How the States Got Their Shapes Too

by Mark Stein

  I at length determined in going to see Mr. Jefferson, and in June I left the Mississippi Territory for Washington city. On my route, I had planned a thousand ways of introducing the inquiry, knowing the unfavorable impression that had been made on the mind of the president through my particular “friends,” Mr. Claiborne, Governor of Louisiana, Mr. John Smith, Senator from the State of Ohio, and some others.

  But the climax of the article—Kemper’s meeting with President Jefferson—engaged in the very thing the article hoped to eliminate: uncertainty. “I rather bungled the business,” Kemper wrote, “obtained no information, and I suppose gave but little. The president thought he had received a novel visit, and I thought he treated his guest in a novel manner.” Meaning what? Who knows. What we do know is how Kemper rehabilitated his reputation by skillfully exploiting uncertainty.

  Uncertainty continued to accompany the Kempers as they passed into history. The 1874 American Cyclopaedia described Reuben Kemper as one of the “leaders in the movement to rid West Florida of its Spanish rule.” Extolling Kemper, it says, “The Spanish authorities caused the Kempers to be kidnapped, but they were rescued.… After these occurrences, Reuben Kemper devoted himself to the task of driving the Spaniards from the American continent.” Other histories have viewed Kemper more along the lines of William Horace Brown, who in 1906 described him as “a man whose lawlessness has found respectable apologists—who has even been lauded, like many others of his brutal breed, as a gallant knight of the frontier.”

  As for the portion of Spanish West Florida that was “liberated” in September 1810, it constituted itself as an independent republic. But before the year was out, the United States dissolved the Republic of West Florida, taking possession of the western half of the region and annexing it to Louisiana. This action created the segment of southern Louisiana east of the Mississippi River.

  · · · MINNESOTA, NORTH DAKOTA, MONTANA, IDAHO · · ·

  RICHARD RUSH

  The 49th Parallel: A New Line of Americans

  As regarded the … boundary line, I remarked [to Lord Castlereagh] that the ground of the objection was that the only line that could be run in the direction proposed under the Treaty of 1783 would not, as had been ascertained since … strike the Mississippi; and to run it lower down would bring it through territory within the limits of the United States.

  —AMBASSADOR RICHARD RUSH1

  The longest boundary line in the United States is the 49th parallel, separating the United States and Canada from Minnesota to the West Coast. The American most largely responsible for this line is Richard Rush, who, as ambassador to England, negotiated the first use of this latitude as a border. The simplicity of this boundary line is deceptive. Its location on the map preserves several elements reflecting the development of the United States in its infancy among the family of nations.

  Rush himself was one of those developing elements. Born in 1780 amid the American Revolution, he was the son of a Founding Father, Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. As the son of a political celebrity, Rush—like his friend, John Quincy Adams—carried an extra burden in establishing an identity. Rush developed an identity complementary to that of his father, a revolutionary whose revolution had succeeded, by becoming a diplomat, thereby devoting his career to forming bonds rather than breaking them. Characteristically, he prefaced his memoir of being ambassador to England by stating, “Enough has been written and said on both sides to irritate. My desire is, and such my effort, to soothe.”

  Though his father’s contacts opened doors, Richard Rush strove mightily to achieve his own laurels, graduating from Princeton University at the age of fourteen, far and away the youngest member in his class. At Princeton he honed his oratorical skills, an effort that served him well in establishing his reputation as a lawyer. He was appointed attorney general of Pennsylvania in 1811, and later that year he was chosen to be comptroller of the U.S. Treasury by President James Madison.

  The commencement of the War of 1812 made that year particularly pivotal for Rush and, separately, the 49th parallel. Because of his oratorical talent, Rush was selected to give a Fourth of July address before both houses of Congress, the president, and his cabinet. In effect, Rush was addressing the nation’s founders on behalf of the next generation, and his words reveal the passing of the torch. “Thirty years, fellow citizens, is a long time to have been exempt from the calamities of war,” he said to these veteran leaders of the Revolutionary War. “It is a fact that affords, in itself, the most honorable and incontestable proof that those who have guided [this nation] … have ardently cherished peace … [despite] abundant provocation.… Let the blood of Concord and of Lexington answer again!”2

  The speech was reported by newspapers throughout the nation. It led to Rush’s becoming an unofficial spokesman for the administration on behalf of the War of 1812, the causes of which were understood by the American public then about as well as they are today. Using the pen name of John Dickinson, Rush published an extensive series of articles justifying the war.3

  On the same July 4 that Rush spoke before Congress and the president, an item appeared in the Charleston City Gazette speculating that America’s opening thrust in the War of 1812 would be an invasion of Upper Canada. The report explained that Upper Canada was bounded “by Hudson’s Bay [Company] in the 49th parallel of north latitude, extending due west indefinitely.” As early as 1812, then, the 49th parallel had surfaced as the Canadian-American border. In the American press, that is; not in the act of Parliament that had defined Canada. The 1774 Quebec Act had stipulated the southern border of Canada’s western region as being “the southern boundary of the territory granted to the Merchants Adventurers of England, trading to Hudson’s Bay.” The boundaries of the Hudson’s Bay Company had previously been stipulated in 1670 as being all the land within the drainage basin of Hudson Bay. That drainage basin, however, dips below the 49th parallel, while further west it ends north of the parallel. Just as important, mapmakers in 1774 did not know how far these tributaries extended. When the news article about Upper Canada appeared in 1812, more was known, but much remained uncertain.

  Richard Rush (1780-1859) (photo credit 15.1)

  Southern boundary (western end) of Hudson Bay watershed

  These uncertainties intersected with Rush’s career when, after the War of 1812, President Monroe appointed him to be the ambassador to England, replacing John Quincy Adams, who was returning to become secretary of state. While awaiting the return of Adams from London, Rush served as acting secretary of state and negotiated the 1817 Rush-Bagot Convention, demilitarizing a key frontier between the United States and British North America (present-day Canada) by limiting the number of warships England and the United States could have on the Great Lakes.

  The Rush-Bagot Convention boded well for Rush’s upcoming boundary negotiations. But upon Rush’s arrival in London, his endeavor to resolve differences with England did not get off to an easy start. Charles Bagot, the British ambassador to the United States with whom he had just negotiated, wrote disparagingly of one bridge-building effort by Rush:

  It is not true that the New England states preserve the manners of old England at the time of their settlement to the degree that Rush thinks.… The real truth is there is very little similarity between the two people, and that little is becoming daily less.… All the young generation, nearly without exception, are of the Democratic Party, the creed of which being hatred of England, leads them to reject as much as they can what they conceive to be an England usage. And, let Rush say what he pleases … in the Southern States … the climate itself would soon induce a great change in English manners, customs, and feelings.4

  Rush let such comments pass and focused on his goals, listing them in a paper he gave the British side. His list of eleven items provides insight into what is now the long straight line across most of the top of the United States. Item three was the “Northwestern boundary line,” and item four was t
he “Columbia River question.”5 Imperceptible on the map today, the long boundary along the 49th parallel resulted from two separate issues.

  In undertaking his new responsibilities, Rush sought advice from a key Founding Father, former president John Adams. Adams had been a member of the delegation that negotiated and signed the Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution in 1783. That treaty stipulated boundaries, fishing rights, and commerce—all of which were now back on the table for two reasons. Some of the issues came to be contested in what had eventually exploded into the War of 1812 and were still unresolved. Other issues stipulated in the 1783 treaty now required renegotiation owing to the expansion of the United States via the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

  The advice Adams gave Rush reveals both the passing of the torch and the evolution of the new nation. Adams described an aspect of that evolution when he replied to Rush, “Not that we were British subjects at the Treaty of 1783, but as having been British subjects … our right was clear and indubitable to fish in all the places in the sea where British subjects had fished or ever had a right to fish.” Passing the torch, Adams went on to advise this rising leader: “Former treaties, not formally repeated in a new treaty, are presumed to be received and acknowledged. The fisheries are therefore ours, and the navigation of the Mississippi theirs, that is the British, as much as ever.”6

  Adams provided a powerful argument for Rush to use in negotiating American rights to fish in the coastal areas and bays of Nova Scotia, Labrador, and Newfoundland. But that same logic worked against Rush regarding the Mississippi River. Free access to the Mississippi and Columbia Rivers was England’s primary concern in negotiating the boundary between the United States and Canada from the Great Lakes to the West Coast. Of primary concern to the United States (following the Louisiana Purchase) was total control of the Mississippi River and, to an increasing extent, control of the Columbia River farther west. Rush, therefore, needed to break with the past in asserting access to rivers while preserving the past in claiming American fishing rights. In both cases, he succeeded in getting more than he gave.

  How did he pull this off? Regarding the northern border, he succeeded in part by agreeing to postpone agreement on that segment of the boundary west of the Rocky Mountains (affecting the Columbia River). For the segment from the Great Lakes to the Rockies, one element that contributed to Rush’s success was yet another river, the St. Lawrence, 950 miles away. Rush explained in his memoirs:

  An attempt was made by the British plenipotentiaries to connect with this article a clause securing to Great Britain access to the Mississippi and right to its navigation.… We said that we could consent to no clause of that nature.… The United States have claimed, in a subsequent negotiation, the right of navigating the St. Lawrence, from its source to its mouth. The essential difference in the two cases is that the upper waters of the St. Lawrence flow through territory belonging to both countries.

  Had England insisted on access to the Mississippi, it would have had no case for opposing American navigation on the St. Lawrence, an avenue of commerce that was as vital to Canada as the Mississippi was to the United States.

  Why, then, the 49th parallel? Why not stick with the straight line established in the 1783 treaty? It commenced at the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods “and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi.” The problem was that it didn’t intersect the Mississippi. The headwaters of the Mississippi turned out to be south of that latitude. This error was known by the time Rush was renegotiating the boundary, which was why the British initially sought a border providing access to the river. Once England abandoned this issue, other waterways became crucial to British interests in this prerailroad era—those being the waterways that led to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s settlement at Winnipeg. From Winnipeg, waterways lead to Lake of the Woods and from there to Lake Superior. Once on the Great Lakes, cargo could ship to the St. Lawrence River and the sea. While the precise latitude of Lake of the Woods was not yet known, it was known that Winnipeg was just below the 50th parallel. This knowledge may have accounted for the 1812 reference to the 49th parallel as the southern border of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and for its use in stipulating the U.S.-Canadian boundary in the agreement Rush negotiated in 1818.

  Waterways leading to Winnipeg

  That agreement stated that the boundary extended from the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods “due north or south, as the case may be, until the said line shall intersect the said [49th] parallel of north latitude, and from the point of such intersection due west.” Since, as it turns out, the 49th parallel is south of the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods, the U.S.-Canadian boundary in what is now Minnesota suddenly blips to the south before commencing its long straight line across the remainder of the continent.

  Upon the election of John Quincy Adams as president, Rush set aside his diplomatic expertise to become the secretary of the treasury. In 1828 he was nominated to be vice president when Adams sought a second term, in a bitterly fought rematch with Andrew Jackson. This time Jackson won, and for the first time the White House was occupied by a president who had risen from among the common people, not from the patrician families of the Founding Fathers. Rush, however, was so esteemed for his skill at bridging differences that Jackson chose him to represent the United States in laying claim to an unusual and contested bequest of over half a million dollars to create an establishment for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” whatever that meant. Rush succeeded in obtaining the funds left by a little-known British chemist named James Smithson. The funds were eventually used to create the Smithsonian Institution, with Rush serving as one of its first regents.

  In 1846 Rush saw the boundary line he had negotiated in 1818 extended to the West Coast. The following year President James K. Polk appointed Rush ambassador to France—a particularly challenging post as the government of King Louis Philippe was overthrown during his tenure. Rush managed to maintain good relations with both the royal government and the provisional government that took its place. He duly participated in political and social events attended by the king, but Rush’s fundamentally diplomatic character, which combined his father’s political insight with detachment from his father’s revolutionary zeal, served him well.

  Rush’s diary entry on February 23, 1848, began, “A revolution has come like a thunder clap.”7 Amid the turmoil and uncertainties, he recognized the symbolic importance of the United States being the first nation to recognize France’s new democracy, known as the Second Republic. “Would it be right or expedient,” he worried, “to wait for instructions before recognizing [the new government]? A month or more must elapse before instructions could reach me.” Rush correctly anticipated the instructions of the Polk administration and established diplomatic relations with the new French government.

  Rush’s diplomatic career concluded at the end of Polk’s presidency. But, after he returned to Pennsylvania, his name was increasingly mentioned as a possible nominee of the Democratic Party for the 1852 presidential election. Rush’s skills as a diplomat, however, did not transfer to those of a presidential candidate. In an 1850 letter to a gathering of Pennsylvania Democrats, he addressed the issue of slavery by invoking the Founding Fathers:

  I am of those who think that our Union is in danger from [the slavery issue]; not a visionary danger … of a few ultras at each end of the Union, but a danger … of constitutional obligations.… When a Southern man has ventured upon a claim for his fugitive slave … men, otherwise good citizens … have carried their opposition to the verge of treason.… Are the present philanthropists superior, as pure men, wise men, patriotic men, to Washington and his great associates—the Franklins, Adamses, Madisons, Jeffersons … who signed or approved of the federal constitution with all its sanctions of slavery?8

  Rush’s suggestion of treason soon came back to haunt him. In September 1851 a Maryland slave owner and his two sons, accompanied by police officers, went to Christiana, Pennsylvania
, to retrieve runaway slaves who were hiding there. The morning after their arrival, they were encircled by approximately eighty African Americans and whites who, on the prior advice of abolitionist leaders, demanded that the slave owner turn back. When the slave owner continued his effort (which had been made legal by the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850), shots were fired and a melee ensued in which the slave owner and one of his sons died. The grand jury indictments that followed were for treason, rather than murder, so that the charges could be (and were) brought against not only those who fired the fatal shots but also everyone else in the gathering and against those who had previously advised them. The antislavery press, citing Rush’s earlier remarks, was not kind to the candidate. Boston’s The Liberator wrote:

  Richard Rush mourns over the fact that his state is the only one in which treason has repeatedly been attempted against the United States.… Some [of those indicted] were merely present, looking on but taking no part in the affair. Some simply gave information in advance to the fugitives attempted to be arrested.… All these are indicted for treason, for “levying war”—for treason, according to the United States Constitution, “shall consist only in levying war” or adhering to the enemies of the United States, giving them aid or comfort.

  The magazine National Era stated that “Mr. Rush is evidently not the man for the hour. He is timid, fearful, trembling. He does not counsel support of the Fugitive Slave Law because it is proper, just, and right; but [because] the ‘eyes of the South’ are upon Pennsylvania.” In a separate article, the magazine even used Rush’s success as ambassador to France to castigate him in the political arena: “We presume this humane ex-minister studied the philosophy of the guillotine when in Paris.… As cutting off peoples’ heads has proven so efficacious in promoting a holy reverence for law and order in France, the venerable gentleman seems to be under the impression that strangling people must be equally beneficial in Pennsylvania.”