Hope you had a good (and if you’re in the U.S., long!) weekend. — Dan

Ohio's Admission Problem

As of this writing, there are fifty states in the United States of America. Hawaii became the 50th state on August 21, 1959, and Alaska gained admission just a few months prior, on January 3 of that same year. Few people are still alive who can recall a time when America had fewer than 48 states.

Assuming you’re OK with laws going into effect 150 years into the past, that is. But don’t worry — because almost everybody is. At least, in this case.

On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as the third President of the United States. At the time, there were only sixteen states — the thirteen original colonies plus Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. But the United States was significantly larger than the footprint of those constituent states. For example, the Northwest Territory — the area making up the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and a small part of Minnesota — was ceded to the United States by the UK as part of the Treaty of Paris (ending the Revolutionary War). The people who moved there wanted to have states of their own, and ultimately, that’s exactly what happened. On April 30, 1802, Congress passed and Thomas Jefferson signed the Enabling Act, which set forth what the people of future Ohio (and other future states to come out of the Northwest Territory) needed to do to become a state of their own.

The process was simple. At its core, the people in Ohio-to-be had to hold a constitutional convention, decide (by majority rule of the delegates) to form a state government and form a state constitution, and then submit that constitution for approval by the United States Congress. And that’s almost what happened. For most of November, a group of about 1,200 met in the town of Chillicothe and drafted the first Ohio Constitution. A majority voted to adopt that constitution and to form a state, and that information was sent off to Washington, D.C., for Congress to approve. On February 19, 1803, Congress passed an act that acknowledged the work of that state constitutional congress. From that point on, Ohio was a state — kind of.

Ohio was set to celebrate its sesquicentennial — that is, its 150th birthday — in 1953. And to help tell the story of the state’s founding, as OhioHistory.org recounts, “some Ohio school teachers headed to Washington, D.C. to obtain copies of documents pertaining to Ohio becoming a state in 1803.” And when they went to the Library of Congress to find the legislation that officially proclaimed Ohio to be the 17th state in the union, they came up empty. No, the Library of Congress didn’t lose the document: the document never existed. Congress, it seemed, screwed up.

The law that Congress enacted in February 1803, as noted above, acknowledged that Ohio had adopted a state constitution, but that’s all it did. As the Athens News highlights, “Congress neglected to approve the Ohio constitution, which they were required to do if Ohio were to be a state.” Ohio probably wasn’t, officially, a state. And that’s a huge problem because for the 150 year period preceding, Ohio had lots of members of Congress and Senators representing its people in Washington.

So, Congress fixed the problem. In January 1953, Congressman Goerge Bender of Ohio sponsored a bill that approved Ohio’s constitution and established it as a state, retroactive to March 1, 1803.

That seemed dicey. Per Athens News, ‘there were some lawsuits here and there, as one might expect. If Congress could go around making retroactive laws for purposes of convenience – and you must admit that Ohio having not been a state for 150 years when everybody thought it was a state would have been one hell of an inconvenience – who knows what other laws they could make retroactive? If you think upon it, you’ll find room for all sorts of mischief.”

But no one in power seemed to mind, at least not in this case. Ohio, it seems, is too important to have not existed for most of American history.

More About Statehood

Today’s Bonus fact: The United States declared its independence in 1776 and drafted the Articles of Confederation the next year (and ratified it in 1781). It was in effect until superseded by the Constitution in 1789, and during that time, another region could have been admitted as an American state: the Canadian province of Quebec. Article IX read “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.” The writers of the Articles defined “Canada” as Quebec, not the country we know today. Quebec never took the United States up on the open invitation.

From the Archives: The Electoral Insurance Policy: The race to admit Nevada into the United States. Also, First Dakota: Which Dakota came first? No one knows.

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And thanks! — Dan