The northern border of Illinois originally was going to be 41 miles south of its current location, which meant that thirteen counties currently in Illinois, including Cook, would have ended up belonging to Wisconsin. However, prior to Illinois achieving statehood in 1818, Nathaniel Pope (a delegate to the U.S. Congress from the Illinois territory) successfully argued that the border should be moved to its present site. Pope correctly believed that southern Illinois was sympathetic to slavery, and he thought that it would be desirable to include within the state a port on Lake Michigan so that there would be intensive trading with North through the Great Lakes and the influx of Northern ideas, sentiments, and sympathizers.
Had Pope not succeeded, probably Illinois would have been a border state (if not an outright Southern one) in the Civil War, Richard Nixon would have won the 1960 election, and Wisconsin instead of Illinois would now have a state debt of $127 billion (yes, with a "b").
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