How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [49]
Waterways leading to Winnipeg
That agreement stated that the boundary extended from the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods “due north or south, as the case may be, until the said line shall intersect the said [49th] parallel of north latitude, and from the point of such intersection due west.” Since, as it turns out, the 49th parallel is south of the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods, the U.S.-Canadian boundary in what is now Minnesota suddenly blips to the south before commencing its long straight line across the remainder of the continent.
Upon the election of John Quincy Adams as president, Rush set aside his diplomatic expertise to become the secretary of the treasury. In 1828 he was nominated to be vice president when Adams sought a second term, in a bitterly fought rematch with Andrew Jackson. This time Jackson won, and for the first time the White House was occupied by a president who had risen from among the common people, not from the patrician families of the Founding Fathers. Rush, however, was so esteemed for his skill at bridging differences that Jackson chose him to represent the United States in laying claim to an unusual and contested bequest of over half a million dollars to create an establishment for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” whatever that meant. Rush succeeded in obtaining the funds left by a little-known British chemist named James Smithson. The funds were eventually used to create the Smithsonian Institution, with Rush serving as one of its first regents.
In 1846 Rush saw the boundary line he had negotiated in 1818 extended to the West Coast. The following year President James K. Polk appointed Rush ambassador to France—a particularly challenging post as the government of King Louis Philippe was overthrown during his tenure. Rush managed to maintain good relations with both the royal government and the provisional government that took its place. He duly participated in political and social events attended by the king, but Rush’s fundamentally diplomatic character, which combined his father’s political insight with detachment from his father’s revolutionary zeal, served him well.
Rush’s diary entry on February 23, 1848, began, “A revolution has come like a thunder clap.”7 Amid the turmoil and uncertainties, he recognized the symbolic importance of the United States being the first nation to recognize France’s new democracy, known as the Second Republic. “Would it be right or expedient,” he worried, “to wait for instructions before recognizing [the new government]? A month or more must elapse before instructions could reach me.” Rush correctly anticipated the instructions of the Polk administration and established diplomatic relations with the new French government.
Rush’s diplomatic career concluded at the end of Polk’s presidency. But, after he returned to Pennsylvania, his name was increasingly mentioned as a possible nominee of the Democratic Party for the 1852 presidential election. Rush’s skills as a diplomat, however, did not transfer to those of a presidential candidate. In an 1850 letter to a gathering of Pennsylvania Democrats, he addressed the issue of slavery by invoking the Founding Fathers:
I am of those who think that our Union is in danger from [the slavery issue]; not a visionary danger … of a few ultras at each end of the Union, but a danger … of constitutional obligations.… When a Southern man has ventured upon a claim for his fugitive slave … men, otherwise good citizens … have carried their opposition to the verge of treason.… Are the present philanthropists superior, as pure men, wise men, patriotic men, to Washington and his great associates—the Franklins, Adamses, Madisons, Jeffersons … who signed or approved of the federal constitution with all its sanctions of slavery?8
Rush’s suggestion of treason soon came back to haunt him. In September 1851 a Maryland slave owner and his two sons, accompanied by police officers, went to Christiana, Pennsylvania, to retrieve runaway slaves who were hiding there. The morning after their arrival,