Colorado's Eighteen Seventy-Six Statehood: Perfectly Timed

Colorado became a state on August first, eighteen seventy-six. Not approximately one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence. Exactly one hundred years and twenty-eight days after, which, given the pace of nineteenth-century congressional action, counts as precise. The nickname followed immediately: the Centennial State. It has not changed.

Getting to statehood had taken four tries and a presidential veto. Congress had passed statehood bills in eighteen sixty-four and again in eighteen sixty-seven. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the second one on the grounds that Colorado's population was insufficient. He was not wrong about the population; the territory held fewer than fifty thousand people at the time. But Johnson's vetoes also reflected the postwar political landscape, in which admitting new states was entangled with Reconstruction politics and the question of which party the new senators would belong to.

The fourth attempt succeeded under President Ulysses Grant, who signed the proclamation on August first. The constitution Colorado submitted was, for its time, notably progressive in specific and documented ways. It included provisions for Black male suffrage, extending voting rights that not every state in the nation recognized. Laws were required to be published in both Spanish and English, reflecting the territory's significant Hispanic population and its pre-American political history in New Mexico and Mexico.

Leadville would strike silver the following year. The Ute removal would happen within five years. The boom that Colorado's statehood announced would be followed, within seventeen years, by one of the most complete economic collapses in American frontier history. The Centennial State got its timing exactly right and spent the next generation finding out what that meant.