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How Did Iowa Get Its Shape?

(Authors note: The following account is essentially a summary of an excellent work on the
Iowa/Minnesota border gifted to us by Minnesota historian William E. Lass. (Shaping the North State
State: A History of Minnesota Boundaries. St. Cloud: North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc., 2014.) With that
acknowledgement, I have chosen to footnote sparingly but would direct the reader to the Lass work.
Chapter 2, Iowa Statehood and the Southern Boundary is an excellent explanation of this complex
narrative. At the end of the chapter, there is additional material on challenges faced by the survey
teams sent out to mark the border with wooden stakes. Numbers in parenthesis ( ) refer to page
numbers in the Lass text unless otherwise noted.)

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Carroll and Creston, Nebraska? Mankato and Minneapolis, Iowa? Dubuque, Minnesota? Those
locations sound strange today, but they were on-the-table possibilities as lawmakers debated where to
draw the borders of Iowa. Historians often discuss Iowas entry into the Union in terms of the sectional
struggle between North and South in the years leading up to the Civil War, but it was the boundary
lines--not slavery--that stirred the political passions of Iowans. What shape would the new state take?
How big should Iowa be? How big could it be? There were lesser issues, of course, but the size and
shape of Hawkeyedom dominated the conversation in the final days. Congress had one idea; Iowans
had several others. Fortunately, there were some feisty and determined Iowans who thought big!

In the treaty with Great Britain that ended the American Revolution, the original United States extended
from the Atlantic Ocean only to the Mississippi River. In 1804, the U.S. nearly doubled in size when it
took title to its Louisiana Purchase from France that included all the lands drained by the Missouri
River. Since the region had hosted neither mapmakers nor survey crews, no one knew for sure where
those boundary lines were, but the future Iowa was definitely part of the deal.

Very early in the nations history, Congress created an orderly process for governing western lands
through various stages of development and admitting new states into the Union. Until the population of
an area reached 5,000 voters (adult white males only at the time), the region was a district supervised
by a governor and three judges appointed by the President. When the census exceeded 5,000, the
district could become a territory and elect a legislature. The territorial governor, however, was still
appointed by the President. Residents could also select a delegate to Congress who could speak on
issues and introduce bills but had no vote. When the population reached 60,000, the territory could
draft a constitution and apply for full statehood.
Iowa was part of several jurisdictions in its climb to statehood. After a few decades in administrative
limbo, the upper Mississippi Valley was lumped into the huge Territory of Michigan in 1834. When
Michigan began preparing for statehood in 1836, the remaining area morphed into the Territory of
Wisconsin. With the opening of lands in eastern Iowa and the ensuing influx of settlers, the Wisconsin
Territory divided along the Mississippi River in 1838, and the separate western region was named the
Iowa Territory. The Mississippi and the northern border of Missouri defined its eastern and southern
borders. But how far to the west and the north should this land beyond the river extend? On a map,
the Territory of Iowa was huge. It swept up everything east of the Missouri River all the way to the
Canadian border, much too big to be one state. Furthermore, much of the area was under the firm
control of the Sioux.

The formation of the Territory of Iowa called for the appointment of a territorial governor. President
Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, appointed one of his own. Robert Lucas had served a lengthy tenure in
the Ohio legislature before winning election as its governor in 1832 and 1834. Along with the governors
office, Democrats held a solid majority in both houses of the territorial legislature.

Governor Lucas had an ambitious agenda for his new domain and lost little time in laying the
groundwork for Iowa statehood. He persuaded the Iowa legislature to authorize a territory-wide
referendum on convening a convention to draft a state constitution. But Lucas reach exceeded his
grasp on that issue. Expenses of running a territory are picked up by the Federal government; states
must pay their own way. Frugal frontier voters were not yet ready to pay the bills of a state
government, and they soundly defeated the proposal, 2,907 937, a whopping 76% thumbs down.

A change in party control at the national level soon led to a change of administration in Iowa. In 1841,
following a victory for the Whig Party, President William Henry Harrison took office but died after only
32 days. During his short White House tenure, Harrison replaced Democrat Lucas with John Chambers, a
Whig from Kentucky. Like Lucas, Chambers pushed for statehood earlier rather than later. Now,
however, the governor faced the opposition of his own Whig party. Democrats were a clear majority in
frontier Iowa. If Iowa voters were allowed to elect their own governor, that office would very likely
revert to Democratic hands. A Whig President, however, could appoint one of his own choosing.
Nevertheless, Chambers was able to work with the legislature to call for a second referendum on a
constitutional convention. Alas, like the first, Iowa voters defeated Round 2 at the polls. In no county
was the majority in favor of the statehood proposition. Undeterred, however, Chambers and the
legislature authorized yet another vote in April, 1844. This timevictory. Iowa adult white males
approved a call for a constitutional convention by a 62% majority, 6,719 - 3,974. The size of the vote
gives a telling clue to the changing perspective on statehood. The larger population could more easily
bear the expenses of a state government.

One of the tasks facing the convention delegates was defining the borders of what would become the
state of Iowa. The decision was not Iowans alone; Congress would have to approve the entire proposed
constitution. However, putting on the table a recommendation to which Congress could say yes was a
good start.

A prominent delegate on the Boundaries Committee of the convention was former Governor Lucas, and
he had long nurtured big plans for his adopted state. In the decades before the Civil War, rivers were
Americas primary transportation routes. Railroads were making inroads in the northeast, but western
settlement still relied on all manner of floating vessels to move people and goods. Waterways large and
small were valuable assets, and access to them was important. As the defining feature on the
landscape, major rivers like the Mississippi and Ohio often became political boundaries separating states
and even nations.

At the convention, former Gov. Lucas became the leading advocate for an expansive Iowa with rivers as
borders. Very early in deliberations, a committee consensus emerged to extend Iowa west to the
Missouri River. Just how far north was a matter of debate. Lucas wanted the border to leave the
Missouri where it was joined by the Big Sioux River at present-day Sioux City and to run a survey line
northeast to the mouth of the Little Sac River northwest of the Twin Cities. This would have obtained
for Iowa the coveted prize of the St. Anthony Falls just north of the Twin Cities. Waterfalls provided
power for mills to grind grain or cut trees into lumber. Delegate Ralph Lowe of Muscatine County
argued that the Falls would add wealth and power to the new state: We could not have too much

water power. (Lass, 42) Other delegates provided slightly different options to connect the Big Sioux
with some Minnesota river, but the consensus favored western and northern borders defined by rivers
as much as possible.

In view of later developments, it is worthwhile to note that the committee did briefly consider running a
straight line west from the Mississippi instead of selecting a river as the boundary. Proponents of the
latitude border argued for its simplicity and clarity. Delegate James Gower of Cedar County proposed
drawing the line along the 45o, running through the Twin Cities on to the Missouri River.
In addition to all of southern Minnesota, that proposal would have extended Iowa west to include much
of eastern South Dakota. Robert Lucas objected. According to historian Lass in his excellent account of
the boundary deliberations, Lucas did not want to burden Iowa with a large range of broken and
comparatively valueless country. (p. 41) So much for South Dakota.

In the end, the Iowa convention adopted a river border. From Sioux City, the line would follow the
Missouri and Big Sioux north to a point in present-day Lyon County, Iowas extreme northwest corner.
From there a survey line to the northeast would link it to a point on the Minnesota River (called St.
Peters at the time). The Minnesota flows into the Mississippi River at Minneapolis/St. Paul, providing a
continuous river route back south to the northeast corner of Missouri. While this is not the exact line
proposed by Robert Lucas, it is close, and the proposal became known as the Lucas boundaries in
honor of its chief advocate. According to Lass, Lucas deserved the praise: In limiting the state by three
navigable rives, the convention accepted a natural boundaries principle first suggested by Lucas in
November 1839. (43) Had the proposal been ultimately successful, the Hawkeye State would today
include most of southern Minnesota up to Minneapolis/St. Paul and all of Iowa except for a part of Lyon
County in the extreme northwest corner.

The convention completed its draft of a constitution, adjourned on November 1, 1844, and forwarded
the document to Congress for approval. At first it looked like smooth sailing for Iowa statehood. The
boundary question was referred to the House Committee on the Territories. Augustus Caesar Dodge,
Iowas elected territorial delegate, urged the committee to accept the boundary lines asked for by the
people of Iowa, who were there, who had settled the country, and whose voice should be listened to in
the matter. (Lass, 44) Committee chairman Rep. Aaron Brown from Tennessee agreed. Many
committee members, however, did not, and their opposition inaugurated a lengthy and contentious
struggle to shape the first free state west of the Mississippi.

The United States Congress comprises two houses. The number of representatives in the House reflects
the population of each state. In the Senate, each state gets two senators. Big states, small statesit
makes no difference: two senators apiece. If you want more senators from one section of the country,
divide it into small states. If you want fewer, advocate for large states. In a deal known as the Missouri
Compromise when Missouri entered the Union in 1820, the Senate was to be evenly balanced between
states allowing slavery and those forbidding it. Northern free states had a clear majority in the House of
Representatives, but the South was on equal footing in the Senate and intended to keep it that way.
When Missouri entered as a slave state, it was balanced with Maine, a free state, and so the delicate
equilibrium was maintained as tensions between North and South escalated.

A second component of the Compromise intended to resolve the question of slavery in the western
territories. It stipulated that, with the exception of the Missouri itself, slavery was forbidden in any
Federal holdings north of the Arkansas/Missouri border line extended west to the Pacific Ocean. Since
by far most of the Louisiana Purchase lay north of that line, the South was anxious about the source of

future slave state senators. From the perspective of Southern delegations to Congress, it would help,
therefore, if new free states were as big as possible to reduce their numbers. When Iowa applied for
admission, Congress arranged a marriage between free Iowa and slave Florida to keep the balance.

With the Missouri Compromise framing the debate, support for the big-state borders that Iowa wanted
did not come from Iowas fellow free states; its advocates were Southerners. Rep. Alexander Duncan of
Ohio led the attack and argued that the state would be too big; Iowa was asking for too much. For a
better approach in his opinion, he referred to a recent report by explorer and mapmaker Joseph Nicollet
who had recently completed his third expedition through the upper Mississippi Valley. While Nicollet
was also oriented to rivers, he looked at them in a different way. Rather than as boundary lines
themselves, he looked to the lands they drained, their watersheds, as the regions natural divisions.
Nicollet advocated a map with five news states created out of the remaining trans-Mississippi west. One
state would be due west of Arkansas and a second west of Missouri. The Iowa Territory would, with
some modifications on the western side, become two separate states. The land drained by the
Mississippi would be the third state; lands on both sides of the Missouri and Platte Rivers (western Iowa
and Nebraska) would be the fourth. The fifth state in Nicollets design was the remaining region to the
north to the Canadian border.

Nicollet argued that keeping the states smaller would allow their citizens to develop stronger ties with
each other. Nicollet argued a 19th C. version of less is more. It was his belief that the his more
compact version of Iowa would

not only assure Iowans similar climate, soil, resources and commercial routes, but would also
give them a homogeneity of character and interest highly conducive to their well-being both
morally and politically. (46)

Duncan moved to amend Iowas constitution by substituting boundaries proposed by Nicollet. Rather
than rivers, the surveyors compass would define the boundaries of Iowa. The line would start where
the Watonwan River flows into the Minnesota River west of Mankato in present-day Minnesota and run
straight east to the Mississippi River near Winona, then south along the Mississippi, west along the
Missouri border, and back north on a straight shot to the starting point. According to this plan, Iowas
western border would today be ten miles west of Des Moines. The future county seat of Webster
County would have become Ft. Dodge, Nebraska, five miles west of the Iowa line.

Rep. Samuel Vinton of Ohio continued the attack on the large-state borders as unfair to western citizens
themselves. The lines, so his argument went, deprived the region of the representation in the Senate
that it deserves. Furthermore, he maintained, creating more states in the west would promote national
unity because the Mississippi and Ohio River are so central to their economies, those states are forever
tied to both North and South and, therefore, immune to the spirit of disunion. (47)

The arguments on both sides, though ingenious, were only a cover to adjust the size of western borders
for a sectional advantage. By a vote reflecting the Northern dominance in the House of Representatives,
Duncans small state amendment passed. (42) Dodge was, however, able to get the line moved about
twenty-five miles to the west by pointing out that Nicollet had actually proposed a slightly larger state.
On March 3, 1845, in one of his last acts in office, President John Tyler, the late Harrisons vice president
and successor, signed a bill authorizing the admission of Florida and Iowa as the 28th and 29th states
respectively. Florida was admitted immediately. Iowa would follow as soon as it approved the
Congressional revisions of the boundaries. A referendum was set for April 7, 1845.

Dodge assumed that his success in getting the Nicollet borders enlarged slightly to the west would win
him praise back home. In an open letter back to Iowa, he wrote that the border issue was now a bi-
partisan done-deal with no hope for the boundaries the constitutional convention had recommended.
We will not be able hereafter under any circumstances, to obtain one square mile more. (51) If you
want to become a state, Dodge admonished, you will accept the will of Congress. He was wrong.

Dodge had not been the only Iowan following the Congressional debate. Advocates and opponents in
Iowa had been sparring over the proposed constitution since it had been first approved by the
convention. However, whatever their differences on specifics of other issues, the changes Congress
made to the borders became the central issue on ratification. The Democratic Party in Iowa advocated
for early statehood despite the smaller borders. Five of their number, however, broke ranks and
embarked on aggressive speaking campaigns to torpedo the Congressional revisions: Enoch Eastman,
Shepherd Leffler, Frederick Mills, Theodore Parvin and James Woods. (For biographical information on
the five and the roles they played in the debate, see Lass, 51-53.) With support from the Whig Party,
they were successful, and the referendum on Iowa statehood went down to defeat by 996 votes, 6,023
for and 7,019 against. (Leland Sage, A History of Iowa. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1974, p. 88)
In August, 1845, the proposition to accept a constitution with the Nicolette, small state boundaries
was again put to a vote and once again defeated.

In a strange and nearly-forgotten footnote to the whole complicated story, a small contingent of citizens
from Dubuque came up with a novel suggestion. They petitioned Congress to draw the northern border
of Iowa along an east-west line about 30 miles south of Dubuque itself! (Note: Picture a line 30 miles
south of Highway 20 from Dubuque to Sioux City.) They were in effect proposing to secede from Iowa
in the hopes of becoming the major urban powerhouse in the new territory/state that would be created
out of Iowa leftovers extending north to the Canadian border! (Lass, 55) Their imaginations did not
foresee the rise of the Twin Cities, which at the time was little more than the military outpost of Ft.
Snelling. While the proposal never gained widespread traction, it was still one more suggestion for a
straight line as the northern border instead of a combination of survey lines and rivers.

In the meantime, the national landscape had shifted once more. The Democrats again captured the
White House in 1844 with the election of James K. Polk. To the victors belong the spoils, and Polk
replaced Gov. Chambers with John Clarke, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, who took office in November
of 1845. Like his predecessors, Clarke pushed the legislature to continue the drive for statehood. It did
so and, once again, adult white males went to the polls to select delegates to a constitutional
convention.

Before the convention met, the territory legislature made its wishes known in no uncertain terms. It
directed Iowa delegate Dodge to inform Congress that the Iowa would insist on the Lucas boundaries.
While Dodge could not persuade the Committee on Territories to accept the large state borders, that
committee now chaired by Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois found that there were no longer the votes to
approve the small state proposal it had passed the year before. If Iowa was going to be paired with
Florida to keep the slave-free balance in the Senate, something had to give.

Douglas opted for a compromise. He proposed the 43o 30 latitude as the northern Iowa border.
(Spoiler alert: The fact that this line is in fact the Iowa/Minnesota border takes some of the suspense out
of the rest of the narrative.) When Iowa constitution delegates convened on May 4, 1846, they already
knew the details of the Douglas proposal even before he formally introduced it to Congress on June 8.

At first a wide majority of the Iowa convention delegates continued to support the Lucas boundaries by
a wide margin. In the end, however, on an 18-13 vote, the convention adopted the Douglas
boundaries. That is what Douglas needed. He could then champion his proposal as the voice the people
of Iowa. The House defeated, 54-68, a bid to keep the small state Nicollet borders and then approved
the revised constitution as the Iowa convention had now proposed it, with the Douglas borders. The
Senate followed suit.

Iowa needed to jump through just one more hoop to become at state. This it did on August 3, 1846,
when voters approvedjust barely--the new constitution. The final tally was 9,492 to 9,036, or 51 in
favor. The next day, on August 4, still without knowing the outcome of the Iowa referendum, President
James K. Polk signed the bill to admit Iowa as the 29th state. In the fall, Iowa elected a slate of officials to
fill the legislative, executive, and judicial positions prescribed in its new constitution, and on December
28, 1846, Iowa officially entered the Union. (Lass, 58)

Iowas strange and distinctive shape stands in contrast to the rectangular states to the west. Winding
rivers define its eastern and western boundaries while parallel lines separate it from its southern and
northern neighbor. While efforts failed to extend it northward to capture the Twin Cities, so did the
proposal to stop it 100 miles short of the Missouri River. The author of some of the Iowa history
accounts, Benjamin Gue, an early historian of Iowa, credits the work of the five men who led the fight
against ratification of the Nicollet boundaries as one of the most important public services ever
rendered the State. (cited in Lass, 53)

For those who like to play what if, Iowas border saga offers a treasure of possibilities. Political
junkies can debate to their hearts content how Iowa politics would be different today if the entire
Republican stronghold of western Iowa removed from statewide races or the legislature. It was Joseph
Nicollets vision that states that are smaller and more tightly integrated rise to a higher level of
morality. If so, here is a delightfully ornery point of contemplation: If one were to cut off the western
third of Iowa and give it to Nebraska, would the moral standards of both states improve? Or what
would Iowa be today without the sovereign state of Dubuque and the northern third of the state,
some of the richest farmland in the world?

Iowa has occupied its distinctive shape in the American heartland for so long that we may forget that it
was the product of passionate debate and a shaky consensus. A bare majority approved the final
compromise. Iowa as we know it today was by no means a historical inevitability.