Statehood and the Shape of a State

Minnesota became the thirty-second state of the Union on May eleventh, eighteen fifty-eight, about nine months before Oregon became the thirty-third. The timing was not accidental. Minnesota's statehood had been expedited by the same political arithmetic that governed all territorial admissions in the decade before the Civil War: the balance of slave and free states in the Senate. Minnesota was admitted as a free state. The vote in Congress was heavily sectional. Oregon followed the same path. Both were being organized into the Union in the window before the question of sectional balance became unanswerable by political means.

The territory that became Minnesota had a complicated administrative history. The land east of the Mississippi River had been part of the Northwest Territory, organized by the Ordinance of seventeen eighty-seven, which prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River. The land west of the Mississippi had been acquired through the Louisiana Purchase of eighteen oh-three and organized through a sequence of territories, Missouri Territory, Michigan Territory, Wisconsin Territory, finally Minnesota Territory in eighteen forty-nine.

Alexander Ramsey, a Pennsylvanian appointed by President Zachary Taylor as Minnesota Territory's first governor, arrived in St. Paul in eighteen forty-nine to find a capital city of perhaps eight hundred people, a territory of perhaps five thousand non-Indian residents, and a land that was still legally and practically the homeland of the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples he had been sent to govern. Ramsey spent much of his first two years in office negotiating the treaties that transferred Dakota land to the United States. He later served as the second governor of the state and as a U.S. Senator.

The state that emerged from that territorial period was enormous, eighty-six thousand square miles, the twelfth-largest state in the union, and its character was shaped from the beginning by the tension between its northern boreal wilderness and its southern agricultural prairie. One part of the state dreamed of iron ore and timber. Another dreamed of wheat. Both dreams came true. Both left consequences that Minnesota is still sorting through.