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THE MICHIGAN AND OHIO BOUNDARY LINE BY FRANK E. ROBSON ESQ.
The interests favoring admission are very clearly expressed by Judge Cooley as follows: "The president's wishes on the subject were well1 known to his active partisans, who constituted a strong and growing party, and had chosen the state officers. A presidential election was pending and a very natural desire existed to participate in it. A distribution of the public lands or their proceeds was one of the issues of the day, and if it took place it would be unfortunate- if Michigan should fail to receive its share.. The senators and representatives chosen to seats in congress were naturally anxious to occupy them, and politicians were equally anxious to be recognized1 in the distribution of federal patronage. "
There was an evident determination to have the state admitted, and October 29, 1836, a democratic convention of Wayne county called for another convention, and a similar expression was made by a Washtenaw convention. The governor replied that the legislature could not be again convened for want of time, and intimated that a "popular" convention might satisfy the Washington authorities. Acting on this suggestion a call was issued for a convention signed by several individual leaders of the Jackson party. In? *See appendix
response to this call a convention, called in ridicule the "Frost-bitten Convention, " met at Ann Arbor, December 14, and at once assented to the proposition of congress and forwarded the result of their deliberations to
Washington.
After considerable debate and much delay, congress finally accepted the action of the "Frost-bitten Convention" as sufficient, by an act, the preamble of which recites it as a convention "elected by the people, " and Michigan was formally admitted as a state with its new boundaries, January
26, 1837.
Michigan throughout the controversy was the weaker party, but having on its side all the right. I cannot close my story better than to quote the words of John Quincy Adams: "Never in the course of my life have I known a controversy of which all the right was so clearly on one side, and all the power so overwhelmingly on the other; never a case where the temptation was so intense to take the strongest side, and the duty of taking the weakest so thankless. "
MICHIGAN
Page 16
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