How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [71]
What has been the effect of this change? … The vast and fertile region between the Ohio, the Lakes, and the Mississippi has been thus reduced from twelve to fourteen States to five at the most … [that] can never have but ten votes in the Senate.… As an equitable compensation to the western country for this flagrant injustice, I would make a series of small States on the opposite bank of the [Mississippi] river.
Vinton then sought to move Iowa’s proposed northern border from the Minnesota River to the 43rd parallel. Iowa’s nonvoting delegate, Augustus Dodge, strenuously but unsuccessfully opposed the shift, calling the new boundary “an artificial line.”
Borders proposed by Lucas
Was it artificial? As ultimately passed, Iowa’s northern border was a line set at 43°30’, resulting in the state having just under three degrees of height. Over the ensuing decades, Congress would go on to create a tier of prairie states just west of Iowa, each of which had three degrees of height (Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota). Just west of those states, Congress created a tier of states in the less populous Rocky Mountain region, each of which had four degrees of height (Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana).
Congressman Vinton’s argument had been so powerful it not only affected Iowa’s northern border but also brought Jefferson’s underlying principle back into the equation for defining state lines. Iowa may have lost the boundary it sought, but it acquired the distinction of being the lynchpin in determining the next phase of the American map.
When Iowa became a state, Robert Lucas hoped to become its first elected governor. But he was now sixty-five years old, and a new generation had come of age. Iowa’s Democratic Party instead nominated forty-one-year-old Ansel Briggs, who went on to win the election. Lucas’s political career had come to its close, with one last exception. In 1852, the year before his death, he announced his departure from the Democratic Party, following its nomination of Franklin Pierce, a proslavery Northerner. The seventy-two-year-old Lucas, who had entered the Democratic Party as a young stalwart of Andrew Jackson, could no longer associate himself with the party when even its northern members veered further toward proslavery views for political purposes. Though Robert Lucas’s tactics were wily, his principles were not.
MAINE, CANADA
DANIEL WEBSTER
Maine’s Border: The Devil in Daniel Webster
The [human] race, if it cannot drag a Webster along with it, leaves him behind and forgets him. The race is rich enough to afford to do without the greatest intellects God ever let the Devil buy.
—WENDELL PHILLIPS1
Those who know of Daniel Webster typically know of him only from being assigned to read “The Devil and Daniel Webster” or from having seen the film it spawned. Stephen Vincent Benét’s fanciful short story posits Webster as the defense attorney for a man who has signed a pact with the devil; Webster wins the case even though the devil gets to pick the judge and jury.
Webster was indeed a great lawyer. He argued more than 200 cases before the Supreme Court and became the preeminent debater in the U.S. Senate. He was also a bit of a devil himself.
Those unfamiliar with Webster can take comfort in the fact that in September 1852 the Daily Ohio Statesman headlined an article on the then longtime political veteran, “Who Is Daniel Webster?” Everyone at that time knew his name, but few knew what—other than oratory—he had done.
Webster served for over twenty-three years as a senator from Massachusetts, was the secretary of state twice, and sought the presidency three times. While he never made it to the White House, his work as secretary of state is engraved on today’s map in the boundary between Maine and Canada.
Daniel Webster (1782-1852) (photo credit 22.1)
One might think that Maine’s boundary would have been established in