Brownsville

Brownsville is a section of Brooklyn, New York, with a rich history of thousands of people who have come through it, lived there for generations, moved out or stayed, lived their lives, added their story to those of the city. Books are written about these people and I just read one.

But there is a Brownsville in Illinois which also interests me. It is nothing now but shards of ruins in some guy's field, just west of Murphysboro. But it was once one of the biggest cities in Illinois, thriving, with metalworks and industry.

In those days metalworks and industry was what it took to make a town a more substantial town, in other words, to distinguish any old place from a truly thriving place. They settled Illinois from the rivers, from Cairo up, with Chicago in those days nothing but a pipe dream, so all the action was in the south until you got up to Alton and then Quincy following the river. There was no such thing as such inland towns as Champaign or Rockford and in fact most of Illinois was considered the remote Northwest (northwest of Virginia) as people had not begun pouring in from places like Ohio and New York. The southern rivers were where the people were.

Brownsville was where John A. Logan was born, and he grew up naturally wanting to be a politician. When he was elected, he went to Springfield to represent the people of that southern Illinois area where he was from. That area was pro-Southern, pro-slave owners, so he wrote laws protecting slave-owners who were trying to get their escaped slaves back, when those slaves crossed over into Illinois from Kentucky or perhaps Missouri, states that border that area of Illinois. He was, in general, a pro-Southern legislator, but a distinct minority in a state that bred Lincoln and became increasingly abolitionist.

In fact, hanging around Springfield in general made him an abolitionist, and caused him to change his mind. Some people have said that the murder of Elijah Lovejoy in Alton in the 1830s (?) is what changed everyone's mind, and I'm not sure about the timing here, but Illinois was rapidly seeing that strong feelings were developing along the Mississippi and Missourians were guilty of overstepping their bounds in coming into Illinois and telling Illinoisans whet to do with people who were either on the move toward Canada, or in some way laying low and hiding in the Illinois countryside.

Illinoisans were in fact of mixed opinions about the developing conflict with the south. In southern Illinois many had settled from the south, and understood slaves and slavery, and had no desire to go fight a war against those relatives whom they'd left behind in such places as Kentucky, Tennessee, or North Carolina. In north and central Illinois, settled by northerners and ardent Congregationalists, the idea of slavery was becoming increasingly abhorrent and they didn't feel there was any moral justification to owning another person whatsoever. But there was also a fair number of people who simply were trying to feed body and soul; having obtained an acre or two of generally good farmland, they'd set out to clear it and farm it, and now were faced with what to do when people came up the road requesting something of them. Sometimes people wanted to be hidden; other times, people wanted whoever was hidden to be handed over to receive punishment and return to the other side of the river. In any case there were hard feelings and one was required to side with somebody even if one wanted to keep one's head down and survive the whole experience.

Down in Brownsville, continuous rains made its placement at the mouth of the Big Muddy River a problem. Every time the rivers would rise, Brownsville would be endangered, to the point where it became impractical to keep developing its industry and in fact risk the flooding of what industry was already there. Finally town leaders agreed to move the whole thing up on the bluffs to Murphysboro, which is much higher, but a little bit off of both the Big Muddy and the Mississippi. Up in Murphysboro they put in a courthouse and people could live there without constant fear of flooding.

When the war started John A. agreed to go back to his hometown to raise up a group of infantry volunteers to go and fight it. But when he got there some people were very angry with him. By now of course the whole countryside was divided into the three groups above mentioned: southern sympathizers, abolitionists, and those who really didn't want to get involved. Southern Illinois had always had more of the first group but these people were angry that John A. was a traitor and had sold out their side, up in Springfield. They didn't want to join him to take up arms against the south. It was all they could do not to take up arms against him as everyone was in the process of taking up arms, in general.

He went on to have an illustrious career, leading his brigade, and then coming back to southern Illinois to start one of the first Memorial Days on record. The war had defined his era, and his life, and he had served in distinction. The memory of him did not settle easily on the area, though. They named a junior college John A. Logan College, and started a museum in Murphysboro. But one cold winter day I was in the doorway of that museum, and some guy sidled up near me and said under his breath that he was a traitor. I was shocked, as I didn't know the story I just related to you above, but I didn't argue with him. It was obviously a sincere opinion, handed down through generations, of a never-forgotten betrayal by one who left and went out into the world, and let southern Illinois live through its times, on the border, as it were, between the abolitionist territory and the slave-holding south that surrounded it.

As for Brownsville, I once asked someone why they didn't at least have a bronze marker telling where it was, and telling that John A. Logan was born there. They have put markers up, more than once, someone told me, but people keep stealing them and using them to melt down metals for resale. They could be stealing them just out of hostility to John A. himself, as that was clearly evident on my visit to the museum. Who knows? Most of the people in the area had no idea of the story I just told, and I suppose it will slowly go back to nothing, much as Brownville itself has.