Little Egypt

During the “Winter of the Deep Snow” in 1830-1831, and some severe winters following, counties in the south of Illinois supplied food to the northern part of the state, an action that may have given rise to the name “Little Egypt” or just “Egypt” for Southern Illinois: 

There is an old tradition handed down from the early settlers along this road about the people coming down from the north to buy corn in an early day. The frost having killed all the corn in the north, in the southern part of Illinois the corn was not hurt by frost. The people near Goshen had come down the Old Goshen road to Knight's Prairie west of McLeansboro where they stopped to stay over night with one of the early settlers by the name of Knight. The corn buyers accosted the early settler by using the Bible expression “We are the son of Jacob and have come into the land of Egypt to buy corn.” From this expression we derived the cognomen of 'The land of Egypt.” Since then all Southern Illinois is known as 'EGYPT" or The land of Egypt." (H. M. Aiken, Franklin County History, Centennial Edition)

 It is sometimes claimed the southernmost Illinois city was given the name “Cairo” because it lay in “Little Egypt,” but the reverse may be true. On 9 Jan 1818 the governor of Illinois territory signed into law an act to incorporate the “City and Bank of Cairo.” The city was named well before the food shipments following the winter of 1830 and afterwards. Perhaps the position of Cairo at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, reminded the founders of the Egyptian Delta. But, of course, there may have been earlier food shipments.

 And the Egypt designation could have began in 1799 when Baptist minister John Badgley termed the fertile lands near southern Illinois town of Edwardsville, Illinois, the “Land of Goshen,” a Biblical area in Egypt.

City of Cairo, Illinois, panoramic map, 1885.

Southern Illinois, “Little Egypt,” was known for its huge coal deposits, though the Summers family was apparently never involved with this. And it was also known for its large concentration of settlers from southern states, such as North Carolina and Tennessee, from which the Franklin Co Summers immigrated.

In his 1918 book on the history of Franklin Co, H. M. Aiken states

The early settlers of the county who came from the South, brought with them, a hospitality and sociability, that could not be excelled anywhere in the U. S. The typical Yankee possessed many good traits of character but the genuine hospitality and sociability of the people of the South was a great inheritance of which Franklin County received in her early days.

Franklin County is indebted to her early settlers for the gentle, Christian spirit that had been a great factor in moulding[sic] the character of the founders of Franklin County.

Joy, peace, and contentment and affection encompassed and enveloped their homes. Southern ideas govern our social intercourse and Southern hospitality is dispersed. The traveler passing through the county upon our public highways is always greeted with an affable "Good-day, Sir," and if he should stop at a farm house in quest of information he will be politely invited to 'light and come in." Refreshments will be offered him so cordially and unostentatiously that he at once concludes that he has found a county where kindness, chivalry and hospitality do not entirely belong to the ages that are past.

 No description could be further from the truth. Inhospitable and unsociable, Southern Illinois had a plethora of crime and violence. In 1875 a newspaper reporter described Little Egypt residents as 

Dirty roughs, clad in two shirts, butternut homespun, and cowhide boots, hanging round the "drug stores" (here grogshops are so designated), to drink benzine, discuss who is "the best man," and, if enough benzine have been consumed, to settle that great question by fighting it out then and there. Men, as one soon learns of them, who are born bullies, every mother's son of them, and who are so proud of nothing as having knocked down some other man, and, while he was down, kicked, choked, bit, and gouged him, until the victor has spent his strength and his rage.

The stereotypic resident was said to be “lazy, ignorant, anti-intellectual drunkard who loved a good fight and held the law in slight regard” (Illinois Historical Journal, Spring, 1985, pp. 17-44). Assaults and murders were rampant, particularly in Williamson Co, with its vicious family vendettas, but also in adjacent Franklin, Jackson, and other Litte Egypt counties. Suspects usually escaped punishment owing to badly managed prosecutions; lying, threatened, or murdered witnesses; and biased or frightened juries. And all too often they were simply "nolled" (legal slang from L. nolle prosequi, charges dismissed) for no apparent reason.

Counties in black voted for the constitutional convention

that could have legalized slavery.

Little Egypt was exceedingly racist, particularly the city of Cairo, home to a large number of blacks, estimated at more than ten thousand during the Civil War, mostly fugitive “contrabands.” About three thousand remained in the city after the war. Though the first Illinois state constitution, published in 1818, stated that slavery shall not be “thereafter introduced,” slavery continued to be tolerated. The historian Darrel Dexter has described Illinois as a "quasi-slave" state. Use of slaves was allowed by law until 1825 for the salt works in the southern Illinois county of Gallatin. Documents show that at least five southern counties—St. Clair, Gallatin, Randolph, Edwards and Pope, where blacks were bought, sold, indentured, gifted, and taxed as property—embraced the institution of slavery. In 1853 the state legislature passed a law which made the settlement of African Americans in Illinois a crime. If African Americans remained in Illinois beyond 10 days, they could be arrested and fined.

The 1818 Illinois census for statehood showed Franklin Co with only sixty-seven blacks, fifteen “indentured” (slavery by another name) and fifty-two free. But, despite these low numbers, Franklin certainly supported slavery. When a vote was taken in Illinois in 1824 for or against a constitutional convention that could have made slavery legal outright, Franklin was one of eleven southern Illinois counties with a majority of votes for the convention. In Franklin Co, the vote was 170 for and 113 against. But Illinois, as a whole, voted 4972 for and 6640 against. Had the measure passed, the course of Illinois history would have been much different.

In 1876, after defending several clients accused of “crimes that would make the bailiffs of Hades blush,” the magniloquent lawyer Milo Erwin wrote a book about Williamson Co, inviting the world “to look with joy and pride upon a county redeemed from crime, and sparkling with brilliant gems of innocence and virtue.” Any sparkle was short-lived. Crime and violence continued in Williamson and the rest of Little Egypt, culminating in the 1920s with violent labor strikes, prohibition violence, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. But, as we will see in our next blog, the latter was not a rise but a rebirth.

And this was home for the Wittenberg Summers Line! But crime-ridden Egypt may have been more than just their home. As we will see, it may have been their cultural cradle.

Darrel Dexter, Bondage in Egypt, Slavery in Southern Illinois, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 2010.