. In contrast, the Macomb Journal, during 1862, discussed “a foulmouthed, blatant secessionist, named Dave Crisman,” who hated supporters of the war, and who committed an act of gun violence against someone who disagreed with him. In an 1864 article, which I also reprinted, that newspaper blasted the local “Copperheads” (northern-based supporters of Confederates during the war) as “reptiles and renegades” for opposing the Union Army draft and fighting against “all of the rights that are sacred to man.” And of course, it also celebrated Lincoln as a great American. So, the two Macomb newspapers couldn’t have been more opposed throughout the war, as they represented the two sides of the conflict time and again during the 1861-1865 period. That local clash illustrates the severe division in our county during those turbulent years. So does the most notable murder in McDonough County during the nineteenth century—the killing of William H. Randolph, who had been a Macomb store owner, banker, realtor, sheriff, circuit clerk, and state legislator (who had also built the Randolph House Hotel) in the 1830s-1850s.
