How the States Got Their Shapes Too

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you good morning everyone and we're gonna get started with our program today I'm Kyla Molenaar and I'm the communications officer for the Center for the book which is presenting this program in conjunction with the serial and government publications division today just to tell you briefly about the Center for the book we're the reading promotion division of the Library of Congress and we promote books reading and literacy nationwide here in Washington and through our 52 state centers for the book we even have one in the US Virgin Islands I also need to let you know that we're going to be webcasting and recording this presentation today so if you ask a question at the end of the program you'll become a part of the webcast I also ask you to turn off all your electronic devices and I need to tell you also that there will be a Q&A at the end of the program and our speaker will be glad to answer any questions that you have and following that there will be a book signing here at this table and the books are being sold in the back of the room at a discount of 20% it's now my privilege to introduce to you Tara Sierra she is the assistant chief of the serial and government publications division and she will introduce our speaker today thank you guys first I offer my excuses for my runny nose my cough and the fact that I may lose my voice but I'm gonna try not to I'm very happy to be here despite my cold and I'll try not to give it to any of you to introduce her speaker I actually just met but I have known about him through his wife Arlene Bukowski who works in my division and is one of our top notch reference librarians she started out as a catalog or I might add but we've persuaded her and brought her to our side of the world and she's embraced it so so I have known about mark for a while and I would tell you some things about him about his career highlights but if you googled and you probably have googled his name or gone to Amazon to look for his books you probably know that by and large his career has been as a playwright or screen a screenplay right for actually real celebrities like Goldie Hawn and and and Steve Martin who he told me a little bit about today that was fun he himself is a celebrity I think because he has appeared in a number of episodes in the History Channel series that has the name of the first book how the state's got their shape and if you haven't read his books I am here to tell you you should I I've enjoyed them tremendously I particularly have liked the flexibility of it because this chapter is its own story you can read a chapter when you don't have a lot of time and later you can read another chapter I now have the in my upstairs I have the first one and this one the one that we're going to hear about today hopefully I have downstairs so and I can go back and read parts that I don't remember easily enough plus his writing style is is to me like it's like having a conversation with a friend it's very gentle I mean that as a compliment I think when when I can read something and I it's like listening to a friend it's just fun for me so I've enjoyed it I want to put in one more word before I have we have Marc come up and this is about the fact that in the second book there are two chapters not one but two chapters about the District of Columbia of which I'm a proud resident the first one is about how the district came about and who the players were the second one is about Eleanor Holmes Norton Arnon valiant and about the efforts of the people of the district to gain statehood thank you for doing that Marc because we all forget and I was particularly interested in one quote in that particular chapter by representative Dingell from Michigan where he said and this is this is a Democrat they've been more favorable to the statehood in decedent the Republicans have but here he said if they don't like it they can just pack and leave I was like no but anyway that's the quote in the book so I learned a good deal and I'm very happy to be able to introduce mark and I know we're gonna have a very good time listening to what he has to say so please come up mark and thank you all for coming today it's very exciting to see a full Mumford Thank You Terry and also thank you to your division serial and government publications and guy thank you and the Center for the book for arranging for this event and thank you Arlene my wife works there I will just say in passing that anyone there are some young people here anyone who's thinking of engaging in a career that may involve research I would urge you to marry someone who works at the Library of Congress I just didn't plan to say but you mentioned about Eleanor Holmes Norton one of the things that I discovered and write in that chapter about her which actually comes through documents available through this division is I wondered when the debate about non not having voting rights for those who lived in the District of Columbia when did that become an issue answer when they were writing the Constitution there was an extraordinary dispute that went on between James Madison on the one hand and George Mason and Patrick Henry on the other I mentioned it in the book I don't wanna spend too much time on it but you can it comes right off the page that these guys were nose-to-nose in this debate it was emotional right from the get-go and has remained part of the discourse this this conflict not ever since it didn't go to sleep ever since this book when I when I wrote this book what got me passionate was something very different from when I wrote the first book the first book deals with why the lines of our states are located where they are and in the course of writing it a question started kind of a thought it's kind of started germinating in my head which was that you know nobody to my knowledge when they were a kid tell me if I'm wrong got some young people here ever said when I grow up I want to establish a state line and so in in this book the people that I write about it's if they all had a quest in their lives a personal quest of some kind that's somehow that questa ended up on the map in researching the book I came to discover that most of the people involved were not particularly famous people or famous people at all and among those that were famous I have to confess I didn't always know why they were famous Stephen Douglas what did he really do you debated Lincoln Daniel Webster debated the devil I don't know is that good maybe that's just a short story I read in high school what did the guy I should do in in in in one case it wasn't even a person Lyman Cutler's neighbors Pig was responsible for two British battleships and four hundred American troops faced off this close to war and which ultimately didn't erupt but did alter the boundary between Canada and what is today the state of Washington in one case was only part of a person Robert Jenkins ear was severed by a Spaniard resulted in a war between it triggered the war between England and Spain and one of the up shots of that war is the boundary we have today between Georgia and Florida but the person I want to talk about today is is is Thomas Jefferson and one reason for talking about Thomas Jefferson is how instrumental he was in the founding of the institution where we're gathered today the Library of Congress but also bringing Jefferson full circle if you will is how important the Library of Congress has been to me in writing this book so as I move through this discussion you'll see in some of these background images websites that I use that are available through the Library of Congress and I consider these these websites this whole institution really as part of the legacy of Jefferson's quest because he had one - I would the way I would word his quest is to create a nation where the people had the liberty to pursue happiness it was an imperfectly pursued quest and it was a quest that encountered great obstacles but it's a quest that over the next two hundred and some years I think the nation has come closer to and I also think it's a quest that you can see on the map it's not something that jumps off the map but it's something that with a little dusting powder if you will which is what I hope this talk will be I can make visible to you the imprint of Thomas Jefferson on the American man so here is the map as it appeared at the end of the American Revolution when I want to point out about this is that at that point in time the nation extended only as far west as the Mississippi River and did not yet extend to the Gulf of Mexico Jefferson oh yeah more importantly these are the states that existed at the attempt at the end of the revolution as you can see Georgia North Carolina at Virginia much bigger than they are today I also want to point out to you that Maine was still part of Massachusetts and Vermont was still part of New York but in particular that dark area called the Northwest Territory that was land that the British with their American colonists acquired in their victory over the French in the French and Indian War after the Revolution it became part of the United States but it was not part of any state I have pulled it from this little piece of text is from a letter Jefferson wrote that from - a french encyclopaedists who had correspondent - herman and said loosely translated Wow told me about this new country of yours and so Jefferson did and one of the things that he said in the letter was yeah the Confederation meaning the Articles of Confederation but the same is true of the Constitution when it when it was ratified 1787 it has no mechanism to create new states there's no procedure place so Congress and at this point which I met the Continental Congress created a committee which Jefferson chaired to to form some procedure protocols for creating States and governments in the western territory the image in the background I'll point out is from the Library of Congress's century of lawmaking website they all go through American memory and it has for about a hundred years but today we call the congressional record went by different names in different periods of time and you there are the words that's why I found the thing about Patrick Henry it could get pretty exciting these guys were long-winded then too but every now and then it's like wow so Jefferson was was charged with this and by the way I'll also point out it says the western territory in fact they meant not only that Northwest Territory but all the land west of the Appalachian Mountains because for a number of reasons Virginia Georgia North Carolina they too even wanted to be broken up into into smaller but more states here's the report that Jefferson came back with in 1784 what jumps off this map probably that's it did that for you probably as it did for me is that isn't what we did the page here is from the record of the time it shows where the names were Jefferson's proposing these wacky sounding names to us in most cases the other thought I had was mr. Jefferson did you just put a ruler down on the map and draw some lines and call it quits I mean is that what you did with this assignment well in fact no Jefferson had reasons behind this there were issues that face the nation that Jefferson believed the original 13 States now let's call it 15 because Vermont was soon to come into the Union and it wouldn't be long everybody knew until Maine came into the Union that these states east of the 8th of the mountains these original States they were not going to solve these issues slavery of course was the biggest of these issues but there were issues over economic issues over banking whether or not they have a national bank issues over trade and whether there's to be a tariff and how terrorists should be Jefferson believed that if these issues were ever to be resolved and if this nation was going to really continue to hold together it would be through what I'm calling in this thing middle Americans but only what he I think envisioned was this next generation of Americans both chronologically and geographically that would have the detachment to collectively find the optimum way to solve these problems so if you count the number of states that Jefferson has proposed there it is about equal to maybe even a state or more than the original there's there's fifteen states that would occupy the eastern part of the country now a little footnote here on the legislature here under the Articles of Confederation there was only one legislature it was called the Continental Congress no matter how many delegates a state sent to the Continental Congress each state one vote so in the days of the Continental Congress this really is a very important number to keep track of 1787 we have the Constitution we now have two legislative bodies but this remains still very important in the Senate where as you probably know each state has has two representatives well Congress clearly didn't do this they strayed from the vision of this founding father something that we hear quite a lot about today and so I kind of wondered when did they begin to stray from this vision of this founding father and the answer if I remember right is about two weeks after he handed in the report they started tapering with it and they continued to tinker with it and the final shoe fell three years later when they passed what's called the Northwest Ordinance in 18 1787 and under that they proposed tentative boundaries for the Northwest Territory and by then those states further south we're already coming in being in a different way so of course you look at this and again I suppose your reaction like mine is well yeah that's kind of what we have today Wisconsin's going to get chopped down a little bit and that horizontal line east and west at the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan that's gonna get adjusted in warth word in various ways for Illinois and Indiana and Ohio but that's kind of what they did why you know it's fair to ask why why Jefferson came up with his idea why did Congress change it why did they come up with with this idea well it turns out that those Appalachian Mountains were much more inconvenient then than they would be today when we have railroads there were no railroads at the time rivers were the primary Avenue of Commerce and virtually all the rivers west of the Appalachian Mountains flow to the Mississippi River down to the Gulf or directly to the Gulf and in that era the Mississippi River was controlled on and off but more on than off by Spain and during this period of time the residents of what we today call Tennessee got very impatient with Congress because it wasn't getting the job done of creating a state for them sounds a little like things today too so in Tennessee they simply proclaimed themselves a state they called it the state of Franklin and they started to negotiate with Spain for navigational rights on the Mississippi River the texts that I've pulled out here is from that same letter to the French encyclopedist where he explains that under the Articles of Confederation but the same by the way is true in the Constitution no state can negotiate a treaty with a foreign nation and when the people in what is now Tennessee started doing that suddenly the word United in the in the phrase United States was appearing incredibly fragile and Congress got on the stick and they proceeded to create these these new proposed boundaries and fixed boundaries and in doing so in the biggest gerrymander in American history think about that slide that was up to a minute ago with Jefferson and the number of votes that this area of the country had compared to the area east of the Appalachians well you can see here that what the way Congress did it only nine votes compared to probably 15 votes or less you never know exactly let's I'm going to vote foreign policy would stay in the hands of the eastern part of the country because treaties under the Constitution are negotiated by the president and ratified by the Senate and a lot of other issues the weight would be decided much more by the eastern part of the country when this happened in 1787 Jefferson was not here he was in Paris he was our ambassador to France but he heard about it he was not particularly happy he wrote a letter to his friend James Monroe that little image up at the top of five and three-quarters pages that's the letter he had a lot of things to say about this I've pulled out a little bit of it to show how profoundly Jefferson thought about what a state should be how big it should be what happens if it's too big and and the people have divergent interests how serious is it if it's too big well very serious they felt would end by separating and becoming our enemies he was really upset this is going to come back a little bit later in this talk Jefferson's going to come back right now because he returns to the United States gets elected the President and proceeds to make the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and what I've pulled here is from again correspondence from Jefferson what's interesting to me to me about this I don't know if you can see you probably can't but the date of that letter is 1803 he's immediately talking about this quest of his he's using phrases such as giving as much satisfaction to the inhabitants as that part of that province as it does us in acquiring it and about the necessity of Congress making the best arrangements for its train and security and government this is the quest of Jefferson but there's a new wrinkle now in acquiring all this land we acquired all these people who did not ask to become citizens of this country and they did not speak our language most of them spoke French so part of the challenges how do we bring these people into this country and provide a place where they can if you will pursue happiness Jefferson in another letter says that he envisions and this is still way back in 1803 of that the inhabited part of Louisiana and when he says inhabited and when I say inhabited forgive me we're talking about white people as he was - uh we'll go from point Kupe to the sea and that this will become a territory in the state well when I read that as a researcher I go that's so cool where's Point Kupe and I go to Google Maps and I see oh it's a Parish County like the county in Louisiana but I have to wonder was it a was it a region then was it just that maybe a point as its name implies on the river how do I find that out well I go to the Library of Congress this website is the geography and map division this is a map from 1764 and there you can see it circled point poupee my circle actually I realized this morning I'm looking at this blocks the fact that there is no dot there it was a region already I'll probably based on a point along the river but nevertheless this tells me where Jefferson intends the boundary to be for his anticipated state of Louisiana and there it is well what you see here is what we saw before Jefferson has a state in mind that's much smaller than what we know Congress is at some point in the future going to do and I want to emphasize it because it not only reflects what happened but the story with Louisiana's boundaries it's also a microcosm of what's going to happen down the line with so much else in the nation Louisiana became a state in 1812 and these are the boundaries that Congress assigned to it at that point in time so it looks like well that once again they've gone and made a much bigger state but by 1812 the inhabited if you will part of the state the the-the-the which were still predominantly french-speaking people had migrated it enlarged and it migrated further north along the buyers and the rivers to it region or regions actually just a little bit south of the northern border of what is today the northern border of Louisiana so what Congress did was create a boundary that in effect assured these people we are not going to yank the levers of power away from you this is a state that will in effect remain in your control and they can pursue their happiness think of the difference today between our relations in this country with Louisiana and Canada's relations with the province of Quebec in which the British did do certain things but they also yanked the levers of power from the French speakers the province of Quebec so we could pat ourselves on the back for that and see the wisdom of Jefferson yeah in that the route that continues taking us back toward Jefferson begins with this man Robert Lucas and this state Iowa back in the days when it was the Iowa territory Robert Lucas prior to this had been the Governor of Ohio I want to just say briefly in that capacity he had a really verily boundary dispute with the territory of Michigan to the north true militias faced the face they call it the Toledo war it in fact came but very close to war Michigan was given the Upper Peninsula as a car as a consolation prize but Robert Lucas got what he wanted for Ohio he then goes to a high oh he immediately has virtually the identical kind of boundary dispute with the state to his self Missouri only in this case that's the state he's the territory no votes in Congress votes for president only a militia to deal with Robert Lucas won that one too but Robert Lucas the boundary champ lost round three and that's the one that's important to our discussion here the northern border of Iowa this is what Robert Lucas had proposed and the legislature of Iowa territory proposed would be the northern boundary of Iowa it makes sense in a way it follows its eastern boundary along the Mississippi to what is today called the Minnesota River crosses over the state through that picks up what the Big Sioux River comes down the big still river catches a little bit of the Missouri River down to the southern border at Missouri when Iowa came up before Congress for statehood congressman Samuel Vinton from Ohio someone that would have known said that yeah yeah in fact it's about the same size as Illinois Indiana and Michigan and then Vinton went on to tell Congress that you have to remember that those Midwestern states violated the the proposal of Thomas Jefferson for political reasons and for equitable representation in the Senate I want to read to you what Vinton said on the floor of the House of Representatives what has been the effect of this change the vast and fertile region between the Ohio that's that river down bottom right there along those states between the Ohio the lakes meaning the Great Lakes and the Mississippi has thus been reduced from 12 to 14 states to five at the most that can never have but 10 votes in the Senate as an equitable compensation to the western country for this flagrant injustice I would make a series of smaller states small states on the opposite bank of the Mississippi River and then he proposed the boundary that you see on the map Iowa had a non-voting delegate there a man named Augustus dodge who did not like this idea and among other things he said that's just an arbor very long and the question I want to put in the air here we'll get back to it a little later is was that an arbitrary line I'll tell you this it is the line that got enacted and what I'm showing you here is I've highlighted it a bit some a little from the news coverage of the day when Congress did in fact enact the line that that the Vinton proposed this is from the chronicling America website from the serial and government publications division here this is a particular website you don't you can actually access right at home it's a terrific website for all kinds of stuff in historical newspapers but we have this question was it an arbitrary line and the answer to that and the continuation of the return of Jefferson is found in this man Stephen Douglas hello here he is and these states New Mexico Arizona and Kansas Nebraska and this part of the story begins after the Mexican war in 1848 this website by the way US Geological Survey not Library of Congress but nevertheless a great website this is their Interactive National atlas what I've pulled up for you to see here is the land acquisitions in the United States and the one I want to call your attention to first is that greenish yellow area that's what we acquired after the Mexican War just above it that I don't know if that color has a name sort of peachy ish looking area in the northwest we acquired that the very same year 1848 in a treaty with England and we acquired also a great big national headache because up until this point ever since 1820 slavery in this country had been regulated fraught by the Missouri Compromise this was a line that Henry Clay came up with when Missouri became a state in 1820 it was located at 36 degrees 30 minutes which is the southern boundary for pretty much the whole state of Missouri Missouri Compromise said this no new state or territory north of this line can become can have slavery with the exception of Missouri that's why we have the word compromise in the name well as the South could easily see with this new land this line wasn't going to work anymore in not too many years the non-slaveholding part of the country would greatly out vote outnumber the slaveholding part of the country so beginning with this acquisition of this land there were a series of increasingly virulent conflicts in Congress and in the country about slavery that ultimately erupted in the Civil War the first big conflict occurred in 1850 and civil war was averted by a package of legislation which today we know as the comfort we call it the compromise of 1850 one piece of that legislation created the New Mexico Territory and it was Stephen Douglas who as chairman of the committee on territories wrote that legislation and in it he it authorized the United States to buy which they did of chunk of land from the state of Texas which at the time went all the way to the Rio Grande and to make it part of this New Mexico Territory and in the legislation Douglass said yeah let's do that all the way is to the to the 103rd meridian 103 degrees west longitude really mr. Douglass 103 you know why don't 100 you know this line that you see there is the most brilliant line on the American map in my opinion and I say that based on what surfaces 13 years later when the New Mexico Territory is going to be divided to create the Arizona Territory when that came up the delegate from the New Mexico Territory was John s watts he I just mentioned I opted he did not want to run again so he was replaced in the next election by a friend of his Francisco pariah these two men were extremely significant in keeping the New Mexico Territory loyal to the Union in the Civil War you note that we are right in the middle of the Civil War when this division of the territory is coming up the big question before Congress was how do we do it do we divide this territory horizontally or we do we divide it vertically watch proposed to be divided vertically and that he proposed a line along the 109th meridian when he did one congressman William wheeler from New York said it's sort of like mr. Jefferson did you just put a ruler on the map you're just continuing the line that separates Colorado and Utah which gives us that little four-corners thing that we have today watson answered that and in answering it you can hear echoes of Thomas Jefferson the first thing you said is no if you put the line there the two territories that will result and they've altered a little bit because of some land shifts in and around that time but nevertheless they'll be virtually equal in size he then went on said this Mexico was compelled to relinquish a portion of her people endeared to her by 10,000 pleasant memories and doubly endeared by 10,000 painful forebodings for the future was he talking about well when we acquired this land in the Mexican War just like Louisiana we acquired a bunch of people who did not ask to be citizens of this country who did not speak our language most of them lived along the Rio Grande Valley and as you follow Texas up to that area between the two little colors of New Mexico that's the Rio Grande and the biggest community was located at Santa Fe there forebodings for the future their biggest fear was a five letter word te ex is a group of Anglos not that many years before had come into the Mexican province of Tejas it didn't take very long before they turned it into an independent Republic of Texas it then became the state of Texas Texas always claimed its boundary went to the Rio Grande though they had not yet sent their militia to actually lay claim but these Hispanic people along that Valley and in Santa Fe feared them even more so as time went on because Anglos many of them Texans we're now migrating into the western part of the New Mexico Territory so look at that line that Watts has proposed and you will see that it puts the Rio Grande pretty securely in the center of the New Mexico Territory and Santa Fe in particular three degrees from Texas three degrees from Arizona creating a territory and future state six degrees wide and a future state of Arizona six degrees wide more or less since the Colorado River is mainly its boundary very much the principle of Thomas Jefferson is at work in the creation but it could only happen because Steven Douglas said 103 degrees he never said why we're gonna come to something in a moment where he doesn't always tell you why but damn it works out in very interesting ways the second big o let me mention that we have 50 states today so how close together are they in size well New Mexico is the fifth largest Arizona the sixth largest they turned out to be extremely close in in in size the next big fight was in 1854 when Kansas came up for statehood and the question about slavery there this time Douglass said look I have a I think we could avert this whole conflict once and for all simply by relying on the genius of democracy well let from here I not will scrap this Missouri Compromise and we'll let the people in the state or the territory decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery and we will begin this with this state of Kansas Territory without now I'd be a state of Kansas it's an idea called popular sovereignty it really only had one drawback nobody liked it northerners didn't like it southerners didn't like it huge huge conflict Douglas said ok ok let me revise it a little bit watch what happens in his revision to the southern border of Kansas he proposes Kansas and Nebraska the common wisdom conventional wisdom is Nebraskans will vote to become prohibit slavery Kansas will vote to allow slavery as it turned down after a good deal of bloodshed Kansas did not Prairie but did you notice what happened to the boundary it moved up just a little bit it moved up one half of one degree that left a gap and that gap resulted in what is today the panhandle of Oklahoma why did Douglas do this well he told Congress why he did it sorta at the time and I'd like to read that to you he said my attention has been called by the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs to the fact that the boundary would divide the Cherokee country whereas by taking the parallel of 37 degrees as opposed to 36 30 it's got 37 north latitude as the southern boundary of Kansas the line would run between the Cherokees and the Osage very courteous of mr. Douglass it's not entirely irrelevant but the full relevance of it occurred two weeks later when that chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs said in Congress my committee is maturing a policy upon which the title of the Indians to the lands guaranteed to them by treaty is to be extinguished and by extinguishing them which happened quite a bit later because the Civil War got in the way they ultimately created the state of Oklahoma so all that was already in the works in 1854 when when when kansas-nebraska act was coming up but but Douglas moving it also did something else by moving it up to the 37th parallel 37 degrees he created a baseline and from that baseline as the years went on we created the state of South Dakota North Dakota right up to the Canadian border each of the states in that tier of Prairie states has three degrees of height let's come back to mr. Vinton and ask was that line and Iowa an arbitrary line it's not looking so arbitrary now Iowa is three and a half degrees high although that kind of begs another question why move the boundary because had he left it in place Kansas would have been three and a half degrees high but remember this Oklahoma thing because when they did get around to creating Oklahoma though it is a rather bizarrely shaped state it is about three degrees high and although this is total speculation on my part since it didn't get rolling till later this never came about but I can't help but wonder if there might have been some effort to get Texas to participate in this for some sort of recompense and create a state of Kansas that might have looked like that be that as it may I again total speculation of my point I'm not even sure I agree with myself be that as it may the the with 37 degrees as the baseline if you go a little further to the west the nation was able to create a tier of mountainous states Colorado Wyoming Montana each of them have four degrees of height and during the same era of state making six of our western states have seven degrees of width so what we are seeing is a return of state prototypes and it's beginning to look very similar to Jefferson's original proposal but bigger but now there are railroads and the need for States to be the size Jefferson conceived isn't is the nation the nation's changed so the vision is is is it is modified there's one other way that Jefferson left an imprint on the map and I want to mention it briefly one thing the nation that Congress did adopt way back when he made his proposal was that worth this land when it surveyed that they used something called the rectangular survey system Jefferson was a surveyor he didn't invent this system but he thought this would be the best system to use the letter that you're seeing there on the Left who have highlighted something at the bottom is a letter he wrote to governor William Henry Harrison of the territory of Indiana and which in the highlighted area he's basically saying oh by the way I hope you're using this rectangular survey system to mark off the land today when you fly in an airplane east of the Appalachian Mountains and look down the roads are gonna look pretty much like those Virginia roads there once you cross the Appalachians and get into the Northwest Territory region an areas further west and look down you will see roads to probably look pretty much like those roads in Indiana that is the rectangular survey system and so what we have is the imprint of Thomas Jefferson on the map I said at the beginning that the people came from from all walks of life the people who impacted on the lines they go all the way back to the very beginnings of what became this nation Roger Williams I talked about from 1641 too far too fast the picture of the gentleman that's in color down there David Schaffer he is a Georgia state senator who had a resolution that passed in 2008 in Georgia to correct the boundary between Georgia and Tennessee there have been Native Americans involved and I want to just kind of quickly note some of these participation chief Breen mcurtin and sought to create a Native American state that would be called Sequoia in what is today the eastern and of Oklahoma Sequoia years earlier was part of the Cherokee delegation that negotiated what is today the the line that divides Oklahoma and Arkansas I find that sort of meaningful that it is a bent line chief standing bears life resulted in altering the boundary between Nebraska and South Dakota among african-americans Edward P McCabe sought to create an a majority african-american state in what is today the western half of Oklahoma Benjamin Banneker was one of the two men he and Andrew Ellicott who surveyed the boundary line for the District of Columbia and as the years have passed that line has shown itself to be extraordinarily accurate and this is the man who did the calculations for the field work to tell them where to put the line he was the Jackie Robinson of his era it is an incredible gig that an african-american it's 1792 could get hired to do that work his story's amazing Eleanor Holmes Norton as Terry mentioned very instrumental in her dream and that of many of the others of us to create statehood for the District of Columbia should that comment actually would alter a line because in the District of Columbia's originally conceived there was a federal Enclave that had very specific boundary it was called Washington hence Washington comma DC the boundary you can see today on the map it's called Florida Avenue so that that old line that's no longer a boundary that would would would be altered if she should ever succeed or someone who follows her I mentioned Francisco Perea in terms of the New Mexico Territory Luis frere was the leading voice in Puerto Rico urging Porto Ricans to vote in favor of becoming the 51st state among women hardest group defined because they weren't given a seat at the table and I suspect they had much influence then we have a record of but we do know that Queen Liliuokalani struggled to prevent Hawaii from becoming part of the United States she lost that struggle to a man named Sanford dole whose family put pineapple in cans Rowena Nichols attended the Kansas State that Kansas statehood convention where their boundaries were laid out she was not allowed to vote or participate that's a did let her speak and she was less concerned about the boundaries of Kansas than she was around about the boundaries around the voting booth the boundaries around child custody and the boundaries around property rights for women she won two of the three she didn't get the vote I have Eleanor Holmes up there twice partly because as Terry someone suggested when I as I got to learn more about her just her life what a remarkable woman no matter what you think a DC state but what a remarkable woman she is but also that we have reached the point where not only are african-americans and women at the table but we have an african-american woman at the table and so I think that the greatest legacy of Thomas Jefferson and the greatest evidence of the progression toward realizing his quest as it turns out he is really just one of so many people who've had an impact on the American man thank you very much so yeah if there are questions and someone will cut me off when the when the time is over but yeah yeah you know my feeling on that is no they're fixed they won't change and every time I look at any historical atlas the boundaries of places are always changing it makes me very uncomfortable so that's my answer to you I'm never gonna hear him he said that there was a proposal recently to retro seed which means to give back to Maryland that portion of the District of Columbia borrowing probably a federal Enclave I think it's the way that proposal goes so that rather than become a state Maryland DC would become part of Maryland then he asked did I think that might be more likely than statehood by the way the original he mentioned related to this also the original District Columbia was a full square the other half was in Virginia and if you look at the map today particularly the map of Arlington County you will see the lines the original District of Columbia Alexandria has expanded its boundaries a part of King Street though you'll see a continuation of what was that part of King Street that was laid out while it was part of the district because it was laid out right just inside the line as to your question I actually don't know what if anything changes which is more likely between statehood or retrocession Maryland would have to agree to retrocession under the Constitution to state to change any state line any state involved in that changed in other words if it's two states both states have to agree and Congress has to agree so that's one of the factors that are there so so I don't know kind of time back to the first man's question I sort of wonder with what's going on the way Virginia is developing and the way you hear phrases about real Virginia's versus Northern Virginia's if there may not be a way down the line and this is totally just me I don't know more about this than you folks probably less than some of you if there might be something a state that's composed of the Washington Metropolitan Area or something I really don't all that to say question here yep yeah so like well of course Governor Perry made a remark about that I don't know how much history he knows Texas Texas was a republic for I think was ten years and acquired tens of millions of dollars of debt as a Republican it didn't work out too well I don't think Texas would do that I'll point out though that I would Texas entered the union also in California did Union Congress was not happy about the size of these states Congress did not create California or Texas they created themselves in the case of Texas they said to Texas you can subdivide into as many as five states 1845 does that were talking about forget the day for 248 I guess or seven and enters five states the other southern states that do it do it that's ten votes in the Senate it slave state coats Texans had so much history they didn't subdivide whether they sixty I don't think they were secede Texas would secede from the union you do hear talk of other states by the way of breaking up there's some in Long Island where they feel they should be a separate state several times in California's history and currently there have been talk about this section of that dividing from the state so there is if by the way did happen once on a large scale there have been some little small-scale trades but it did happen once I write about it in the book on a large scale and that was that in the Civil War the western part of Virginia broke away and formed West Virginia and I think I real quickly a little thing about that they had a big commitment it was not conducive to slavery out there in the mountains in all kinds of ways they were very unhappy part of Virginia not just regarding slavery for all the way back and when the war broke out they had a convention in Wheeling Virginia at which they said hey they seceded from the Union let's just see from Virginia and Frances Pierpont who's the gentleman I write about stood up and said you can the federal government has said it's illegal to secede they're not going to recognize a state that has seceded from a state pandemonium I mean this man was a little bit in danger I would say for a few moments before he said overall what we have to do has come up with some way of seceding based on the illegality of secession not only a lawyer could do that but Frances her pot was a lawyer he's very good lawyer and I won't go through it but he came up with an absolutely i popping legal tap dance and it worked to create the state of western west virginia questions we good yes my favorite state you mean do you mean in terms of its shape or just my favorite state my favorite state is Wisconsin because yeah they're yeah well it's a great state I don't know if this is in your paper or not but I went to the University of Wisconsin and I had a girlfriend there she's standing in the back of the room she's my wife we have two boys one of them graduated from the University and one of Wisconsin and is there now and the boy who graduated there he is back there works for Senator Herb Kohl who maybe in your paper who's the senior senator from Wisconsin so for me it's the state of Wisconsin excellent question I didn't catch the with the obey yeah yeah right you know I I don't and but you know there's a wonderful book I'm gonna be embarrassed cuz I'm not going to be able to remember the title it just came out about the cultural history of the map and how when you look at those lines as opposed to the state lines those divides remain so much more relevant today than the state lines oh I've met the author he's a wonderful guy and title is not coming up uh someone here may know of it but there is a book on that yeah it's a that it's a it's a wonderful book I've read it I just care of the name yeah no plans to do that any other questions are we good this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

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Length: 55min 53sec (3353 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2012