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 the one containing Chicago, 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 state line should be moved to what is its present site. Pope correctly believed that most of the Illinois population was pro-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 the state debt of Wisconsin would awe-inspiring (in a bad way).
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