The
Race to Become the Fourteenth State
Thirteen
colonies
joined to form the Second Continental Congress in May 1775. A
year later, they became the thirteen United
States.
Would
there ever be a
fourteenth? The
members of Congress
hoped so, since there were other British colonies in North America. John Dickinson reflected
this hope in his
first draft of the Articles of Confederation (June 1776, see Drafting
the Articles).
Dickinson, writing just before independence when the soon-to-be
states were still colonies, sketched out the route by which the
Original Thirteen could be augmented: “Canada acceding
to this confederation, and entirely joining in the measures of the
United
Colonies, shall be admitted into and entitled to all the Advantages of
this Union: But no
other
Colony shall be
admitted into the same, unless such admission be agreed to by the
delegates of nine colonies.”
With
respect to
Canada, Dickinson’s words were delusional by the time he wrote them. Congress had attempted a
two-pronged
seduction of Canada in 1775-76. As
one
prong, Continental armies attacked Montreal and the city of Quebec. As the other, Ben Franklin
led a diplomatic
mission to ally persuasion to force.
By
June 1776 both
prongs had failed, and Congress knew that they had failed. The army was turned back
at the walls of
Quebec (left), and the diplomats never got past Montreal and attracted
few converts
among the Catholic French-speaking Canadians.
Such is human optimism, however, that Dickinson
still
wrote in June as
if Canadian accession were a possibility.
His language survived into the final Articles of Confederation (1777) as
Article
XI with only
slight modification: “Canada acceding to this confederation, and
joining in the
measures of the United States, shall be admitted into and entitled to
all the
advantages of this union; but no other colony shall be admitted into
the same,
unless such admission be agreed to by nine states.”
Canada,
it need
hardly be said, never “acceded”. What
about other colonies? The
colony of Canada included only the lands which are now Ontario and
Quebec; the British operated administratively distinct colonies in Nova
Scotia, Newfoundland, and St. John's Island (now Prince Edward Island.)
There was also Rupert’s Land—the vast
frozen
fur-trading empire of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
To the south ot the thirteen United States, the British controlled colonies in East and West Florida and the Caribbean.
None of these colonies ever applied for admission to the United States. None ever seriously
considered it.
Was
the Artiles of Confederation language on
new states then to be a dead letter?
Not
necessarily. Congress
had overlooked
what turned out to be the most common-sense manner of forming new
states—by
breaking apart existing ones, especially those with vast, barely
governable trans-Appalachian land claims.
Disaffected citizens forced the issue, inducing
Congress
to react
despite the awkward language of Article XI and a lack of explicit power. The race to form the
fourteenth state was on.
The
first entrant
arose not from the mountain West but from the rolling farmlands east of
the Hudson River, long disputed between New Hampshire and New York. The British Crown had
awarded the area to New
York, against the wishes of its inhabitants, in 1764.
When British authority broke down during the
Revolution,
the inhabitants threw off both the British and
New York, held a constitutional convention (1777, right), and
proclaimed
themselves
the State of Vermont. They
applied to
Congress for admission.
Congress
stalled
until after the Articles of Confederation were ratified (1781), wishing to
antagonize
neither New York nor the Vermonters, whose soldiers fought the British heroically
at Ticonderoga and Bennington. The
Vermonters only grew more obstreperous.
They annexed neighboring districts in what are now
New
Hampshire and
eastern New York. Then
(May 1781), they
entered into negotiations with the British, offering to return to the
Crown if
Britain would recognize Vermont as a colony.
That
got attention. On
August 20, 1781, Congress resolved that,
if Vermont receded from her expansive boundary claims, it would be a
“preliminary” to “recognition of the independence of the people of
Vermont, and
their admission into the federal union”.
The resolution passed nine states to one, with only
New
York
opposed. The nine
states would meet the
Article threshold for admission of a new state.
Three other states were represented by only single
delegates, but those
delegates favored the resolution as well.
Vermont appeared to be on the verge of admission,
and duly
retreated
from its expanded boundaries in 1782.
Then
matters ground
to a halt. Congress
reconsidered Vermont
in April 1782, and refused to even set a
date to vote on a committee report recommending her admission. What had gone wrong? The war was winding down,
so the British were
no longer frightening as a suitor for Vermont.
But more importantly, sectional jealousy had reared
its
head.
Pierce
Butler of
South Carolina wrote that “The Northern interest is all
prevalent; their
members are firmly united, and carry many measures disadvantageous to
the
Southern interest. They
are laboring
hard to get Vermont established as an independent State, which will
give them
another vote, by which the balance will be quite destroyed.” Arthur Lee of Virginia
framed the matter as
one of large versus small states: “The addition of another (small
state) will
be a dangerous accession, & the disposal of property in
quotaing each being
by Votes, not by interest, it will enable the small States to throw the
whole
burthen of the war upon the large Ones.”
Vermont was not admitted.
And yet, the
Vermonters continued to govern Vermont.
New York shrank from asserting its claims by
force. The issue
continued to fester.
The next entrants
in the statehood race emerged from the
West. In 1784
Congress asserted
sovereignty over the lands northwest of the Ohio River, and adopted an ordinance
written by
Thomas Jefferson providing for the eventual settlers of the land
to
organize themselves into new states (see Creating
the Northwest Territory).
In time, this
would lead to new states in what is now the American Midwest.
What about south of
the Ohio River, where white settlers already lived?
In June
1784, North Carolina
ceded its transmountain land to the federal government.
The transmountain settlers, then numbering
about 15,000, promptly held a convention (December) and organized a
state government. If
this
was to be the
process north of the Ohio, why not south of it as well?
The settlers originally called their land
Frankland, after the tribe (the Franks) which overthrew the Roman
Empire, but
elided the name into Franklin (1785) in a dubious attempt to associate
the proposed state with the popular Pennsylvanian.
The state collected taxes and paid salaries in
beaver
pelts.
Matters miscarried
at once.
North Carolina had second thoughts, and resented the
precipitate action
of the Franklinites. The
legislature
repealed her act of cession in March 1785.
Franklin sent a memorial to Congress anyhow, seeking
admission as the
fourteenth state. North
Carolina, the
memorial read, “claims a
sovereignty
over a country whose prayers she has rejected and whose interests she
has
forsaken”. Congress
should “receive
(Franklin) into the federal union”.
Congress
considered the matter on May 20, 1785.
The first question was whether to accept the
since-repealed North Carolina
land cession. A
committee reported that “no
subsequent act” of North Carolina could “repeal or make void” the
original deed. Six
states (all Northern) voted to approve
the report, two voted against, one was divided, two were
under-represented, and
two were unrepresented. Without
seven states in favor, the report
failed. The repeal
stood. With the
repeal standing, there was no land cession.
Without the cession, there was no way to
admit Franklin.
With
Congress
standing aside, North Carolina showed none of the hesitation of New
York. North
Carolina organized a competing
government for the Franklin region, and for a time, residents had the
choice of
paying taxes to, and using the courts of, either government. But not for long. In 1788 North Carolina
began seizing the
property of Franklinites who failed to pay North Carolina taxes, and
when the Franklinites resisted, they were crushed at the “Battle of
Franklin”
(left) near what
is now Johnson City, Tennessee. Franklin
faded out of existence.
Farther
north, matters proceeded with more decorum.
Virginians pouring into the western district of
Kentucky
endured many of
the same indignities as the Franklinites—remoteness from the state
capital,
delay in learning of new laws, drain of tax money eastward, and a state
government insufficiently interested in building roads and (always an
issue)
dispossessing American Indians. Unlike
the Franklinites, however, the Kentuckians worked with their parent
state instead of against it.
In
August 1785, a
convention of Kentuckians meeting in Danville (right) formally
petitioned
Virginia for permission to separate.
Virginia
agreed with but modest conditions, demanding that Kentucky honor prior
Virginia land
grants and assume a share of Virginia’s state debt.
Delay
ensued when
the militiamen of Kentucky (much of the adult white male population)
took off
to raid American Indians in the Ohio country (see From Conquest to Purchase).
The settlers returned and accepted the Virginia
conditions
at another
convention in September 1787. The
matter
came before Congress on July 3, 1788.
Here,
finally,
appeared to be a clear-cut case for admission.
Both parent and daughter state had agreed to an
amiable
separation. The
population of Kentucky (then about
60,000) was approaching that of the smaller eastern states, and growing
rapidly.
And
yet, Congress
held back. The new
Constitution (the
Constitution of the United States, or COTUS, of 1787) was in the process of being ratified.
Two delegates, Nathan Dane (MA) and Thomas
Tucker (SC), moved that it would be “manifestly improper
for Congress
assembled under the Articles of Confederation to adopt any measures
(other) than
those which express their sense that the said district ought to be an
independent member of the Union as soon as circumstances shall permit
proper
measures to be adopted for that purpose.”
In other words, Congress would punt the matter to
the new
Congress
elected under the COTUS. Dane
and
Tucker’s motion carried, nine states to one, with only Virginia holding
out for
immediate admission.
Were
constitutional scruples the real reason for the delay? John
Brown, a Kentuckian serving in Congress
as a delegate from Virginia pending separation, wrote that delay was
“supported
by all the eastern States lest (Kentucky) might add to the Southern
Interest”. Clearly, again, sectional
jealousy was an issue. The Articles of
Confederation began with 13 states, and ended with 13 states.
The
Anti-Climactic
Finish Under the COTUS
The COTUS
convention granted Congress a clearer power to
admit new states, but also endorsed the action of the Confederation
Congress in
declining to admit Vermont and Franklin without the consent of their
parents. “New
States may be admitted by
the Congress into this Union”, ran Article IV, “but no new State shall
be
formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any
State be
formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States,
without the
Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the
Congress”.
The First Congress
(1789-1791) which met under the COTUS
found itself in the happy situation of being able to consider Vermont
and
Kentucky in tandem. New
York had finally consented to the
separation of
Vermont in 1790, in return for a cash payment of $30,000. And Virginia had again
consented to the
separation of Kentucky, and Kentucky had again accepted. Vermont and Kentucky
balanced each other in
every possible way—north against south, east against west, and large
state
against small state.
President George
Washington signed a bill to admit Kentucky
on February 4, 1791. He
signed another
to admit Vermont on February 18. But,
Vermont won the race to statehood.
Vermont had had a government in place since 1777,
and slid
seamlessly
into the United States on March 4, 1791.
Kentucky had still to hold a constitutional
convention and
an election,
and did not complete the process until June 1, 1792.
Vermont became the 14th
state, and
Kentucky the 15th.
The Confederation
government, in this way as in so many
others, set precedent. Again
and again,
in the Nineteenth Century, states would be denied admission until they
could be
matched with sectional opposites.
Even
as late as 1959, Alaska and Hawaii were admitted in tandem in the
belief that
they would be partisan political opposites.
And what of the
vanished State of Franklin? North
Carolina finally ceded its western land
to the federal government in 1790.
The
government organized it into the Southwest Territory, and five years
later,
admitted it to the union as the State of Tennessee.
Sources: Peter
Onuf, The
Origins of the Federal Government, 1983; Kevin Barksdale, The Lost State of Franklin: America’s First
Secession, 2009; Lowell Harrison, Kentucky’s
Road to Statehood, 1992; Journals
of
the Continental Congress, Volumes 22, 28, and 34; Letters of Delegates to Congress
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