How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [151]
David Shafer (1965-) (photo credit 43.1)
Emotions were turning serious on both sides of the line. Fingers began to be pointed, and not just across the state line. When, in proposing a resolution rejecting Georgia’s call for a boundary commission, a Tennessee legislator included the phrase “legal precedent favors the Volunteer State, just as good fortune often smiles upon the righteous,” he was criticized by a fellow legislator who declared, “I don’t take this as a tongue-in-cheek matter.”2 The language regarding the righteous was dropped.
In Georgia, too, the debate regarding the state line was causing other lines to surface. A February 2008 editorial in the Athens Banner-Herald began, “As one man’s quixotic quest, the effort to get Georgia’s northern border moved one mile farther north was an entertaining diversion from the more routine motifs of pettifoggery and pandering that dominate the annual sessions of the Georgia legislature. But now that the whole Senate has bought into Sen. David Shafer’s legislative proposal, it has crossed the line from the merely entertaining to the more than mildly troubling.”
The same editorial, however, observed, “That’s not to say Shafer … doesn’t have a point.”
What was the point of resurrecting a 190-year-old surveying error? Water. Tennessee had it; Georgia needed it. Georgia had been suffering an extreme drought since the spring of 2007. The drought sorely exacerbated an ongoing problem in Atlanta, where rapid population growth had outpaced the region’s water supply. If the northern border of Georgia had been accurately surveyed in 1818, the state line would pass through the Tennessee River.
But it would not have in 1818. Only after the federal government built Nickajack Dam in the mid-1960s did the river back up enough to cross the 35th parallel. Still, prior to the original surveying of the line in 1818, Georgians assumed there was no question that the river crossed below the 35th parallel. This assumption is revealed in Georgia’s 1802 Act of Cession, the legislation in which Georgia released to the federal government its western land from colonial days (present-day Alabama and Mississippi). The act described Georgia’s northern border as commencing at the point where its newly defined western border ran “in a direct line to Nickajack on the Tennessee River; then crossing the last mentioned river, and thence running up the said Tennessee River and along the western bank thereof to the southern boundary line of the State of Tennessee.” The southern boundary of Tennessee had previously been established by Congress as the 35th parallel. That Georgia’s Act of Cession described the boundary as going up the river to the southern border of Tennessee reveals that no one at the time knew exactly where the 35th parallel was. Including, as it turned out, the 1818 surveyor, who located the line just over a mile south of where it should have been. Tennessee ratified the 1818 survey. Georgia did not.
Erroneously surveyed Georgia-Tennessee border
Two centuries later, Shafer’s concern was the same as the state’s leaders in the early years of the Republic. “Georgia must increase its water supply,” he stated, echoing the objective stated in the Act of Cession. “I am more concerned about securing riparian [river bank] rights to the Tennessee River than obtaining the entire disputed area.”3
Though the intent of his resolution was to obtain water, the resolution itself concerned a boundary. As it happened, Tennessee’s lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, was a professional surveyor. Ramsey cited “adverse possession,” a technical term that refers to a legal precedent regarding