How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [26]
Allen returned to Vermont, which, during his absence, had declared itself an independent republic. Arriving to a hero’s welcome, his compatriots immediately sent him back to Philadelphia—three times, in fact—to lobby the Continental Congress for statehood. By the time of his third effort, in 1780, he was secretly contacted by an agent for the British who suggested that a negotiation regarding Vermont joining England’s efforts to win the war might yield mutually beneficial results.
Ever the high-risk negotiator, Allen commenced negotiations with the British and also secretly informed the Continental Congress that he was negotiating with its enemy. “Vermont had an indubitable right to agree on terms of cessation of hostility with Great Britain, provided the United States persisted in rejecting her application for a union with them,” he wrote, arguing that Vermont “would be the most miserable were she obliged to defend the independence of the United States, and they at the same time claiming full liberty to overturn and ruin the independence of Vermont.”8
Congress yielded. But another eleven years would pass before the details regarding land deeds and restitution could be ironed out, enabling Vermont to enter the union in 1791. While Allen had led Vermont to the threshold of statehood, he did not live to cross it with them. He died in 1789 at the age of fifty-one.
OHIO, INDIANA, ILLINOIS, MICHIGAN, WISCONSIN
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Lines on the Map in Invisible Ink
With respect to the new States, were the question to stand simply in this form: How may the ultramontane territory [the land west of the Appalachians] be disposed of so as to produce the greatest and most immediate benefit to the inhabitants of the maritime States of the Union?—the plan would be … laying it off into two or more states only.… Good faith … requires us to state the question in its just form: How may the territories of the Union be disposed of so as to produce the greatest degree of happiness to their inhabitants?
—THOMAS JEFFERSON1
Whether or not the Founding Fathers truly shared a common vision, there is no question that Thomas Jefferson possessed and expressed a vision that gazed far into the nation’s future. And while many of his views are difficult to pin down, his views regarding the American map were crystal clear.2 Yet, looking at what that map has become, the United States appears to have closed its eyes to his vision. Or is it that his influence can be difficult to detect?
One example of Jefferson’s mercurial legacy is the eastern border of Iowa. He was responsible for establishing what is today the eastern border of Iowa, yet not responsible for the same border of its neighboring state, Illinois. The border separating Iowa and Illinois is the Mississippi River. It was the eastern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase, which was completed by Jefferson as president in 1803. Subsequently the river became the eastern border of present-day Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and segments of Minnesota and Louisiana. Since the Mississippi had been the western boundary of the United States prior to the Louisiana Purchase, it was already in place as the western border of present-day Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and segments of Wisconsin and Mississippi.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) (photo credit 9.1)
Louisiana Purchase: boundary uncertainties
Other than those states with eastern borders on the Mississippi River, no other state has a boundary reflecting Jefferson’s historic purchase. The Louisiana Purchase is now all but invisible on the map because of the language in Jefferson’s treaty with France conveying the land to the United States. It declared that, after Spain officially ceded the land back to France, France would sell to the United States “the Colony or