How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [103]
Douglas’s addition of Kansas also made a difference in the South. They now resumed shaking their fists. But, unlike the North, they did not shake them at Douglas. They shook them at the North for continuing to shake their fists, even after Douglas’s two-state response to northern fist shaking. The conflicts were becoming increasingly complex. Each camp, however, believed the matter was becoming increasingly clear. “We have never read speeches which more completely and irrefragably established what [the Kansas-Nebraska Act] proposed to do, than have the efforts of the friends of Mr. Douglas’ Bill,” the Macon Weekly Telegraph asserted. “The enemies of the measure have in every instance been … forced to take some poor pitiful shift of abolition, maudlin cant, or irrelevant discussion.”
As with the Compromise of 1850, the furor over slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska Act diverted attention from the significance of Douglas’s boundary lines. Though he originally proposed that Kansas’s southern border be located, quite logically, adjacent to Texas at 36°30’, shortly after the bill was introduced he shifted the border to 37°. This shift left a gap of one-half of one degree. Today that gap is the Oklahoma Panhandle. Why did Douglas do this? “The southern boundary of the proposed territory … is on the line of 36°30’,” Douglas noted when introducing the amendment to shift the boundary, explaining, “[My] attention has been called, by the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, to the fact that that boundary would divide the Cherokee country; whereas, by taking the parallel of 37° north latitude as the southern boundary, the line would run between the Cherokees and the Osages.”
That sounded plausible … except for the fact that American Indian boundaries were unaffected by state lines. Two weeks later, Senator William Sebastian, the committee chairman to whom Douglas referred, revealed the truer reason when he stated on the floor of the Senate, “[My] committee is maturing a policy which … directly affects the terms and conditions upon which the title of the Indians to the lands guaranteed to them by treaty, within the proposed limits of these territories, is to be extinguished.” Shifting the line simplified the task of extinguishing various Indian treaties.
In addition, the shift enhanced the geometry for future states—though it left that pesky gap. With a boundary at 37° as a baseline, two tiers of equally spaced future states emerged. One was a tier of prairie states: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, each having three degrees of height. Just to their west was a tier of mountainous states: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, each with four degrees of height.
Did Douglas envision this? His Kansas-Nebraska Act stipulated Kansas’s northern border at precisely the height that, if replicated, would yield the tier of states that resulted. Yet he never expressed this geometric logic in the Senate debate. Likewise, if he foresaw the future Arizona and New Mexico by virtue of where he located the Texas-New Mexico boundary, he never expressed that either. Perhaps for good reason. Both debates were filled with suspicion regarding future slave and free states. For Douglas to add projected states to the debate would have added fuel to the fire he was seeking to tamp down. Though his intentions for future boundaries cannot be ascertained from what he didn’t say, a pattern emerges from the added facts that he also made no mention of his colleague’s plan to extinguish Indian treaties, and that his prized policy of “popular sovereignty