John Cole: Well, good afternoon.   Thank you for joining us.

I'm John Cole, I'm the director of the Center for the Book
in the Library of Congress   [ Library ]

and of course, we're thrilled at the size of the crowd today.
Sorry we don't have a larger room, but on the other hand,
it's a wonderful topic and we have an excellent speaker
and there's going to be lots of time for questions and answers
so I think everyone will get the question
about their particular state answered.
The Center for the Book was created 1977
to help stimulate public interest in books and reading.
We are the reading promotion arm of the Library of Congress.
We also have centers in every state of the union
so we have a special interest in states and in today's topic.
We also are the author people who work on the National Book Festival
and this year's National Book Festival, which the Library
of Congress does with first lady Laura Bush will be
on the National Mall this year on Sept.
27. We hope that you can join us.
And we have our own take on Mark's topic.
This is a state map that we hand out in the Pavilion of the States.
Every state is, is represented in the Pavilion of the States
and each state has its own seal and the kids, of course,
drag their parents around to visit every state table to make darn sure
that they get a stamp from the state.
So this is our little piece of the state action that we're going
to hear more about today.
I'd like to thank not only Mark, our speaker, but also Arlene Balkansky
who is Mark's wife who also is a Library of Congress employee.
Arlene, where are you, Arlene?
Are you handing out -- she's in the very corner.
She's pulling out chairs and helping in a general way.
She's been at the Library of Congress for over 25 years.
For the last year Arlene has been a senior reference specialist
in the Serial and Government Publications Division.
Earlier, when working in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting
and Recorded Sound Division, she gave numerous presentations
on the cataloging of archival film and television
and on the Library's collection
of Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographic films.
This is the book Mark is going to discuss today.
It's called "How the States Got Their Shapes."
It's filled with anecdotal history.
Mark, as you may have known, has already been
on "CBS Sunday Morning," he's been on National Public Radio and I know
that several of you are here because of the advertising campaign.
Mark is a playwright.
Mark Stein is a playwright and a screenwriter.
His plays have been performed off-Broadway
and at theatres around the country.
His films include "House Sitter" with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn.
He has taught writing and drama at American University
and Catholic University and he lives in Washington,
D.C. Mark will tell us about the book, we'll have a chance
to ask Mark questions and then we will regroup for a book signing
in this room as soon as he is through.
And it's a pleasure to introduce Mark Stein.
Mark?   [ applause ]

Mark Stein: Thank you, John.
And I want to thank the Center for the Book for inviting me.
I also want to thank the Library of Congress for enabling me
to be invited because if it were not for this institution I don't know
that I could have written the book and so I just kind of briefly want
to mention before diving in to talk about the book,
just some of the different areas of this Library that were
so critical to me in creating it.
The Geography and Map Division here is just extraordinary,
at least from the point of view of a researcher.
If you don't know, it's just so much fun to go find it on the Web.
They have all these historical maps, an extraordinary collection
of historical maps that you can pull up, zoom in.
For me to be able to find place names from treaties
and other documents that don't -- that aren't on the map today
and to be able to locate them
on a historical map was absolutely critical
to understanding some of the boundaries.
And their reference division, I can't say enough about.
It's so clear in my mind is going in there one day and saying,
I'm just -- I cannot find the reason
for New York's logic in this dispute.
And they said, "Well, sit down and we'll see what we can find."
They were like waiters.
They were -- four books were placed upon --
and in no time there it was in a book
from the Government Printing Office that's probably pretty hard
to find elsewhere.
There's also something called the ephemera collection,
I believe is what it's called, that had tremendous nuggets
to understand the culture of the time in a particular locale.
I'm particularly thinking about Louisiana
after the Louisiana Purchase when all these French-speaking people
who did not want to be American --
necessarily choose to be Americans were suddenly Americans.
I could find things in the ephemera collection.
Likewise, after the Mexican War, the Hispanic population
that had not sought to become Americans, I could find things
in the ephemera collection.
It's very helpful for understanding what Congress was dealing
with when creating a boundary in terms of this new population.
And of course, the books.   And in particularly in the Library.

And something John didn't mention about having my wife work
at the Library of Congress is that she has borrowing privileges.
[ laughter ]
And I cannot tell you how many times I'd send an e-mail asking
if you could bring home -- in one case, I wrote it down here,
"Original Instructions Governing Public Land Surveys in Iowa"
from the Iowa Engineering Society.
And a day or two later, there it would be.
And in fact, that book had a, had a very critical piece of information
that I had been searching for, for quite a long time.
My, my interest in this topic goes back to my teens.
I don't clearly remember in what order these two things happened
but I do remember -- I grew up in Maryland, I remember that.
[ laughter ]
And I would see the map of Maryland in school day after day
and I remember at about the age of 13 looking at this map at one point
and thinking what is this thing?   What -- how did it get this shape?

It's almost broken in two on the west
and on the east it's missing half a rectangle.
What's that rectangle?   Turns out it's Delaware.

[ laughter ]
And I remember thinking then, do we really need Delaware?
[ laughter ]
Maryland wouldn't be that big a state even if it had Delaware.
Why do we have Delaware?
It was also right about that point when I was in taking geography
in junior high school that my teacher who --
though, this story may end up sounding somewhat critical of her.
She was actually a wonderful teacher.
But she had, she had a game we'd play.
I loved it.
She'd hold up shapes, states, no names just their shapes
and we would raise our hands and try to identify them.
I can't remember how we distinguished Wyoming from Colorado
because they're both rectangles.
I think she just didn't have them in there but, but, you know,
we could learn the shape of New York and the shape of Florida.
Years later I thought back on that
and I thought what she was teaching us is what is the shape of New York
but not why is the shape of New York.
And that there's so much more value in learning why a set
of conditions exist than simply accepting those conditions
and committing them to memory.
And in that regard, to know why Colorado is the shape that it is.
Why the lines are where they are in that rectangle
and not five miles this way or that --
can prove to be a very important thing to know.
So part of my motive in writing this book was, in playwright's language,
a subtext, was to encourage readers,
and particularly perhaps the younger readers to, to try to glom on to
that notion of asking why a set of conditions exist.
In the time we have today, of course, I can't cover everything
so I'm just going to focus on four elements that influenced a lot
of the shapes of the states that we have.
And the first of those elements would be the American Revolution
and the difference in which colonies were created by the crown as opposed
to the way after the Revolution, states were created by Congress.
For the most part, they had the same kind of considerations
on their plate and they dealt with them.
But there was one major consideration that Congress had
which simply was not on the screen for the crown.
It just wasn't in their mind,
and that was the equality among the colonies.
So, for instance, if it behooved the crown
to create a very small colony called Rhode Island for religious tolerance
and in doing so relieve what could be an explosive political problem
building in Massachusetts where they were burning people at the stake
over religious issues, it would do that
and it wouldn't be terribly concerned, it wouldn't be concerned
at all in fact, that Rhode Island was so much smaller
than Massachusetts or Pennsylvania or, or Virginia.
So that the colonies that we inherited from,
from England after the Revolution are a great deal more diverse
in size than are the states.
I do not seem to -- I must have one of those maps that you all have.
If not, I'm going to be sunk.   Here we go.

I got it. If you look at the handout you were given, the states that are
in color, or I should say the areas that are in color,
those are the 13 colonies at the start
of the American Revolution, okay?
And the reason I put them in color was to show that as diverse
as those 13 colonies are in size when you just think of them today,
they were even more diverse at the start of the Revolution.
Virginia, you know, included three, what are now three states.
Georgia -- one of three states.   Massachusetts included Maine.

New York at the start of the Revolution,
though not by the end, included Vermont.
And Rhode Island and Delaware are teeny and that affects, no
[ unintelligible ]
. So there was this tremendous diversity in size.
After the Revolution, as your eye kind of goes west on the map,
you see that doesn't continue the states are much --
there's much greater parity, not necessarily in stickler miles.
In fact that's only par of it,
it would be in the quality of resources.
Quality of access to resources -
the quality of the arable land and things like that.
A couple things happened right after the Revolution to try
to level the playing field they inherited
and to create a more level playing field in the future,
and I just want to mention them briefly.
The first was Congress create a bicameral legislature--
a House and a Senate.
This was to try to level the playing field.
So in the House representation is by population.
Therefore, New York would have a whole lot more influence than,
say, Rhode Island.
But in the Senate every state gets two votes,
Rhode Island is equal then to New York.
It mitigates the situation.
The other thing Congress did was to urge those states
that had colonial claims beyond the Appalachian Mountains,
or in the case of Massachusetts, with Maine, to cede those lands
to the United States to create a greater number
of states more equal in size.
And you can see that ultimately did happen.
I should put a footnote here that this sounds just wonderful,
everybody working in concert.   Didn't happen without conflict

and the motives weren't always so wonderful.
Georgia and Virginia and North Carolina realized
that by ceding their western claims and creating additional states,
they would be creating additional votes in the U.S. Senate for slavery
and they were always looking down the pike worrying
that they could eventually be outvoted in the Senate on slavery
and that slavery might be outlawed.
So there's a dark underside to this as well.
So that's element one, the change from the monarchy to the Congress.
A second element that affected a lot of the states was the proposal
in 1808 to build an Erie Canal.
After the Revolution we're no longer part of England,
we no longer can be assured of access to the St. Lawrence River,
which connects the Great Lakes to the ocean.
1808, St. Lawrence is entirely in Canada, it's not our boundary,
except for a small part of New York.
In 1808 they proposed a canal that would leave Lake Erie,
roughly at Buffalo, cross the state of New York,
connect to the Hudson River and go down to the ocean.
That impacted the -- at least one boundary for every state
in the vicinity of the Great Lakes.
So that it changed a boundary line for Ohio, for Indiana,
for Illinois, for Wisconsin.   Michigan indirectly ended up with

that Upper Peninsula that's not even connected to Michigan,
and Minnesota ended up, also,
with land that was not originally part of it.
So the Erie Canal was huge for that region.
Not too long later, after that, element three, railroads.
When railroads came into being as a viable means of transportation,
rivers became less critical for boundaries.
They are still very important as a resource but it was less critical.
And so what you see as your eyes scans the map from east
to west is those lines start to straighten out.
And one of the reasons they can straighten out is
that Congress did not have to rely on rivers in the way
that the British Monarchs did, or the early years
of Congress did perhaps with the Northwest Territory.
And then the fourth element, and this one is interesting
because it bounces in a couple of unusual ways, is slavery.
And on the map there's -- there are vestiges of the effort by Congress
in state boundaries to regulate slavery but also there are vestiges
of the surrender of that effort by Congress.
And here's specifically what I mean.
After the Louisiana Purchase the question came up,
will there be slavery allowed in this new territory?
And it was ultimately resolved when Missouri applied for statehood
in what was called the Missouri Compromise.
The Missouri Compromise said no new state or territory can have slavery
if it is north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, I'll come back to that line
in a moment, with the exception of the state
of Missouri, hence the compromise.
36 degrees 30 minutes is the southern border of Missouri.
If you look at the map you'll see
that there are some little exceptions to the rule but basically
that line, if you go east, it continues as the boundary
between Kentucky and Tennessee and Virginia and North Carolina.
It's actually a line that has been with us since Colonial times
when Queen Anne established --
actually it was a revision to the original boundary
but established the boundary of Virginia and North Carolina
as being halfway between the Chesapeake Bay and Albemarle Sound,
had nothing to do with slavery at the time.
And since both those states had their western claims,
it simply continued when they ceded those western claims as the boundary
of Kentucky and Tennessee.   But then Missouri used it

as a convenient southern boundary just crossing the river
but it became significant because of the Missouri Compromise.
If you look further to the west after Oklahoma, you'll see the top
of Texas is 36 degrees 30 minutes.
The reason is when Texas applied for statehood in, I believe 1845,
it was a republic, it had slavery.
It was a much larger entity than it is today.
It included not only the eastern half of New Mexico --
if you look on your map you'll see a blue line going through New Mexico.
That's a continuation of the Rio Grande.
That was all Texas when it became a state.
And it went up to the red line, which is 36/30.
Before Texas' statehood the Republic of Texas continued --
it narrowed down but it continued all the way up far
as the same latitude as California, all the way up to the 42nd parallel.
So it was a much larger republic and it's --
but it could not keep slavery if it went that far north.
So it said, okay, we will give you our land north of 36/30
in order to keep slavery.
So that is why the top of Texas is lopped off where it is and why
on the map we have this kind of interrupted but long line
that goes all the way from Virginia to Texas, and it becomes significant
in terms of slavery with Missouri, as I said.
Before that it was not significant for slavery.
If you look just above Texas you'll see
that there's a line that's the northern border of Oklahoma,
more significantly, the southern border of Kansas, and that,
that line, too, is pretty long.
It continues across Colorado, Utah and at one time it went all the way
to California as part of that territory.
That line represents the surrender by the federal government
of the effort to regulate slavery.   And what am I talking about here?

After Texas joined the Union it triggered the Mexican War
and the Mexican War led
to our acquiring a huge amount of land in the West.
And again the question came up, will it be slave land or not?
And the South could see that the Missouri Compromise wasn't going
to work anymore.
Too much of that land was below 36/30.
It wouldn't take long before they would get outvoted in the Senate.
And so when Kansas applied for statehood, there was a huge dust-up
across the way here, just over there, over whether
or not the Missouri Compromise would apply.
And ultimately, to make a long story short, Congress said we're done.
We're going to scrap the Missouri Compromise.
We're going to take up this idea by Stephen Douglas
of popular sovereignty which means every state or territory will decide
for itself whether or not to have slavery.
And then the dust settled.
But when the dust -- well, it didn't settle in Kansas.
They had a lot of bleeding.
They called it Bleeding Kansas as they went through their debate
about whether or not to, in fact, have slavery.
By the way, they chose not to.
But when the dust settled on all of this, a little shift had happened
that went pretty much unnoticed.
When Kansas applied for statehood at the very start of this brouhaha,
it proposed it's southern boundary
at 36 degrees 30 minutes; made perfect sense.
Would have put it right flat with Texas and,
and Arkansas/Missouri's line.
When Congress finally passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854,
it had shifted the southern boundary of Kansas one-half of one degree
to the north to 37 degrees.   That created a gap.

That gap is the Oklahoma panhandle.
But 37 degrees was the beginnings of a new approach
or a newly minted approach by Congress for future states
because by placing it at 37 degrees and not any longer having to worry
about slavery, Congress could now be much more mathematical
in its creation of states and it could create a tier
of prairie states from Kansas to Canada having exactly three degrees
of height, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota.
And just to the west, it could create a tier
of mountainous states starting at 37 degrees having --
because it was not as good
for agriculture they gave it four degrees of height,
Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.
Six of the western states have either exactly or very close
to exactly if they happen to be
on the West Coast, seven degrees of width.
And in creating this prototype they were, in my view,
they were mirroring a prototype that goes all the way back
to Thomas Jefferson when he was asked to propose boundaries
for what was called the Northwest Territories -- Wisconsin, Illinois,
Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, that area that we had acquired
with the British in the French and Indian War and was part
of this country at the outset.
And they said, "Jefferson, how do we do this?
How are we going to make these states?"
And he wrote a report to Congress.
One part of the report said, by the way,
here's what I think the line should be, and he had a whole bunch
of states having two degrees of height and four degrees of width.
Congress didn't follow it.
But they followed the principle that all states should be created equal.
And then later when they really had a clean slate to work with,
they really followed the idea of a prototype.
So those are four key elements that, that determine where a lot
of the boundaries have ended up on the map.
The last thing I want to say is just that for me,
when I set out to do this, the map of this 48 states, particularly,
as I suspect for many of you, was so,
so familiar that all these lines just seem to me as much a part
of nature as the rivers and the mountain crests.
Having gone through the whole process for me, now,
the map is permanently changed and it's a mural.
It's an incredible mural of a wide swath of American history
and with its -- the nuances and the exceptions and the "this's
and that's" of the American character and, and the way it --
the various aspects that it has had.
So I'm happy to try to answer any questions you may have.
[ applause ]
Male Speaker: Delaware takes an arc in its northwest end.
Mark Stein: Uh-huh.   Male Speaker: Into Pennsylvania.

Mark Stein: Yeah.
Male Speaker: Can you -- Mark Stein: Sure, I love that arc.
That arc, thinking in terms of Pennsylvania, which is the reason
for the arc, that arc inscribes in the shape
of Pennsylvania its Quaker past.
When -- the reason, by the way, we have Delaware, just to start with --
[ laughter ]   -- we'll get to the arc.

Is that the Dutch at the time that these colonies were created were one
of the Colonial powers in North America --
the English, the Dutch, the French and Spanish.
We think of the Dutch in New York primarily, but in fact,
the Dutch settlements began all the way
down in what is now Delaware, along the Delaware Bay.
They extended up through Pennsylvania along the Delaware
River and into New Jersey on the other side of the Delaware River
and then into New York and so forth.
So there was a whole long swath of the Dutch.
When the King gave to the Penn family Pennsylvania,
the charter for Pennsylvania, he knew the Penns were Quakers
and that Quakers are pacifists.
And the crown was never looking for trouble
if it could avoid the trouble and he knew
that if he drew the southern boundary
of Pennsylvania straight it would put
into Pennsylvania a somewhat significant Dutch settlement
at New Castle and he knew he could not count
on the Pennsylvania Quakers to go to the mat over this land in the way
that he knew that Oglethorpe in Georgia would go
to the mat with Spain, and did.
But he knew that the Quakers would not.
And so he said, okay, okay, we're not going to get --
we're not going to go there.
We're going to draw a circle, 12-mile semicircle around New Castle
and that will not be part of the colony of Pennsylvania.
So that's where what appears to be Delaware's semicircle is actually
in some ways Pennsylvania's semicircle.
Male Speaker: Why does West Virginia have that finger going up?
Mark Stein: Yeah, yeah.   [ laughter ]

This is, this is the little finger of West Virginia that,
that sticks up between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The first thing to, to keep in mind is that at the time
that that finger was surfaced on the map,
West Virginia was part of Virginia.
And at that point, actually going back even before that a little bit
into the point where we're still Colonial times, after the French
and Indian War we acquired, as I just said, Ohio, Indiana, all the,
all the areas between the Ohio River there and the Mississippi --
Wisconsin, Michigan, the British acquired with the help
of the American colonists.
And then they said to the American colonists, but you are not allowed
to settle that land, which really angered the colonists
as much as the Stamp Act.
But the British knew that if the colonists started expanding westward
they were just going -- they were already getting too powerful
so they were, they were wrestling with this.
The colonists were so angry that England said, okay, okay, okay.
We'll work out a little deal here.
You can sell warrants to that land, investments,
you can form corporations and sell it but you can't occupy it yet.
Land along the Ohio River.
And so Virginia sold the land along the Ohio.
I was talking to the man next to you -- along the Ohio River.
It was part of the reason that Virginia gave Kentucky
to the U.S. It didn't give West Virginia.
That didn't happen until the Civil War
because of those, those land investments.
And that access through the Ohio River to the Mississippi to the Gulf
to the ocean was an important avenue for commerce after the Revolution.
So that's why Virginia held on to that.
Then at the same time, there was this question
of where the western boundary of Pennsylvania would be.
The British -- the Colonial charter said it would be five degrees west
of its eastern boundary.
Its eastern boundary was the Delaware River.
It's not a straight line so, where on the Delaware River?
So there was, first of all, there was bloodshed
between the Pennsylvanians and the Virginians before the Revolution
and there was continued conflict after as to where
that western boundary between their two colonies, later states, was.
Eventually, shortly after the Revolution there was a --
with Pennsylvania, kind of a massive negotiation that involved New York
and Pennsylvania, the Erie Canal figured into it which is why,
by the way, Pennsylvania has a little tab sticking up on Lake Erie.
And once they did that, they could agree
to where the western boundary would be,
which happens to be five degrees west of the latitude
where the Delaware River crosses the boundary of Maryland,
or something, some little formula.
But it resulted then in this little finger of land
that Virginia was still going to hold on to because it,
at that point in time, needed the river so much.
The boundary, by the way, between Kentucky and West Virginia,
and again, that's really the boundary between Kentucky
and what had been Virginia, is the Big Sandy River and Tug Fork.
And again, those lead to the Ohio and to the west,
to the Mississippi and down.
Commerce in these western areas to get it to the ocean,
those waterways were, before railroads, very important.
And in mountainous areas even after railroads,
it remained very important.
Male Speaker: Out in the West you have some red lines here.
Mark Stein: Uh-huh.
Male Speaker: In some of these states.
Can you explain those a little bit?   Mark Stein: Yeah.

Sure. The ones that are in Nevada actually represent the previous
western boundaries of Utah.
Now, when I say the boundaries are changing I'm always talking
about territorial boundaries.
Once you become a state Congress cannot change your boundary
without your consent.
There have been some changes under those terms
but these are territorial.
I said earlier that Congress operated under the principle
that all states should be created equal.
There was one exception to that and that was Utah,
because Utah was Mormon and Congress didn't trust the Mormons.
This is in the years particularly leading up to the Civil War.
They worried about their, their loyalty to,
to the federal government because of conflicts they had had with them
in Illinois with state law and polygamy and issues such as that.
When the Mormons left Illinois they went out to the Great Salt Lake
and after the Mexican War the Utah Territory was created,
virtually all Mormon territory.
And its original western boundary was that farther west red line.
And then they discovered, I believe it was gold.
It might have been silver, but I believe it was gold,
and so right before they created the state of Nevada, which was created,
I believe, first, they said, you know what,
we're going to give Nevada an extra degree
of longitude, give them the gold.
And then they discovered again right before statehood that, oh,
there's some water resources here that we didn't fully realize
that they could connect us to the Colorado River and transport down
and so we're going to give another degree of longitude to Nevada.
And so Congress twice sliced down Utah
and those were the lines to do it.
A number of the things that were reviewed about the book --
about this book have said, and they are good reviewers,
that the bite taken out of Utah by Wyoming was also part
of this effort to diminish Utah.   I don't think it was.

It actually happened a little later and more to the point
that if you look at a topographic map of that northeast corner
of Utah, there are some mountains that form exactly that right angle.
Had Utah been given the right angle, they would have jurisdiction
over land they'd have to cross mountains to get to it.
Not easy. Whereas for Wyoming, they're right in there.
I'm sure it didn't help them
that they were Mormons but I don't think --
[ laughter ]
At that point that the issues -- this was post-Civil War,
I believe, were quite as strong.
But those are what those red lines are.
Were you asking also about the Montana one?
Male Speaker: Yes.   Mark Stein: Okay.

Montana, there are two places on the map where I like to say
that it embeds the idea that this is the land of opportunity,
where one person can make a difference, for better or for worse.
In the case of Montana, the red line is showing you the crest
of the Rocky Mountains, the Continental Divide,
and when Idaho went for statehood, that was the proposed boundary
for Idaho would be the crest of the, of the Rockies and, you know, hey,
it looks to me like it makes sense, you know,
otherwise Idaho is kind of weird.
But the year before statehood when Idaho was still a territory,
a former congressman named Sidney Edgerton went
out to be a federal judge in Idaho Territory.
The territorial governor gave him a district east of the Rockies,
which was like nowhere, and he was really angry.
So when, a year later, Idaho went for statehood, Sidney Edgerton came
to Washington as part of Montana's delegation,
he knew a lot of congressmen.
He knew the president and he had $2,000 in gold in his baggage.
[ laughter ]
And he managed to get Congress to move the boundary west to the crest
of the Bitterroot Mountains
and that's the line you see today for Idaho.
It starts to taper off.
If Edgerton got everything he wanted, which was to stick
with the Bitterroots, Idaho would actually taper off to a point.
But in fact, he didn't quite get everything he wanted which is why
at the very top there's a straight line for Idaho, a little tab.
That's for giving Idaho one little resource called the Kootenai
River Valley.
Up there in the mountains there's a little bit
of an agricultural area made by this -- by the Kootenai River.
But that's, that's what the red line in Montana is.
Male Speaker: I grew up in the California, Nevada area
and the California and Nevada border has no relationship

to the topographic   [ unintelligible ]

. How did that border come about?
Mark Stein: Well, in a way it does in that --
I actually should probably take this opportunity to talk
about California all together, and Texas in a sense and,
and remind me if I don't come back to that eastern boundary.
You know, I say all states should be created equal.
Well, what about Texas and California?
Texas, just to touch on real quickly
because I have virtually done it already,
Congress didn't create Texas, Texas created itself.
It was a republic when it came in.
Congress tried very hard to get Texas down the size, if you will.
They did cede the northern land and it's northern holdings, as I said.
In 1850 when they were so deeply in debt from their days as a republic,
Congress purchased from Texas all the land east
of the Rio Grande there in New Mexico to that boundary line
that is now the western border of Texas
which reduced the size of Texas even more.
There's more to that story, but I won't go into that one right now.
It also had said to Texas upon becoming a state, hey,
you can divide, if you wish, into as many as five separate states.
And this is 1845, pre-Civil War.
The fellow slave states said, do it, do it, do it,
that's ten pro-slavery votes.
Up north where they were proclaiming all men are created equal,
they weren't so crazy about all states being created equal
because one big Texas is just two votes.
As it turned out, Texas, from its -- this is my guess.
From its experiences together getting independence from Mexico
and struggling as a republic, that they have and still
to this day have a kind of unique sense of themselves
and they were not about to divide into five states.
[ laughter ]
So they said no and so we have a very big Texas
and the south lost quite a few potential votes for slavery.
California, we got what is now California, the land,
in part of the Mexican War.   That was in 1848.

And this is really amazing to follow the timeline on this.
In one year, probably in fact a little less than a year,
gold was discovered and so many people rushed to this area
around the San Francisco Bay and up into the mountains
that before Congress had time to create a territorial government,
California created its own.
And it sent to Congress proposals, we're moving closer
to that eastern boundary, for borders for its state.
To call it a proposal is to put it nicely.
It was a take it or leave it proposition.
[ laughter ]
There's a speech that Senator Seward, William Seward of New York,
later the secretary of state for Lincoln gave that I quote
in the book where he says on the Senate to his fellow senators,
essentially says, look, I don't like this any more
than you do but what can we do?   Suppose California says, well,

we'll just become a nation, try and stop us.
We can't get our Army across the Rockies, we can't get our Navy
around the bottom of South America,
there was no Panama Canal at the time.
They have so much gold in their hills they can secure credit
for their new country, and are we so naive as to think
that other countries would not immediately recognize this new
country if only to stop the growth of the United States.
And so we got to take the deal.   And we did.

Part of what -- were you the man who asked the question?
Male Speaker: Yeah.
Mark Stein: Part of that deal that, that Congress really didn't
like in addition to just the size was that eastern border.
That eastern border encompasses all of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
That's where the gold was.
That's -- California was basically saying, oh,
by the way, all the gold is ours.   [ laughter ]

And Congress said, okay, look,
how about we just move the border back a little
to the crest of the mountains?
And California, which was a state by then, said, no.
We're keeping our border.
So in a sense, it did have to do with the topographical feature
in that it was saying we'll take the whole topographical feature,
unlike most mountainous areas where, particularly in the East,
the mountain crest became the, the boundary.
The logic, or I don't know if it was logic so much as kind
of just the prototype that California worked off
where the math was that the state would be -- I believe there was 215,
approximately 215 miles wide
and that the eastern boundary would follow, in a general sense,
the west coast of the state at a distance of 215 miles, more or less.
So that was the logic of that particular boundary line.
Male Speaker: Can you talk about the -- Mark Stein: Yeah.
Male Speaker: Can you talk about the Michigan borders?
It looks like there's two parts.   Mark Stein: Yes, yes.

Yeah. Michigan, indeed, is in two parts.
There is what they call the mitt sometimes
and then there's this Upper Peninsula
that isn't attached to Michigan.
The Upper Peninsula was a consolation prize to Michigan
for problems -- for, for disputes it lost at the other end,
at the southern end of Michigan and they relate,
in turn, to the Erie Canal.
When that canal became a possibility,
at that point Thomas Jefferson's line for that region --
remember I said he had drawn those lines?
One of his lines was an east/west line that went to the southern --
along the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan.
And that was still in use at the time of the Indiana Territory
and the Illinois Territory.
That gave Indiana one infinitely small point of access
to Lake Michigan, which was now no longer a lake,
it was a vital highway to the Erie Canal.
So Indiana, when it came for statehood,
said you got to give us some frontage on Lake Michigan,
and Congress said, we'll give you ten miles
and they moved the northern border of Indiana ten miles up.
That gave them a port at Gary, Indiana.
Ohio has plenty of frontage.
Ohio being the other southern state that --
the southern border of Michigan has plenty of frontage on a Great Lake
at Lake Erie but that line of Jefferson's cut off Ohio
from the port that is the end of a long river goes
through the whole western part of Ohio called the Maumee
and it empties into Lake Erie at Toledo.
And Ohio, when it came for statehood said, hey,
you got to give us the port at Toledo.
And Congress said, okay, for you we will draw a line from the top
of Toledo toward the very bottom of Lake Michigan
that will stop with the Indiana line.
So one thing that explains is why the boundaries of Indiana
and Ohio there are not one straight line
but actually two slightly offset segments.
Meanwhile, Michigan says, it's still a territory, are we chopped liver?
[ laughter ]
You're just taking our land, some of our best land,
some of our best access and you're giving it away.
And there was what they call the Toledo War where --
it wasn't really a war in the way that some
of these other disputes were wars but there was one death involving --
this would involve harassing the surveyors
when they were doing the lines
and the one death may have been a barroom brawl, may have been part
of the thing, may have been a brawl that had
to do with, you know, the surveying.
But it was getting heated enough that Congress intervened and said,
okay, look, look, how about we give you this peninsula of land up there.
And that was part of Wisconsin but no one is living there right now,
no one is going to complain.   [ laughter ]

Take it-- and Michigan said, we'll take it.
And so Michigan got its upper peninsula.
Wisconsin really just didn't have enough population to,
to raise an issue about it and, and in return, Indiana
and Ohio got the access they needed at those locations
to ports on the Great Lake.
Male Speaker: I'm kind of fascinated by these nine contiguous states.
Mark Stein: Uh-huh.   Male Speaker: And looking

on an atlas you can see a very small portion
of Kentucky on the west side.   Mark Stein: Uh-huh.

Male Speaker: That doesn't actually connect --
Mark Stein: To the west of Kentucky.   Male Speaker: Yeah.

Mark Stein: Yeah, it's called the Kentucky bend.
I was just looking this up this morning.
Kentucky became a state -- well before 1811.
1790's, I think.
In 1811 and '12 there were a series of tremendous earthquakes
in that part of the country, particularly in the boot heel
of Missouri and it changed the flow of the Mississippi River
and created the Kentucky bend.
No one paid too much attention to it at the time in terms
of Kentucky's line because it was Indian land still
until the Jackson Purchase.
Kentucky and Tennessee have a, have a long troubled,
disputed history in their boundaries.
If you'll look at the western end of Kentucky,
you can see there's a little heel that digs down into Tennessee.
That's actually where the line should have been all
across the state.
That's 36 degrees, yeah, 30 minutes as it would be correctly surveyed
but it had gotten way off course and there were lots of disputes.
So there was a little bad blood.
And when they surveyed and they got to the Mississippi River they said,
okay, here's the end of Kentucky.
The Kentuckians said no, no, no, it goes to the western end of the --
you know, it ends where the Mississippi ends.
That line should continue.
And so they could make that case and so this little section
of Kentucky -- you can't see it on this map.
The boundary continues even though the Mississippi loops up and back
and basically cuts it off from the rest of the state.
If you want to get from that region of Kentucky to the rest
of Kentucky you either have to swim the Mississippi,
because I don't think there's a bridge,
or drive down to Tennessee and come up.
In fact, the kids who live in that area go to Tennessee schools.
I think a woman over here at a -- yeah.
Male Speaker: Yeah, I do.
I was wondering about Alabama and Mississippi looking so much alike.
Mark Stein: Yeah.
Male Speaker: Can you talk about that?
Mark Stein: Yeah.   Male Speaker: They look like twins.

Mark Stein: Yeah, yeah.
And I should have also mentioned, by the way, the colors on the map,
the Colonies at the time of the Revolution,
you'll notice that Alabama and Mississippi don't have their tabs
at the bottom and the tabs are part of today part
of that mirror image, by the way.
And that's because at that time they were not part of Kentucky
and a part of the Georgia colony.
They were part of Florida, which was a Spanish holding until 1818.
The, the mirror images is really very much reflecting that notion
of states being created equal.
So that you have this Georgia colony, the area in green,
and Georgia can't really cede it's land west of the Appalachians
because the Appalachians end in northern Georgia.
There ain't no more Appalachians.
So Georgia came up with a little different formula
that followed the principle using, I believe it's the Chattahoochee River
to create the state of Georgia and then
to create what was first called the Mississippi Territory,
which is now Mississippi and Alabama.
And we also seized from Spain
in two separate incidents the land that became the tabs.
When they divided Mississippi and Alabama, the idea was to try
to create three states, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi,
that are all roughly equal in size.
Georgia actually is -- tends to be -- is a little bit bigger but,
you know, they were the big brother
so they got a little more of the share.
But, but the reason for the mirror image line is that.
And then within that, the line that divides them,
there's a bend in that line.   Why not just have a straight line?

The reason was that the most valuable land in, in Mississippi
and Alabama is the southern land, the bottomland.
Further north it gets mountainous, not as good for agriculture,
and particularly down in that region that we took from Spain.
There was some disputes between the two states as to where it should be
but Congress just stepped in and said, here's what we're going to do.
We are going to do a north/south line that divides the southern tier
of the Mississippi Territory through that land we, we acquired from Spain
and it will go as far as the northwest corner
of what was then Washington County, Mississippi.
And at that point the line will then proceed to the center point
between the Mississippi River and the Georgia border.
So that's why it bends.
If it, if it -- if they had used just the bottom line,
the north/south line, the states wouldn't be equal.
If they had used just the main line, the two richest areas
of agriculture wouldn't be equal so it was --
they bent it to try to do the maximum equality.
By the way, there's a little interesting tab
up in the northwest corner of Alabama
that departs from the straight line.
You can barely see it on this map but it's there.
That's the Tennessee River.
The reason they followed the Tennessee River was had they simply
continued the line to Tennessee, the straight line,
they would have created an island of jurisdiction
for Mississippi whereby Mississippi would have had
to cross the Tennessee River, which is pretty wide, to have,
to have law enforcement in that little piece of land.
Very often when that happened Congress would, would not do that
and they would have a little tab.   Does that answer the question?

Male Speaker: Thank you.
Male Speaker: Looking at the column of states from Minnesota
down to Louisiana, it looks like Iowa kind of got squashed, you know.
Minnesota is big and tall, Missouri is big and tall
and -- Mark Stein: Uh-huh.   Male Speaker: There's Iowa.

It seems like, you know --   [ laughter ]

Mark Stein: Yeah, yeah.
And, and you're asking about one of my favorite borders and it looks
so innocuous on the map today, the northern border of Missouri.
The first -- there were several proposals from different groups
within Missouri for statehood boundaries
and the initial ones all placed the boundary --
I don't have the figure with me here.
I think it was three-and-a-half degrees north
of the boundary with Arkansas.   I think that might be right.

It was not up there where it is now.
But when the official boundary proposal was made and the final one,
they followed a line called the Sullivan Line,
which is the boundary.
First, just in general, Missouri is too big, isn't it?
I mean, one other thing about Missouri.
When it first became a state,
do you see the straight line western border of Missouri?
That line continued all the way up to Iowa.
That triangle of land that continues now
in Missouri was not originally part of Missouri.
In fact, we had just negotiated with the Indians for that region
to give them that land for something else that we had taken.
After one year of statehood Missouri said, we want that triangle, too.
And Congress said, okay.   [ laughter ]

And I mean, so where does this come
from that Missouri is like, you know, elbowing out.
[ laughter ]
If you look at the bottom of Missouri,
it's got a boot heel sticking into Arkansas.
It's another one of these individual things.
What's, what's with Missouri?
What's with Missouri is the confluence of the Missouri
and the Mississippi River at St. Louis.
That is one powerful economic resource.
So the Missouri, while all states should be created equal, in fact,
Missouri is a little more equal, much as New York is with the Hudson
and the Erie Canal because it could be.
Because it possessed this extraordinary, valuable resource,
particularly in a country that at the time feared Civil War
and the loss of that resource.
So answer number one is Missouri got this northern border that's really
too far north surveyed by a guy named John C. Sullivan.
And in fact, even that line -- I don't know if you can quite tell it
on this map but as it gets east toward the Mississippi River it
starts to veer too far north.   It's no longer straight.

It veers a little north.   It was inaccurately surveyed.

Iowa challenged that boundary.
They challenged -- they couldn't challenge its location
because Missouri was already a state.
But they challenged the inaccuracy of the survey compared to the --
to what he was -- claimed he did.
But what no one could figure out was who told Sullivan to do it?
[ laughter ]
Which is why I asked my wife to get me
"Rules Governing Public Land Surveys in Iowa."
It was for that very line.
And in that book is where I found that Iowa at one point,
I think it was in 1838, wrote
to what is today the Army Corps of Engineers.
At the time it was just a division in the Army that did the surveying
and said, who told Sullivan to draw that line?
And, and they wrote back and they said, well,
all we know is it was a William Rector who was head of surveying
at the time but we don't know why.   So I looked up William Rector.

Well, first of all, he was General Rector at the time.
He was part of the Army, and he was dismissed from the Army
for incompetence and nepotism.   [ laughter ]

So there could have been shady dealings there.
[ laughter ]
And at least I haven't been able to unearth them
if they're even around to be seen.
The other boundary, though, has a more --
the northern boundary of Iowa with Minnesota and the fact
that Minnesota seems outsized is a different story.
Minnesota, if you look at a map, the northern part
of it is all these lakes,
particularly at that time just didn't appear to be land
that would be very valuable for agriculture or other resources.
So even, even Jefferson in this map made Minnesota what it --
you know, a different name for it but made
that region a little larger.
The reason for the southern boundary, the one with Iowa is
that at that line virtually all the waterways north of that line lead
to the Minnesota River so that the watershed goes toward the Minnesota
River and below that line the watersheds go
to the Mississippi River.
Some of, some of Minnesota's watersheds go also
to the Mississippi but, but for the Minnesota River,
they're all north of that line.
So there was a topographical reason for, I think,
for the location on that line.   Female Speaker: I have a question.

The tip in the border, the northern border of South Carolina,
my mother grew up in that area and she says that the surveyors dipped
down because there was an inn with really good cooking
that they wanted to go to.   Now, you know, can you --

Mark Stein: Are you talking about that north --
Female Speaker: Whether -- Mark Stein: I can tell you that's false.
[ laughter ]
No, no state would accept a boundary that was surveyed for that reason.
Are you talking about the North Carolina, South Carolina boundary?
Female Speaker: Yeah, uh-huh.
Mark Stein: That boundary is just a --
I don't know if you want to say it's a comedy of errors,
it depends on which side of the line you're on, I guess.
[ laughter ]   It was one error after another.

It probably would take me too long and I'd mess it
up anyway to try to recount them.
But initially the boundary was supposed to be the Cape Fear River.
Then it had turned out that North Carolina had already deeded land
along the Cape Fear, so Queen Anne relocated it some given number
of miles below the Cape Fear River.
It was supposed to proceed in parallel northwest
to the 35 degree of latitude.
They did that but they missed the 35 degree
of latitude by like 12 or 13 miles.
And so the next time when they surveyed further west they said,
okay, well, we'll correct it.
And so you start getting these, these dips and movements.
There was also an Indian reservation, a Catawba reservation.
It's one of the few times we respected an Indian boundary
in drawing a state line.
So that a map that would have to be a little better than this one --
well, you can almost see it.
There's a little teeny right angle before the curve area in the west.
That's going around the Catawba reservation at that time,
much smaller than it had been, and then following certain branches
of a river to finally get to the crest
of the Appalachians and to follow that.
But no, there's a similar story about a segment
of the North Carolina border
that it takes a sudden straight line south to Georgia.
And the story is that they were in the mountains
so long they really wanted a tavern.   [ laughter ]

And so they went straight to Georgia.
The fact is they were in the middle of moonshine country
and didn't need a tavern and their journals reveal
that they didn't need any other services either.
They were all provided for.   [ laughter ]

Male Speaker: I notice that the eastern tip of West Virginia
on this map is blue indicating it was originally part of Maryland.
Can you talk about that?
Mark Stein: Yeah, that is my inability to click correctly.
That should be orange, yeah.
Male Speaker: Can you talk about the boundary
between Virginia and Maryland?   Mark Stein: Virginia and Maryland?

Male Speaker: Yeah.   Mark Stein: Yeah.

Well, the boundary is from the Colonial Charter
of Maryland is the Potomac River and all
of the Potomac River is Maryland under that boundary.
One problem is that it didn't stipulate whether,
because they didn't know about it then, the north branch
or the south branch would be considered the,
the Potomac River further out.
It is, in fact, the north branch even though the south branch is
larger and, therefore, by tradition would have been the Potomac River
but Virginia was an older, richer colony, deeded that land
to people like Lord Fairfax.
No way was Maryland going to win that battle.
The one effect of that is that in today in Washington, D.C.,
which is the remainder of Maryland's half of the land it gave
to create the city, the Potomac River in Washington is entirely
under the jurisdiction of Washington, D.C..
That's why you'll see D.C. Police boats out there.
It's why when I crossed the Chain Bridge not long ago
and there was an accident, a D.C. cop was in the middle
of the bridge moving traffic.   Sir, I think you had a question.

Male Speaker: Yeah.   If we take

[ unintelligible ]   the Mississippi and

[ unintelligible ]   . Mark Stein: Uh-huh.

Male Speaker: They shift the land   [ unintelligible ]

Mark Stein: Right.
Male Speaker: How does that affect the boundary between the states?
Mark Stein: Right.
Male Speaker: And the Mississippi -- Mark Stein: Right.
Male Speaker: And between the United States and Mexico?
Mark Stein: Right.   Male Speaker:

[ Unintelligible ]   Mark Stein: Yeah.

It's actually two different answers because, one, you're dealing
with an international boundary and some other issues.
But in the case of the Mississippi, also the Missouri River
and the Ohio River and probably some others,
they have either shifted course or had their course shifted
to make them more straight for shipping
or through events there's been accretion and the river has changed.
But in those instances the boundary remains the original boundary
of the state.
I had a -- was on a call-in show and a man called in and said he was
in southern Illinois with his brother hunting and a sheriff came
up and said, "You can't hunt here."
And he said, "No, Sheriff, here's our, here's our license."
He said, "Well, that's an Illinois license."
He said, "You're in Missouri."
He said, "Well, the Mississippi River is over there."
And he said, "Well, it wasn't always over there."
[ laughter ]   "This is still Missouri."

And if you take a close look -- in fact, if there's a second edition
or in the paperback if they'll let me do it,
I want to call more attention to that, that there are boundaries
where the river has shifted.
Now, the Rio Grande gets more complicated because we entered
into a number of agreements with Mexico
and also there was manmade interference
for shipping along the Rio Grande around the --
El Paso, I know, so it gets more complicated.
And frankly more complicated and detailed
than this book even would attempt to, to piece out when you have
that issue with an international border.
John Cole: One more question.   Who's it going to be?

There you go.
Male Speaker: Tell us more about -- or tell us about the Mason
and Dixon, how they came up with favoring Pennsylvania over
[ unintelligible ]   like Maryland got

[ unintelligible ]
. Mark Stein: Well, Maryland's Colonial Charter, every boundary
in it was contested, and every contest Maryland lost.
[ laughter ]
In terms of the Mason-Dixon Line, first of all,
the Mason-Dixon Line is not simply the boundary between Maryland
and Pennsylvania, it's also --
takes a right turn and becomes the boundary between Maryland
and Delaware and then takes a left turn and remains --
is also part of that, that Maryland, Delaware boundary.
They surveyed all of that.   But they came in a little bit later.

Maryland's boundary, northern border, according to its charter,
was 40 degrees north latitude.   It's great.

It's right through the middle of Philadelphia, as it turns out.
[ laughter ]   You got to cut them some slack,

the fact that they didn't always know just
where in the world they were.   I mean, it was hard.

So Pennsylvania definitely wanted to enter
into negotiations with Maryland.
The, the negotiations got all complicated
because once the British ousted the Dutch authorities from here,
Delaware -- Maryland claimed Delaware because it was
within its charter boundaries also.   Maryland was a Catholic colony.

Delaware did not -- was Protestant, Dutch Protestants.
They did not want to be part of a Catholic colony.
Keep in mind that not only burning the witches in Massachusetts,
there's a King of England who lost his head over religious issues.
Catholics and Protestants were killing each other at that time
in much of Europe and in England in particular.
So there was significant fear by Delaware
that they wouldn't want to be part of Maryland.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania, of all places, wants to claim Delaware.
Where do they come off?
Well, they come off because if Delaware is not somehow
under their control, there could be landlocked.
Their access from the Delaware River,
the Delaware Bay could be cut off.   So there's a long negotiation, okay?

And at one point Lord Baltimore is in London going through it again
with the Pennsylvania representatives and he finds
that they're pretty amenable to his recommendation.
He's recommending a border at Cape Henlopen
as the southern border of Delaware.   And they're saying fine.

What he didn't -- and so he said fine to their northern border.
And what he didn't realize was that his map was wrong.
[ laughter ]
And where it showed Cape Henlopen was really Fenwick Island, which is,
in fact, the boundary between the two.
And where he gave them the northern border, though he didn't know it,
I don't know if he ever knew it,
further west he almost cut his state off in two.
But finally they had an agreement and even
when he realized his mistake and said, let's have a do-over,
the crown said forget it, we're done
and let's get the two finest surveyors in England to come
out and, and do this line once and for all
so there will be no more mistakes.
And they got -- I have their names, their first names here.
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to come out and do the line.
They also had to resolve some contradictions in the stipulations
for the Delaware border that simply physically couldn't be done
but they minimized those, those contradictions.
So that's where it did -- it had nothing to do, by the way,
with slavery, the Mason-Dixon Line.
Nothing to do with slavery whatsoever.
Well, thank you all very much.   [ applause ]

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