How the States Got Their Shapes Too: The People Behind the Borderlines

396 Pages·2011·6.07 MB·English

by  Mark Stein

Text © 2011 by Mark Stein
Cover illustration © 2011 by Leigh Wells
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Published by Smithsonian Books
Executive Editor: Carolyn Gleason
Production Editor: Christina Wiginton
Editor: Duke Johns
Designer: Mary Parsons
Maps: XNR Productions, Inc.
Photo Researcher: Amy Pastan
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stein, Mark, 1951-
How the states got their shapes too : the people behind the borderlines / Mark Stein.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58834-315-4
1. United States—Boundaries—History. 2. U.S. states—Boundaries.
3. United States—Biography. I. Title.
E180.S744 2011
973—dc22
2011003467
For permission to reproduce illustrations appearing in this book, please correspond directly with the
owners of the works, as seen on this page. Smithsonian Books does not retain reproduction rights for these
images individually, or maintain a file of addresses for sources.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Map
Acknowledgments
Roger Williams The Boundary of Religion
Augustine Herman Why We Have Delaware
Robert Jenkins’s Ear Fifteen Minutes of Fame
Robert Tufton Mason Winning New Hampshire
Lord Fairfax What You Know or Who You Know?
Mason and Dixon America’s Most Famous (and Misunderstood) Line
Zebulon Butler Connecticut’s Lost Cause
Ethan Allen Vermont: The Fourteenth Colony
Thomas Jefferson Lines on the Map in Invisible Ink
John Meares The U.S. Line from Spanish Canada
Benjamin Banneker To Be Brilliant and Black in the New Nation
Jesse Hawley The Erie Canal and the Gush of Redrawn Lines
James Brittain The Man History Tried to Erase
Reuben Kemper From Zero To Hero?
Richard Rush The 49th Parallel: A New Line of Americans
Nathaniel Pope Illinois’s Most Boring Border
John Hardeman Walker Putting the Boot Heel on Missouri
John Quincy Adams The Massachusetts Texan
Sequoyah The Cherokee Line
Stevens T. Mason The Toledo War
Robert Lucas Ohio Boundary Champ Takes on Missouri and Minnesota
Daniel Webster Maine’s Border: The Devil in Daniel Webster
James K. Polk Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!
Robert M. T. Hunter Cutting Washington Down to Size
Sam Houston The Man Who Lassoed Texas
Brigham Young The Boundary of Religion Revisited
John A. Sutter California: Boundless Opportunity
James Gadsden Government Aid to Big Business
Stephen A. Douglas The Line on Slavery: Erasing and Redrawing
John A. Quitman Annexing Cuba: Liberty, Security, Slavery
Clarina Nichols Using Boundaries to Break Boundaries
Lyman Cutler’s Neighbor’s Pig The British-American Pig War
Robert W. Steele Rocky Mountain Rogue?
Francis H. Pierpont The Battle Line That Became a State Line
Francisco Perea and John S. Watts Two Sides of the Coin of the Realm
Sidney Edgerton and James Ashley Good as Gold
William H. Seward Why Buy Alaska?
Standing Bear v. Crook The Legal Boundary of Humanity
Lili’uokalani and Sanford Dole Bordering on Empire
Alfalfa Bill Murray, Edward P. McCabe, and Chief Green McCurtain
Oklahoma’s Racial Boundaries
Bernard J. Berry New Jersey Invades Ellis Island
Luis Ferré Puerto Rico: The Fifty-First State?
David Shafer When the Grass Is Greener on the Other Side
Eleanor Holmes Norton Taxation without Representation
Notes
Photography Credits
Preface
N
o child has ever been known to say, “When I grow up, I want to establish a
state line.” But somebody had to do it. Who were those people? How did they
end up in that endeavor?
As it turns out, the people involved in America’s states being shaped the way
they are have come from all walks of life. Some are famous, such as Thomas
Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, though how they participated in shaping our
states is not widely known. Others are famous, but why they’re famous is not
widely known. Daniel Webster, for example: is he famous because of his
extraordinary debate in The Devil and Daniel Webster? Stephen Vincent Benét’s
tale may well be why Webster remains famous. But Daniel Webster never
debated with Satan—at least not in public. He did, however, create one state’s
lines.
Most of those who participated in the location of our state lines are not
famous. Moreover, they are not exclusively white men. Women, African
Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics have also been involved in shaping
the states.
For none of these people was the establishment of their state line their primary
objective in life. Their participation in the creation of a boundary resulted from
some personal quest. Those quests differed, yet each quest emanated from the
issues of the time. Today those historical issues, and the personal quests they
spawned, are imprinted on the map in the form of state lines.
The borders of the United States, however, do not fully enclose those quests.
Many others sought, unsuccessfully, to create additional states in Canada,
Mexico, Cuba, and—still an issue—Puerto Rico. Their stories further enhance
our perspective of the United States.
The American map is so familiar that even its straight lines begin to seem a
part of nature. But looking at it through the individuals involved in its creation,
that map becomes a mural. Its lines reflect an ongoing progression of Americans.
Who, when, and where they were explains much of why we are who we are
today.

Acknowledgments
I
was fortunate, after the publication of How the States Got Their Shapes, to be
urged by my late and much missed editor, Caroline Newman, to offer a follow-
up book. But having been a writer in theater and film, as opposed to nonfiction, I
had difficulty framing an idea that fit the bill. So I called my longtime friend
Mark Olshaker, author of several best-selling books, and asked if we could get
together for lunch to see whether we could generate an idea. He said (and this is
truly what he said), “Sure. Next week is good. Or how about this? A book on the
people, like that guy you mentioned in the first book with Missouri.”
That is this book.
First and foremost, then, and with awe, I thank Mark Olshaker for an idea that,
as it further developed, captured my imagination as much as my passion for
maps drove me to write the first book. “As it further developed” refers in no
small measure to the insights of Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who took over as my
editor. Elisabeth did not have to fill Caroline’s shoes, because her own editor
shoes fit beautifully. Too beautifully, since Elisabeth soon advanced to become
editor-in-chief at another publisher. But her parting gift to me was an
introduction to Kenneth Wright, who became my agent and navigated my now
orphaned project in more ways than I can enumerate here, though I cannot leave
unsaid the importance of the encouragement and clear thinking he provided. Ken
succeeded in placing the book where I most hoped it would end up, at
Smithsonian Books, copublisher of How the States Got Their Shapes, where I
knew I would be in good hands with its director, and now my editor, Carolyn
Gleason. I knew Carolyn was ideally suited because of an offhand remark she
had made when we first met, shortly after How the States Got Their Shapes
replaced my original title, Why Is Iowa? “I liked your first title,” she said, “but it
didn’t work.” I knew then we had the same sensibility, except she knew what
worked.
Both my copy editor, Duke Johns, and the schoolteacher who taught him
grammar and syntax deserve gold medals. Duke’s mind is a lens of clarity. He is
also an intimidatingly thorough fact-checker, for which I am extremely grateful.
The treaties and legislation that created our state shapes are complicated and
often overlap. To my astonishment, Duke dug them up, checking and adjusting
my efforts to explain them. If any errors have slipped past him, it only shows
that no goalie can block every shot. (He even nipped and tucked this paragraph.)
For the images in this book I was privileged to have Amy Pastan searching out
photos and portraits with such enthusiasm that she discovered, and connected me
with, a descendant of Jesse Hawley, the subject of one of the book’s chapters.
Trudy Hawley’s family records provided information not otherwise available. I
was also delighted to be reunited with cartographer Rob McCaleb of XNR
Productions, who had created the maps for my previous book. Once again he has
turned words into maps that reduced me to one word: “exactly.” His geodetic eye
also spotted an element in the battles fought by James Brittain that had gone
unnoted by historians of North Carolina and Georgia’s violent boundary dispute,
leading to its being noted for the first time in this book.
I also want to express my gratitude to the Bender Library at American
University for the privileges it extended to me. And a special thanks to Professor
William W. E. Slights—a profound influence on my life when I was his student
at the University of Wisconsin, and a dear friend ever since—who generously
shared his knowledge of colonial era English abbreviations. I also received
valuable assistance from Robert S. Davis Jr., Frank Drohan, and Paul Schmidt,
in addition to Lauren Leeman of the State Historical Society of Missouri, Kari
Schleher of the University of New Mexico Library, and Arlene Balkansky of the
Serial and Government Publications Division of the Library of Congress. Ms.
Balkansky, in addition to all her help with the resources of the Library of
Congress, devoted time to reading each chapter as it was first drafted, spotting
textual errors and even problems in the flow and arc of the draft. All of this not
only exceeded the duties in her job description but also those in our wedding
vows from over thirty years ago.