• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Governor Mason, for his part, declaimed:

Outrages of a most unjustifiable and unparalleled character have been committed by a number of persons at Toledo upon officers of the [Michigan] Territory.… A regular organization exists among these individuals for the purpose of resisting the execution of the laws of Michigan. If [Ohio] … is permitted to dragoon us into a partial surrender of our jurisdiction … the territorial government is at once annihilated. Criminals committing the highest offences are left at large.… All law is at an end.

Once again, President Jackson sought to defuse the situation. Twelve days after Mason’s remarks, Jackson, abandoning any pretense of neutrality, fired him. In his place, Jackson dispatched John S. Horner. Like Mason, Horner came from Virginia and had never held political office. Once again, the people of Michigan were not pleased. The Detroit Free Press wrote in October 1836:

We have no hesitation in pronouncing what is almost the undivided sense of this community, that Mr. John S. Horner is utterly unqualified and unfit for the station in which he has been placed. We trust, however, that the forbearance of the people of Michigan will continue to be exercised for the few remaining days of their territorial existence. On the first Monday in next month, they become a state; they will then have their own executive, legislature, and other public officers. They will then take care of their own rights and interests, protect their territorial possessions, punish the transgressors of their laws and repel invasion.

Indeed, on the first Monday of the next month (November 2, 1835), voters in Michigan elected Stevens T. Mason governor of the state of Michigan—a state not recognized as such by the United States. Territorial Governor Horner and the new state government treated each other equally: he didn’t recognize them, and they didn’t recognize him.

Congress, at this point, finally took action. It approved statehood for Michigan with one big if: “Be it enacted that the constitution and State Government which the people of Michigan have formed for themselves be … accepted, ratified, and … declared to be one of the United States,” the legislation stated, “provided always—and this admission is upon the express condition—that the said State shall consist of … the following boundaries.” The boundaries that followed conformed to Ohio’s stipulated border—but they also included a peninsula extending eastward from what would later become Wisconsin. Michigan could take the deal, or hold out and remain a territory. If it held out, however, its boundary claim would now have an added hurdle: an act of Congress.

For Ohio, the issue was finished. Governor Lucas closed the book on the conflict, telling his legislature:

It is with peculiar pleasure that I announce to you the irrevocable establishment of the northern boundary line of Ohio, in accordance with what we have ever considered our incontrovertible right.… The assent of Congress has … removed all grounds for contention, and put a final quietus to the clamorous pretensions of the authorities of Michigan.

In Michigan, Governor Mason said to his legislature:

No one can feel more deeply than myself the humiliation of the sacrifice we are called upon to make.… Were I to consult the first impulse prompted by the feeling which every citizen of Michigan must acknowledge, I might be led into a determination to resist the legislation of Congress. But as a public officer called upon to discard excited feelings … I should violate my duty did I recommend to my fellow citizens to embark in a controversy offering so little hope of gain.

Accordingly, in September 1836, Michigan reconvened its constitutional convention. But the delegates rejected the offer from Congress. The “state” of Michigan seemed headed for a state of limbo. It didn’t take long, however, for a sufficient number of Michigan’s residents to recognize that they had painted themselves into a corner. In December a new constitutional