North Star State: A Minnesota History Reader

Territorial Imperative: How Minnesota Became the 32nd State

Territorial Imperative How Minnesota Became the 32nd State Rhoda R. Gilman In 1857,only eight years after becoming a territory,Minnesota sought to become a state,in part because statehood would guarantee Minnesota’s political participation in federal railroad projects.Timing of statehood also became important as the Democrats in Minnesota sensed the new Republican Party was rapidly gaining adherents.Rhoda R.Gilman reveals how Democratic and Republican party rivalries colored statehood politics in many ways,particularly as state boundaries were being debated and drawn.An east-west state would favor the growing Republican base in the southeast and also promote moving the capital to St.Peter since St.Paul would now be on the“border.”A north-south state would favor the Democrats by including the Red River Valley and retain St.Paul as the new state’s capital.Gilman provides a fascinating glimpse of how these arguments and compromises led to the founding of the thirty-second state in 1858. The prairies and forests, the lakes and watersheds that surround the upper reaches of the Mississippi and Red Rivers,and the head of Lake Superior have been known and occupied by men and women for more than 10,000 years. During that span,the human and natural landscapes have been reworked several times by waves of climatic and cultural change.But none was swifter than the change that went into high gear as boundaries were drawn on a map and the region was named “Minnesota.”That event occurred in March 1849,when a bill creating the new territory was passed by the U.S. Senate and signed by President James K.Polk.1 For most Americans,whether their sense of history stems from the classroom or from Disneyland,1849 is associated with the California gold rush.The fact that Minnesota came into being at the same time is not entirely unconnected . Both events were expressions of the burst of expansion that transformed the United States in the 1840s.As late as 1842,the Senate had seriously considered but ultimately rejected a treaty with the Dakota nation that would have created a permanent island of Indian residence and government in the 49 region that was later to become southern Minnesota.The treaty promised the Dakota and other northern tribes that white immigrants would be excluded from the territory and that,after a short period of settled living,Indian people there would be granted United States citizenship along with their own territorial and,ultimately, state government.The measure was urged by the war department ,recommended by the president,and vigorously supported by Henry H.Sibley,the local representative of the American FurCompany.2 Yet less than a decade later,Sibley was lobbying just as hard to organize the same region as a territory for Euro-American settlers instead.What had happened? The seven years between 1842 and 1849 saw the United States assume continent -wide dominance as its “manifest destiny.”Awar upon Mexico was concluded in February 1848 with the taking of that country’s northern frontier from Texas to California.Later in the same year,Oregon Territory was formed from a region that until 1844 had been jointly occupied with Britain.Thus,the entire configuration of the nation had changed,both on maps and in the minds of its citizens.No longerwas the Mississippi River some sort of ultimate boundary .Linking the East Coast to the FarWest had become a national priority,and the idea of placing between them a state that might diJer in race and culture from others in the American republic—an idea never accepted by Congress— became unthinkable. The 1840s had also seen the creation of two new states bordering the upper Mississippi region—Iowa in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848.What was left of the two territories from which they had been carved straddled the headwaters of the great river and reached west to the Missouri River and north to the British possessions. Most of the land still belonged to the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes, and the scattered white population of traders,missionaries,government agents, and a few lumberjacks was far from the minimum of 5,000 required for territorial status—but the logic of national expansion called for the area to be organized immediately. No one understood that fact more clearly than Senator Stephen A.Douglas. The “Little Giant” of Illinois was already stepping into the large shoes being vacated by the aging champions of national unity,Henry Clay of Kentucky and...