How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [70]
This setback was not a problem for Lucas, since his first gambit was with Congress. One might wonder, however, what hope he had with this approach; Missouri had two senators and three representatives in that Congress, and the Iowa Territory had none. Lucas’s hope was best expressed in Missouri itself, a slave state in which one of its senators, arguing that Congress did not have authority to decide the issue, fretted that “if Congress had settlement of this affair, I feel confident that all the free states would range themselves on the side of Iowa—and perhaps some of the slave states, from a feeling of jealousy created by the magnitude of our state.”4
As it turned out, Lucas miscalculated. Though legislation was proposed stating that Congress had intended Missouri’s northern border to be in accordance with the Sullivan Line, the bill failed to pass.5
Iowa became a state in 1846. Immediately, it took its dispute with Missouri to the Supreme Court. Lucas, however, was no longer the governor. Having been appointed by President Martin Van Buren, a fellow Democrat, he was replaced when William Henry Harrison, from the Whig Party, entered the White House in 1841. Lucas, however, had laid the groundwork for the legal challenge by having previously disputed the boundary and, with his early statehood proposal, having signaled plan B. In 1848 the Supreme Court issued its ruling. Iowa’s Burlington Gazette reported that “the long existing difficulty between this State and Missouri is at last settled by the highest judicial tribunal known to the land—settled, too, we are happy to add, in favor of Iowa. The decision of the Supreme Court … establishes the old Indian boundary line, as it is called, as the boundary of Missouri.”
Most of those Iowans who had clamored for Lucas’s removal at the outset of his governorship had come to the see him differently by the time he was replaced. “No man has ever been more true to his trust—none more faithful to the interests of the people over whom he governed,” the Gazette now wrote. “The people of this Territory will be struck with astonishment to find that their old and trusted friend, Gov. Lucas, has been displaced.”
Though he had been replaced, he was not so easily displaced. Lucas and his family remained in Iowa, and in 1844 he was elected as a delegate to the territory’s statehood convention. Serving on its Committee on State Boundaries, Lucas continued an effort he had begun as governor regarding Iowa’s border with its future neighbor to the north, Minnesota. In this instance, however, the boundary champ got knocked out.
Lucas had described the boundaries he envisioned for Iowa when he first urged its legislature to seek statehood. The lines he proposed were those of present-day Iowa, with the exception of its northern border. Lucas had sought a northern border composed of waterways leading to the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers (long-distance railroads still being two decades away). At the statehood convention, his committee again proposed such a border, but this time further north, being entirely framed by the Minnesota River (known then as the St. Peter River).
In Congress, Iowa’s proposed northern border encountered unexpected and stiff opposition. Ohio Congressman Samuel F. Vinton, an influential member of the House Public Lands Committee, noted that Iowa’s proposed boundaries resulted in a state similar in size to Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. He pointed out that those states’ borders were created for political reasons that violated Thomas