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of such importance that Michigan’s territorial governor, Lewis Cass, wrote to the surveyor general, “Report says that the line which has been recently run, purporting to be the line between the State of Ohio and this Territory, was not run [along] a due east course from the southern extremity of Lake Michigan to Lake Erie, but a course somewhat to the north of this, although how much I am unable to ascertain.” Cass went on to cite the boundary mandated by the Northwest Ordinance, then said of the altered boundary in Ohio’s constitution, “This proposition has never been acceded to by Congress … [and] no agreement, even by that body, without our consent, could alter these lines.”5

The fact remained, however, that Congress had approved the constitution of Ohio with the boundaries it had stipulated.6 But also a fact was that the Northwest Ordinance mandated that the “following articles shall be considered as articles of compact between the original states and the people, and states in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent.” Cass’s letter resulted in a second survey of the Michigan-Ohio boundary. The first survey, to which he’d referred in his letter, came to be known as the Harris Line. It followed the boundary stipulated in the constitution of Ohio. The second survey, which came to known as the Fulton Line, conformed to the boundary stipulated in the Northwest Ordinance. Both surveys were then presented to Congress. It did nothing.

For nearly twenty years the issue remained an open wound before an infection entered, in the form of a second canal. “It will doubtless be gratifying to your readers,” a correspondent for Washington, DC’s National Intelligencer wrote, “to learn that another navigable communication between the Ohio River and the Northern Lakes has been commenced, and is now in progress of actual construction. This canal … extends from the head of steamboat navigation on the Wabash River to the Maumee Bay.”

Conflicting federal survey lines

The Wabash and Erie Canal would connect the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico via the Maumee, Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers. Its entry point on the Great Lakes was Toledo. During the commencement of its construction in the early 1830s, Michigan’s population reached the point at which it could seek to become a state—a fact whose significance was not lost on Ohio. “This subject is particularly interesting at this time,” Ohio’s Scioto Gazette reported, “from the obvious necessity to Ohio that Maumee Bay, which will be the future termination of the Wabash and Erie Canal, should be included in the limits of this state.”

Since Congress had never responded to the two conflicting surveys, Ohio’s legislature upped its claim over the disputed region by enacting legislation in early 1835 (the year engraved in Michigan’s crest) that created counties within the region. Six weeks later, Michigan’s territorial legislature enacted the Pains and Penalties Act, making it a criminal offense for anyone other than officers of the Michigan Territory or the United States to exercise official functions in the disputed region.

The fight was on: Stevens Thomson Mason, Michigan’s twenty-three-year-old territorial governor, versus Ohio’s Governor Robert Lucas.

Mason came from a distinguished Virginia family. He was the great-grandson of Thomson Mason, who had been chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court and whose brother, George Mason, was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (the direct inspiration for the U.S. Bill of Rights). He had arrived in Michigan in 1830 after President Andrew Jackson appointed his father, John Mason, as secretary of the territory. John Mason resigned after a year to pursue a purported business venture in Mexico. The venture may in fact have been a secret mission for President Jackson, as it closely followed a meeting with Jackson (at which the younger Mason was present) and as Jackson then appointed Mason’s then nineteen-year-old son to take his place.7

Whether or not the appointment was a political quid pro