Borders nobody agreed to.
American state lines look neat on a map: straight lines, tidy rivers. Some of them were anything but. Here are three states that ended up with borders they never asked for.
The 60-second version, from my channel. Watch it on YouTube.
Michigan: Toledo for the Upper Peninsula
In the 1830s Ohio and the Michigan Territory both claimed a strip of land along their border that included the town of Toledo, at the mouth of the Maumee river. The cause was an old surveying problem about where the southern tip of Lake Michigan really was.
In 1835 both sides sent militias to the area in what became known as the Toledo War. Almost no one was hurt, but neither side would back down. Ohio was already a state, with votes in Congress. Michigan was not.
So Congress made Michigan an offer it could not refuse: give up the Toledo Strip, and in exchange take the western part of the Upper Peninsula, and statehood. A Michigan convention rejected the deal in September 1836. A second, unofficial meeting in December, remembered as the Frostbitten Convention, accepted it. Michigan became a state on 26 January 1837.
The Upper Peninsula looked like a consolation prize of forest and snow. Then copper and iron were found there, and the losers of the Toledo War did rather well.
West Virginia: a state born in a war
When Virginia voted to leave the Union in 1861, many counties in its mountainous north-west wanted nothing to do with it. They set up a pro-Union government of Virginia in Wheeling, and that government, in effect speaking for Virginia, gave its consent for the north-west to become a new state.
The US Constitution says no state can be formed from another without that state's consent, and this was the consent Congress accepted. West Virginia joined the Union on 20 June 1863. Virginia later went to the Supreme Court over two border counties, Berkeley and Jefferson, and lost in 1871.
Minnesota: blame the map
The Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the American War of Independence, described the border between the United States and British North America through the Lake of the Woods and then west, based on a map that got the geography of the region wrong.
When surveyors and later treaties finally drew the line, they left a small piece of land north of the 49th parallel on the American side, cut off from the rest of the country by water. The Northwest Angle is part of Minnesota, but to reach it by road you have to drive through Canada.
- 1783 Treaty of Paris draws a border from a flawed map
- 1835–1836 The Toledo War
- 26 January 1837 Michigan becomes a state
- 20 June 1863 West Virginia becomes a state
- 1871 Supreme Court settles Virginia v. West Virginia
Sources
- Toledo War, Wikipedia
- History of West Virginia, Wikipedia
- Northwest Angle, Wikipedia