How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [63]
Sequoyah lived quietly from then on, venturing into political affairs only when the eastern Cherokees, forced to the reservation in 1838, vied with their western predecessors for dominance. He contributed to the drafting of an 1839 Cherokee constitution, hoping it—words on paper—would resolve the feud. It didn’t. Only time did.
In the spring of 1842, the now elderly Sequoyah enlisted several companions to join him on a journey to Mexico. There he sought to find Cherokees with whom contact had been lost. This branch, having foreseen a future of loss in the United States, had migrated to land controlled by Spain, believing their chances there would be better. Age and illness pursued Sequoyah, but in August of the following year he and his companions found a Cherokee village near the present-day town of Zaragoza, Mexico, fifteen miles southeast of El Paso. There he connected with brethren who predated the rift between the eastern and western tribes and who welcomed him wholeheartedly. Several days later, he died among them. Shortly before he passed away, Sequoyah wrote a letter home. But his final message has been lost.
MICHIGAN, OHIO
STEVENS T. MASON
The Toledo War
Never in the course of my life have I known a controversy of which all the right was so clearly on one side, and all the power so overwhelmingly on the other.
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS1
Michigan officially became a state on January 26, 1837, yet its state seal bears the date 1835. The discrepancy represents the period during which Stevens T. Mason led the self-declared state in what has come to be called the Toledo War.
The seed of this dispute was inadvertently planted by Congress in 1787, when it stipulated how the Northwest Territory would eventually be divided into states. Among those boundaries was one that divided “the said [Northwest] territory which lies north of an east-and-west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan.” Unfortunately, Congress was using an inaccurate map.2 If an accurate map had been available, the stipulated line would have put Toledo in Michigan, had Toledo existed in 1787. As American commerce on the Great Lakes swiftly increased, however, Toledo not only came into existence, it brought Ohio and Michigan to the brink of war.
In 1802 a hunter told delegates to Ohio’s statehood convention that he believed Lake Michigan extended considerably farther south, so much so that Toledo, whose first white settlers had arrived eight years earlier, might be in the territory to be created north of Ohio.3 Since no one knew for sure the latitude at which Lake Michigan ended, or the latitude at which the Maumee River (known then as the Miami River) emptied into Lake Erie, the delegates defined Ohio’s northern border slightly differently than in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. They stipulated it as being “a direct line running from the southern extremity of Lake Michigan to the most northerly cape of the Miami Bay.” Congress was aware of this alteration in wording, as was President Thomas Jefferson, who had authored the report that led to the boundaries specified in the Northwest Ordinance. Given the uncertainties, however, a report jointly issued by his administration and Congress concluded that it was “unnecessary to take it at this time into consideration.”4
Stevens T. Mason (1811-1843) (photo credit 20.1)
Toledo, Ohio, or Toledo, Michigan?
Meanwhile, Americans were beginning to migrate to the region above Ohio in larger numbers, and in 1805 Congress created the territory of Michigan. Yet twelve more years were to pass before Michigan challenged Ohio’s boundary adjustment. Why so long? Possibly because of another event that took place in 1817, the year their boundary dispute commenced. Construction began that year on the Erie Canal.
Toledo, at the western end of Lake Erie, was now