How the States Got Their Shapes Too

by Mark Stein

  If any person shall exercise or attempt to exercise any official functions … by virtue of any commission or authority not derived from this Territory or under the Government of the United States. [he shall] be punished by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or imprisoned … not exceeding five years.… I do hereby enjoin … all sheriffs, constables, Justices of the Peace, and other peace officers … that they cause all persons … attempting to violate any of the provisions of the act … to be arrested.

  But after enactment of the same kind of resolution, Lucas departed from Michigan’s approach. Where Michigan’s territorial governor, Stevens T. Mason, had remained confrontational, Lucas led the territory of Iowa in the opposite direction. “I know of no difficulty between the Territory of Iowa and the State of Missouri,” he said to his legislature, then continued coyly, “Neither can the Territory of Iowa, as a territory, be party to a controversy. The territorial government being entirely under the control of the United States, the controversy about the southern boundary of the Territory of Iowa is between the State of Missouri and the General Government.”

  Lucas may have sounded here like a wily lawyer, but he was not an attorney. He was not even highly educated. Wily, however, he was. One of nine sons of pioneer parents who had migrated from Virginia to what would soon become Ohio, his schooling had consisted of what he learned from his family, augmented by basic lessons in mathematics and surveying from a tutor. Clearly, however, as he entered adulthood, Lucas continued to learn from those he encountered. Clearly, also, he had a lot of learning to do—particularly with regard to authority.

  In 1810 an Ohio court had ordered the twenty-nine-year-old Lucas to pay damages emanating from a breach of promise to a young woman. Lucas sought to outfox the authorities by divesting himself of his assets and publicly dared the sheriff to arrest him. The sheriff thought it best to resign. The official to whom the task then fell also resigned, as did a third. Now, however, the issue was larger than Lucas; it was about the rule of law. A new group of Ohioans sought and won the vacated positions and collectively hauled Lucas off to jail. Lucas, a colonel in the state’s militia, ordered his men to come rescue him. They didn’t. He then quickly paid and, as he later stated, learned his lesson.

  That Lucas had learned to obey authority was demonstrated during the War of 1812. He led a unit that was part of an effort to invade Canada. After the commanding general ordered the troops to pull back, Lucas obeyed, though he strongly disagreed with the order. He wrote to a close friend, “Never was there a more patriotic army … that had it more completely in their power to have accomplished every object of their desire than the present—and it must now be sunk in disgrace for want of a General at their head.” Such a letter carried considerable risk, were it to fall into the wrong hands, but evidently not enough risk for young Lucas, who added, “Neither was there ever men of talents as there are, so shamefully opposed by imbecile or treacherous commander.”1

  The Lucas Iowans now heard proclaiming, at age fifty-eight, “I know of no difficulty between the Territory of Iowa and the State of Missouri,” was a far smarter Lucas. But underneath he was the same. What he had learned over the years wasn’t simply how to cope with more powerful adversaries, but how to win.

  How to win in this instance, however, involved considerable uncertainty. While the Articles of Confederation had stated that Congress was to issue decisions on boundary disputes, the Constitution (which replaced that document) said nothing on the subject. Today boundary disputes between states are routinely adjudicated by the Supreme Court, but by 1839 the court had heard only two such cases, neither providing much confidence about that approach.2 Lucas, in a message to his legislature, opted to butter up Congress:

  Michigan contended that, as a Territory, she was a party to the controversy relative to the boundary between that Territory and the State of Ohio—she denied to Congress the right to act on the subject.… The Territory of Iowa, in the present controversy considers herself entirely under the control of the General Government and … considers that Congress is the only competent tribunal to decide the controversy with the State of Missouri.

  Lucas went on to stroke Congress in this message by saying he believed it had supremacy over the Supreme Court in rulings on such disputes.

  On the other hand, he also silently sought to lay the groundwork for approaching the Supreme Court, urging Iowa’s territorial legislature to seek statehood to redress “the unwarrantable and unjustifiable proceedings of the authorities of Missouri.”3 As a territory, Iowa could not take a dispute to the Supreme Court, since its boundaries, unlike those of a state, were not protected by the Constitution. Lucas, however, said nothing specifically about urging statehood to enable Iowa to approach the Supreme Court. If he privately shared such a strategy with Iowans, he failed to convince them. The legislature opted not to seek statehood, given that the territory was not yet sufficiently populated for the additional costs entailed.

  This setback was not a problem for Lucas, since his first gambit was with Congress. One might wonder, however, what hope he had with this approach; Missouri had two senators and three representatives in that Congress, and the Iowa Territory had none. Lucas’s hope was best expressed in Missouri itself, a slave state in which one of its senators, arguing that Congress did not have authority to decide the issue, fretted that “if Congress had settlement of this affair, I feel confident that all the free states would range themselves on the side of Iowa—and perhaps some of the slave states, from a feeling of jealousy created by the magnitude of our state.”4

  As it turned out, Lucas miscalculated. Though legislation was proposed stating that Congress had intended Missouri’s northern border to be in accordance with the Sullivan Line, the bill failed to pass.5

  Iowa became a state in 1846. Immediately, it took its dispute with Missouri to the Supreme Court. Lucas, however, was no longer the governor. Having been appointed by President Martin Van Buren, a fellow Democrat, he was replaced when William Henry Harrison, from the Whig Party, entered the White House in 1841. Lucas, however, had laid the groundwork for the legal challenge by having previously disputed the boundary and, with his early statehood proposal, having signaled plan B. In 1848 the Supreme Court issued its ruling. Iowa’s Burlington Gazette reported that “the long existing difficulty between this State and Missouri is at last settled by the highest judicial tribunal known to the land—settled, too, we are happy to add, in favor of Iowa. The decision of the Supreme Court … establishes the old Indian boundary line, as it is called, as the boundary of Missouri.”

  Most of those Iowans who had clamored for Lucas’s removal at the outset of his governorship had come to the see him differently by the time he was replaced. “No man has ever been more true to his trust—none more faithful to the interests of the people over whom he governed,” the Gazette now wrote. “The people of this Territory will be struck with astonishment to find that their old and trusted friend, Gov. Lucas, has been displaced.”

  Though he had been replaced, he was not so easily displaced. Lucas and his family remained in Iowa, and in 1844 he was elected as a delegate to the territory’s statehood convention. Serving on its Committee on State Boundaries, Lucas continued an effort he had begun as governor regarding Iowa’s border with its future neighbor to the north, Minnesota. In this instance, however, the boundary champ got knocked out.

  Lucas had described the boundaries he envisioned for Iowa when he first urged its legislature to seek statehood. The lines he proposed were those of present-day Iowa, with the exception of its northern border. Lucas had sought a northern border composed of waterways leading to the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers (long-distance railroads still being two decades away). At the statehood convention, his committee again proposed such a border, but this time further north, being entirely framed by the Minnesota River (known then as the St. Peter River).

  In Congress, Iowa’s proposed northern border encountered unexpected and stiff opposition. Ohio Co
ngressman Samuel F. Vinton, an influential member of the House Public Lands Committee, noted that Iowa’s proposed boundaries resulted in a state similar in size to Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. He pointed out that those states’ borders were created for political reasons that violated Thomas Jefferson’s vision for equitable representation in the Senate (see “Thomas Jefferson” in this book). Regarding Iowa (and other future states), Vinton argued:

  What has been the effect of this change? … The vast and fertile region between the Ohio, the Lakes, and the Mississippi has been thus reduced from twelve to fourteen States to five at the most … [that] can never have but ten votes in the Senate.… As an equitable compensation to the western country for this flagrant injustice, I would make a series of small States on the opposite bank of the [Mississippi] river.

  Vinton then sought to move Iowa’s proposed northern border from the Minnesota River to the 43rd parallel. Iowa’s nonvoting delegate, Augustus Dodge, strenuously but unsuccessfully opposed the shift, calling the new boundary “an artificial line.”

  Borders proposed by Lucas

  Was it artificial? As ultimately passed, Iowa’s northern border was a line set at 43°30’, resulting in the state having just under three degrees of height. Over the ensuing decades, Congress would go on to create a tier of prairie states just west of Iowa, each of which had three degrees of height (Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota). Just west of those states, Congress created a tier of states in the less populous Rocky Mountain region, each of which had four degrees of height (Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana).

  Congressman Vinton’s argument had been so powerful it not only affected Iowa’s northern border but also brought Jefferson’s underlying principle back into the equation for defining state lines. Iowa may have lost the boundary it sought, but it acquired the distinction of being the lynchpin in determining the next phase of the American map.

  When Iowa became a state, Robert Lucas hoped to become its first elected governor. But he was now sixty-five years old, and a new generation had come of age. Iowa’s Democratic Party instead nominated forty-one-year-old Ansel Briggs, who went on to win the election. Lucas’s political career had come to its close, with one last exception. In 1852, the year before his death, he announced his departure from the Democratic Party, following its nomination of Franklin Pierce, a proslavery Northerner. The seventy-two-year-old Lucas, who had entered the Democratic Party as a young stalwart of Andrew Jackson, could no longer associate himself with the party when even its northern members veered further toward proslavery views for political purposes. Though Robert Lucas’s tactics were wily, his principles were not.

  · · · MAINE, CANADA · · ·

  DANIEL WEBSTER

  Maine’s Border: The Devil in Daniel Webster

  The [human] race, if it cannot drag a Webster along with it, leaves him behind and forgets him. The race is rich enough to afford to do without the greatest intellects God ever let the Devil buy.

  —WENDELL PHILLIPS1

  Those who know of Daniel Webster typically know of him only from being assigned to read “The Devil and Daniel Webster” or from having seen the film it spawned. Stephen Vincent Benét’s fanciful short story posits Webster as the defense attorney for a man who has signed a pact with the devil; Webster wins the case even though the devil gets to pick the judge and jury.

  Webster was indeed a great lawyer. He argued more than 200 cases before the Supreme Court and became the preeminent debater in the U.S. Senate. He was also a bit of a devil himself.

  Those unfamiliar with Webster can take comfort in the fact that in September 1852 the Daily Ohio Statesman headlined an article on the then longtime political veteran, “Who Is Daniel Webster?” Everyone at that time knew his name, but few knew what—other than oratory—he had done.

  Webster served for over twenty-three years as a senator from Massachusetts, was the secretary of state twice, and sought the presidency three times. While he never made it to the White House, his work as secretary of state is engraved on today’s map in the boundary between Maine and Canada.

  Daniel Webster (1782-1852) (photo credit 22.1)

  One might think that Maine’s boundary would have been established in the treaty ending the American Revolution, thus defining the borders of this new nation England was relinquishing and recognizing. Americans thought it did, as the 1783 Treaty of Paris indeed devoted an entire section to boundaries. It divided Maine from Canada along “a line drawn due north from the source of St. Croix River to the highlands, along the said highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean to the northwestern-most head of Connecticut River.” Other than determining which rivers flow where, what was left to discuss?

  Nothing … until the War of 1812 caused England to rethink the line. The narrow strip of land it left between the American border and England’s primary route into Canada, the St. Lawrence River, was highly vulnerable to attack—particularly in the winter when the river froze, closing off navigation.

  Daniel Webster was a rookie congressman when England first sought to redefine Maine’s boundary. In 1814, during negotiations to bring the War of 1812 to a close, British negotiators complained:

  With respect to the boundary of the District of Maine … [we] regret that, although the American plenipotentiaries have acknowledged themselves to be instructed to discuss a revision of the boundary line, with a view to prevent uncertainty and dispute, yet by assuming … an exclusive right to determine what is or not a subject of uncertainty and dispute, they have rendered their powers nugatory.

  It being wartime, the British had called Americans all kinds of things. But “nugatory” was below the belt, and the Americans let them know it:

  The proposal of the British plenipotentiaries was not to ascertain, but to vary those lines in such a manner as to secure a direct communication between Quebec and Halifax, an alteration which could not be effected without a cession by the United States to Great Britain of all that portion of [Maine] … intervening between the provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, although unquestionably included within the boundary line.

  1783 treaty: border of Maine

  The Americans allowed that, if the British wanted the two nations to survey the as-yet-unmarked line through the sparsely settled forests, any discrepancies could then be negotiated. Consequently, the line was surveyed in 1817, and indeed a discrepancy surfaced. The United States interpreted the 1783 treaty’s phrase “highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Atlantic” as the ridge separating the two watersheds. England interpreted the preceding phrase leading up to the word “highlands”—“a line drawn due north from the source of St. Croix River to the highlands”—as meaning a line due north to the highest land.2

  The treaty ending the War of 1812 stipulated that boundary disputes could be arbitrated by a third nation agreeable to both sides. Most likely, the United States would have prevailed in arbitration, but it suddenly had cause to hesitate, owing to another glitch recently discovered elsewhere along the U.S.-Canadian border. “The line between New York and Canada on Lake Champlain,” the National Intelligencer reported, “will leave Rouse’s Point, on which the United States have expended between two and three hundred thousand dollars in fortifications, within the British province.” The fort being built was located on a site long accepted as being on the south side of New York’s border with Canada. But the surveys that followed the War of 1812 revealed the fort was actually on the border’s north side.

  “Fort Blunder,” as it came to be called, was no minor military outpost. It commanded the northern entrance to Lake Champlain, a lake that extends far into New York and Vermont. The fort’s importance for defense was equaled only by its importance as a danger if it were to end up in British hands. The Maine boundary negotiations were now profoundly changed. “A proposal has been discussed,” the Int
elligencer reported, “that the territory that would accrue to Maine be given as an offset for the fine military station on the Lake, which would be confirmed to New York. Our friends in Maine think the Commissioners have no right to run the line agreeably to the proposed compromise, and loudly protest against it.”

  Fort Montgomery, aka “Fort Blunder”

  From this point on, the reality was that the U.S. government was no longer negotiating with England; it was negotiating with the District of Maine. And Maine (which gained statehood in 1820) wasn’t budging. Indeed, Maine became more militant, as a report from New Brunswick “to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty … humbly sheweth.” The report informed British authorities that “a senator of the state of Maine … came into this province and seized and marked a quantity of pine timber lying in the river St. John … as having been cut on the river Restook, in the territory of the United States.… In the last year, 1825 … [Maine issued deeds] to the settlers in this territory … [for] one hundred acres each of the land by them possessed.”3

  Maine, in response, further sought to force the federal government to intervene on its behalf by ridiculing New Brunswick’s appeal to its mother country. “Our neighbors in New Brunswick,” Maine’s Thomaston Register wrote, “feel quite warlike on the subject of the northeastern boundary.… They appear to think their masters in England have no other interest to protect.… But [England] … has nothing to gain and much to lose by another contest with us.”