Elias Kane
American politician (1794–1835)
Elias Kent Kane (June 7, 1794 – December 12, 1835) was the first Illinois secretary of state and a U.S. senator from Illinois.
Early life
He was born in New York City, to merchant Capt. Elias Kent Kane and Deborah VanSchelluyne of Dutchess County, New York. Young Kane attended public schools, then Yale College, from which he has graduated in the year 1813.
Career
After he studied law and was admitted to the bar, Kane commenced practice in Nashville, Tennessee, and then moved to Kaskaskia, Illinois in 1814.
He became allied with Jesse B. Thomas, a slaveholder who had secured the job of judge of the Territory of Illinois. Like Judge Thomas and his rival Ninian Edwards, Kane was a delegate to the first state constitutional convention in 1818. At the convention, the Thomas/Kane faction unsuccessfully tried to add language permitting slavery in the new state (where it had been forbidden by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787). However, that proposal was defeated by a faction whose leaders included Baptist John Mason Peck, Methodist Peter Cartwright, Quaker James Lemen, publisher Hooper Warren and future governor Edward Coles. Kane claimed ownership of five people as slaves in 1820,
After an unsuccessful 1820 campaign for election to the 17th Congress which featured numerous letters in the Edwardsville Spectator concerning slavery, and which anti-slavery candidate Daniel Pope Cook won, Kane became Illinois' first Secretary of State, and served from 1820 to 1824.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Elias Kane” as american politician (1794–1835). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american politician (1794–1835). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q368062. VIAF identifies the subject as 63902975. The Library of Congress control number is nr96001389. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1794, 1835, 1813 and 1814.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elias Kane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.