CALIFORNIA, NEVADA, ARIZONA.

JOHN A. SUTTER.

California: Boundless Opportunity

The hat must come off before the military general, the flag staff, and the church, and I preferred a country where I could keep mine on ... where I should be absolute master.

-JOHN A. SUTTER1 On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered in California at Sutter's Mill. The discovery determined the way California would be shaped. Had it not been for John A. Sutter, gold would still have been discovered. Sutter was just lucky-or, as it turned out, unlucky.

Like a moth to a flame, Sutter was attracted to fragile boundaries: geographic, social, and contractual. Born in northern Switzerland, he served in the Swiss military, married, and went into the dry goods business. By the time he was thirty, he had five children, was deeply in debt, and had lost control of his business to his mother-in-law, who had financed it. With the help of his wife, Sutter secretly sold off the store's inventory and fled, arriving in Missouri in 1834. There he established a similar business, became an American citizen, fell deeply into debt, and fled the day before he'd been summoned to appear in court.

During the Missouri years and in the year that followed, Sutter's business pursuits took him to Santa Fe, Oregon, Hawaii, and California. Taken together, these destinations tell us something of his instincts. At the time, none of these locations was within the United States (though it shared, and disputed, Oregon with England). All of them, however, became part of the United States within the next ten years. Sutter, of course, could not have known this. What he could have known was that they were jurisdictionally weak.

John A. Sutter (1803-1880) (photo credit 27.1) Arriving in California in 1839, he sought permission from the Mexican government to establish an agricultural colony. "Governor [Juan Bautista] Alvarado ... was very glad to hear that ... I intended to settle in the interior on the banks of the river Sacramento, because the Indians ... would not allow white men, and particularly of the Spanish origin, to come near them," Sutter recorded in his diary. "I got ... permission to select a territory wherever I would find it convenient."

He selected territory at and around the juncture of the Sacramento and American Rivers, building his settlement's initial structures slightly to the southeast, above the flood plain, and naming it New Helvetia (New Switzerland). Governor Alvarado may have been pleased about the location, but Mexico's regional military commander, General Mariano Vallejo, was not. The area was too far in the interior for Vallejo's forces to a.s.sert control. That fact suited Sutter, who sought a place where he need not remove his hat to anyone. It also suited him that the location was ripe for business, perched along a route used by pioneers heading to the Oregon Territory.

Adding to General Vallejo's concern was the fact that Sutter's initial colony was non-Hispanic, consisting of five American and German men, eight to ten Hawaiians (two of whom were, according to Sutter, wives), one bulldog, and three cannons. The bulldog and cannons provided a measure of security from hostile Indians, but Vallejo knew they could also provide protection from Mexican forces.

Sutter became well known even before gold was discovered at his mill. His importance rated inclusion in an 1844 report to the State Department. "Augustus Sutter, alcade of the new town of New Helvetia ... is a Swiss, and now a citizen of Mexico, and obtained from the government a large tract of land," the U.S. consul in Mexican California informed his superiors. "All parties by land from Oregon or from the United States to California touch at this establishment."2 An alcade was the Mexican government's chief executive and judicial officer for a munic.i.p.ality. Sutter did not possess this authority. He did, however, possess a personality ideally suited for commerce with travelers. A March 1849 item in the magazine Home Journal reveals a good deal of his gregarious character: Captain Sutter ... was one of the officers of the Swiss Guard in the Revolution of July during the reign of Charles X. After this Revolution, he emigrated to the United States.... Capt. Sutter is kind, hospitable, and generous.... Surrounded as he was, on his first settling in this country, by tribes of wild Indians, he has by kindness and just dealing, attached them to his interest.... They, for their food and a pay from four to six dollars per month, man his fort, work his farms and mills, and do all the labor generally required in the new settlement.

Actually, Sutter had been neither a captain nor a Swiss Guard. He had been a sublieutenant in the local reserves. He also appears to have misled the correspondent regarding labor-management relations. He may have paid his Indian workers $4 to $6 a month during the Gold Rush, when labor was scarce in every enterprise other than mining. Before that, however, American dollars were a rarity in what was still Mexican California. So too, for that matter, were pesos in tribal transactions, since payment was generally made in goods.

Still, as the correspondent reports, Sutter did have a character befitting a lord of the manor. To one Indian caught stealing, he imposed a sentence of twenty-fives lashes, which was duly carried out, despite the fact that Mexican law prohibited private citizens from exercising judicial functions.3 Mexican law enforcement, however, was 90 miles downriver in San Francisco.

In 1841 Sutter purchased the Russian-American Company's coastal trading post known as Fort Ross (near present-day Jenner, California). He transported its movable goods and livestock to New Helvetia and held the distant Pacific Coast land as an investment. To finance the purchase, he borrowed from the Russian-American Company, using New Helvetia as collateral. He subsequently took out loans to finance his agricultural, ranching, fur-trapping, and distilling enterprises by putting up portions of his land as collateral, despite the fact that all his land was now mortgaged to the Russian-American Company. The common denominator in these and later transactions was the boundaries that contracts were written to stipulate. Sutter was not big on boundaries.

Loyalty, too, is a boundary, dividing certain actions one will and will not do. Sutter's political loyalties were just as supple regarding that boundary. At the time, Mexico's control of California was being challenged both by native-born californios (under the leadership of Jose Castro, General Vallejo, and Governor Alvarado) and by the United States. After Mexican President Antonio Lpez de Santa Anna replaced Governor Alvarado with Manuel Micheltorena, the new governor sought to secure his authority by offering Sutter clear t.i.tle to all his land in return for a vow of loyalty to Mexico. Sutter avowed it. When General Vallejo confronted Sutter regarding his action, Sutter avowed his loyalty to Vallejo.

After the Mexican War commenced in 1846, Sutter kept the Mexican military informed of events that came to his attention-until events tilted in favor of the U.S. forces. Sutter then sent a letter of support to General John C. Fremont. By adjusting his sails to the prevailing winds, Sutter spent the war years expanding his enterprises. For one such project, the construction of a lumber mill, he partnered with James Marshall, with Sutter providing the financing and Marshall overseeing construction. In Sutter's diary entry for January 28, 1848, he wrote in his less than perfect English, "Marshall arrived in the evening. It was raining very heavy but he told me he came on important business. After we was alone in a private room, he showed me ... specimens of gold. That is, he was not certain if it was gold or not, but he thought it might be."

Four days later, Sutter traveled to the site to see for himself. This may seem blase, but there had been discoveries of gold before in California and each had turned out to be insignificant. By the time he arrived, continual findings of gold suggested that this one could be big.

But there was a hitch. The mill was not on Sutter's land. He and Marshall promptly leased the land and surrounding area from the Yalisumni Indians, making no mention of the gold. The Yalisumnis made no mention of not being the tribe to whom Mexico had accorded the land.

Over the next year, more than 80,000 people flooded into the region. Sutter's debts had left him poorly positioned to profit from the gold or from providing supplies to the prospectors. To make matters worse, their arrival caused Sutter's lax att.i.tude toward boundaries to boomerang, as evidenced by an announcement he published in July 1849: NOTICE TO SQUATTERS.

All persons are hereby cautioned not to settle without my permission on any land of mine in this territory. Said land is bounded as follows: What followed was a lengthy and precise stipulation of boundaries. But Sutter's notice went unheeded due to jurisdictional weakness-the very element that had drawn him to this region. With the Mexican War just ended, Congress had not yet established a territorial government, and the military's forces were depleted by soldiers deserting for the gold fields.

Sutter's land claims Unfortunate as the squatters were for Sutter, something worse was arriving in their wake: jurisdictional strength. California's statehood convention in 1849 marked the imminent establishment of state and federal courts that would become the arena of his undoing.

The statehood convention also established California's borders, and the debates regarding those borders were intense. Two big issues were at stake. Slavery was the more urgent of the two, and its advocates sought to create two states: a Northern and a Southern California-one free, the other slave. The second issue was water. California had very little of it in its south unless it located its border at the Rocky Mountains in order to include the Colorado and Gila Rivers. Such a border, however, would create a huge state. Opponents advocated a border just beyond the gold-filled Sierra Nevada Mountains, extending south to the Colorado River and along that river to the Gulf of California.

Among the delegates to the convention was Sutter, at whose mill all this had begun. Now out of his element, he spoke briefly only once during the proceedings, adding his support to the majority preference: a single state with the more modest eastern border.

Defining California: four proposals Meanwhile, the Russian-American Company commenced legal action to foreclose on New Helvetia owing to Sutter's many missed payments. The crisis was averted by the arrival of Sutter's eldest son, August (soon followed by the rest of the family, from whom Sutter had been apart for twenty years). To delay foreclosure, Sutter transferred t.i.tle to all his property to August. August proceeded to have plans drawn up for a town in the squatter-populated area at the juncture of the rivers. He named it Sacramento. Sutter objected vehemently to the plan, both because it was in a floodplain and because he had been trying to sell lots for a town of Sutterville, located on higher ground three miles below the juncture.4 But demand was so high for real estate at the point of entry, August was able to pay off all his father's debts. Sutter then invested in gold mines, using as collateral property that was now in his son's name.5 Sutter's tangled t.i.tle claims soon became a gold mine for lawyers, representing or suing not only Sutter but also those who had bought land from him to which his t.i.tle was dubious. The Chicago Tribune reported in July 1858: Judge Hoffman, of the United States District Court, rejected the claim of Milton Little for 22,197 acres of land opposite Sacramento City. This claim is founded on an alleged grant from Mexico, and among the papers offered in evidence were two certificates signed by [John A.] Sutter and dated in 1845. Judge Hoffman declares himself satisfied that one of these was written in 1857 and ante-dated, and he expresses a suspicion of the good faith of the other. This is the second case in which Judge Hoffman has declared certificates of Sutter dated previous to the American conquest to have been written since and ante-dated.

Not only in the courts but in the streets, the forces of organization were increasingly challenging Sutter's claims. The squatters now formed themselves into a political a.s.sociation: Whereas, the evidence that the land in Sacramento County belongs to the United States is becoming clear and more positive everyday....

Resolved, that we will hold our hold [sic] peaceably, if we can-forcibly, if we must-till a decision shall be had upon this question in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Resolved, that if the bail of an arrested squatter be refused, simply because the bondsman is not a landholder under Capt. Sutter, we shall consider all executions issued in consequence thereof as acts of illegal force and shall act accordingly.6 Sutter's claims ultimately made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the decorum of which was also disrupted by his disregard for boundaries. Two attorneys claimed to be his representative. Once resolved, the legal arguments-involving "conveyances," "pet.i.tions for surplus," and "parol evidence"-decorously masked the fact that they had been the cause of bloodshed and death in Sacramento. In February 1859 the Supreme Court announced its ruling. It affirmed Sutter's claim to his original land grant by Governor Alvarado but rejected his second (and twice as large) claim. That claim was based on Governor Micheltorena having sweepingly cleared any rival claims, in return for Sutter's vow of loyalty to Mexican President Santa Anna.

The decision caused the collapse of Sutter's shaky finances. His remaining hope was to find a means of keeping his home and the farmland on which it sat. Relief came in 1864, when California provided him with a pension of $250 per month.

Through it all, Sutter remained unchanged. In 1865 a discharged soldier whom he had hired to do odd jobs was caught stealing. Sutter, ever the lord of the manor, ordered the man flogged-as illegal under American law as it had been when he'd done the same under Mexican law. This time Sutter paid a price, similarly without regard to the boundaries of law. "The old adobe residence of General Sutter ... together with its valuable contents, was destroyed by fire on Wednesday morning, the 21st," San Francisco's Evening Bulletin reported. "The fire was the work of an incendiary [arsonist], supposed to be a discharged soldier, who had been hanging about the premises the past few days."

With everything in ashes, the Sutters left California, relocating in Lit.i.tz, Pennsylvania. Sutter spent his remaining years seeking to salvage something of the fortune that had slipped through his fingers. Shuttling between Lit.i.tz and Washington, DC, he had entreaties to Congress prepared on his behalf. "Now in his old age, and in a state of absolute penury," one such plea stated, "he asks not for one cent for such aid as he rendered to his adopted and profoundly honored government in the extension of its domain to the borders of the Pacific Ocean, and ... the untold treasures of California. He asks only that the government shall secure to him so much of its unsold public lands as it has caused to be unjustly taken from him, or its equivalent in money."7 Every new Congress, over a period of fifteen years, considered another of his appeals. While in Washington continuing his efforts in 1880, Sutter died at the age of seventy-eight. Congress no longer had to decide what it thought about John A. Sutter.

ARIZONA, NEW MEXICO.

JAMES GADSDEN.

Government Aid to Big Business

If the Union is to continue to be bounded as it has been extended, from the Atlantic to the Pacific ... measures must be adapted to bring nearer together the extremes, by these iron highways which, in stimulating social and commercial intercourse, const.i.tute the strongest bonds of political harmony.

-JAMES GADSDEN, PRESIDENT, SOUTH CAROLINA RAILROAD COMPANY The life of James Gadsden reveals that there is nothing new about powerful lobbyists winning government funds to support their special interests. Nor is there anything new about individuals leaving high-level government jobs for corporate positions from which they operate as influential lobbyists. Gadsden was an adjutant general in the U.S. Army who left government service and became a railroad president-a railroad president later appointed by President Franklin Pierce to purchase land from Mexico for the purpose of building a railroad. The Gadsden Purchase, which the United States acquired in 1853, also resolved a lingering boundary dispute between the two countries. It now forms the southern end of Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.

James Gadsden was born in 1788 to a distinguished South Carolina family. His grandfather had been a delegate to the Continental Congress and, later, a brigadier general in the war itself. After graduating from Yale and serving in the military, Gadsden became the president of the South Carolina Ca.n.a.l and Rail Road Company. In that capacity, he saw opportunities to connect the South via rail to gold-rich California and ports on the Pacific. A firm believer in slavery, he also saw in the newly acquired western lands the opportunity-indeed, the necessity-to secure its continued legality through additional congressional votes from new slave states. Toward that end, Gadsden joined an effort under way to divide California in two, with slavery permitted in the southern half. To encourage the legislature via the prospect of bringing development to spa.r.s.ely populated (mostly by Mexican Americans) Southern California, he sent a pet.i.tion in 1852 bearing 1,200 signatures of people seeking permission to establish a district that would be farmed by "African Domestics."1 Slavery was a hotly contested issue in California. Gadsden's plan aroused debate but went nowhere.

James Gadsden (1788-1858) (photo credit 28.1) The Gadsden Purchase When President Franklin Pierce decided the United States should seek to purchase land from Mexico, Gadsden was ideally situated for the appointment-just as appointments today often go to corporate executives whose resumes include previous government positions and powerful politicians as references.

The reason the southern railroads said they needed this Mexican land was that it contained mountain pa.s.ses that did not exist elsewhere in the region. One such pa.s.s, in the area still under dispute, was so important that the town where it was situated had been named after it: El Paso.

Still, the purchase of land for the purpose of building a railroad triggered a three-way clash of political power, ideals, and pork. Abolitionists believed the government should not actively promote the economy of the slave-holding South. Southerners responded with outrage, though others in the South who were troubled by slavery argued that promoting industry in the region would help build an economy that need not depend on slavery to be financially viable.

Ideals and pork also came into conflict. Southerners' commitment to states' rights had previously led them to oppose federal expenditures for road and bridge construction. Such projects, they believed, were the responsibility of the states. Once the federal government entered in, they argued, it would open the door to ever-increasing centralization of power. Indeed, history has proven them right.

But in this instance most leaders left their ideals on the campaign trail and reached for the pork. Railroads, after all, were beginning to shift the flow of commerce through the north, rather than along the waterways leading to the Mississippi River. Moreover, even if the Southern states could have afforded the $10 million price tag for the Gadsden Purchase, they were barred by the Const.i.tution from negotiating a treaty with another country.

Faced with these realities, the South's two foremost advocates for states' rights, Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun, found ways to justify federal involvement in the building of a southern transcontinental railroad. Davis, at the time secretary of war in the Pierce administration, maintained that federal expenditures to enable such a railroad were legitimate because it might be needed for national defense.2 And while Calhoun, in his keynote address to the 1845 Memphis Commercial Convention, a.s.serted that building railroads was beyond the purview of Congress, he allowed as to how the government, as owner of the land on which such a railroad would be built, could grant alternate sections of the land to the railroads, since such grants would raise the value of the land the government retained.

Gadsden was also present at that convention. It was there that he proposed two possible routes for such a railroad-one terminating in San Diego and the other in Mazatln, a port on the Mexican coast opposite the southern tip of Baja California. San Diego, at that time, was also in Mexico. Since federal investment, not an agreement with Mexico, was the issue at hand, how were the Memphis conventioneers planning to pull this off? War with Mexico?

Less than a year later, that's exactly what happened. What they were thinking in 1845 may be suggested by what surfaced in 1853 when Gadsden received his instructions regarding the purchase. He was authorized to spend up to $65 million to acquire a region that included most of what are now the Mexican states of Baja California, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo Len, and Tamaulipas.

Gadsden's mission, 1853 Gadsden's mission sparked a new voice of opposition in the person of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, whose doubts began with the underlying premise that the land was necessary in order to build a southern railroad through the Rockies: We have a fine ... route on the parallels of 34 and 35, by Albuquerque, corresponding with the center of the southern states. The route gained by the [Gadsden] treaty is not even a sectional route. It is too far south to be southern. It is not only beyond the center, but beyond the limits and lat.i.tudes of the southern states; and is besides ... through country so utterly desolate, desert, and G.o.d forsaken that Kit Carson says even a wolf could not make his living upon it.

Benton went on to speculate regarding a darker causes for locating a railroad so far south: What is the reason of this strange deflection? I will tell you.... The city of New San Diego. Here it is-[holding up a map]-here it is, and with explanatory notes showing that it is a "port." ... New San Diego, then, is the governing point in the southern proposed railroad route to the Pacific Ocean. And who owns this city on the map which has suddenly become a governing point in our legislation and diplomacy? It is said to belong to the military.

To Benton, a railroad located so far south, when considered with the fact that Gadsden had been authorized to acquire far more of Mexico, suggested that proslavery interests sought to expand the South-through purchase, if possible; through military actions, if necessary-and consequently increase the number and influence of slave states.

Benton's claim of an alternate southern rail route Why then would Mexico be willing to sell? Not because it wanted to. The United States was its greatest threat. Even as Gadsden was in Mexico City seeking to purchase a wide swath of territory, a privately raised army of Americans under the leadership of William Walker illegally invaded spa.r.s.ely populated Baja California and briefly declared it an independent republic before being chased out by local Mexicans. Fortunately for Gadsden, however, Mexico was burdened by $17 million of debt from its recent war with the United States. President Santa Anna therefore grudgingly agreed to sell only enough land to raise sufficient funds to enable his military to defend against further incursions by the United States.

The agreement was sent to Washington for approval. Gadsden then pursued the purchase of the rest of the land the United States sought by not so privately meeting with revolutionary elements in Mexico. To further unsettle Santa Anna, he told the Mexican president "the spirit of the age" was such that these northern regions of Mexico would eventually secede to join the United States, so he might as well sell them now.3 Santa Anna responded by having his amba.s.sador in Washington demand that President Pierce recall Gadsden. Pierce expressed his understanding and respect to the amba.s.sador and did nothing. Later, when the agreement was being finalized by the U.S. Senate, Gadsden offended virtually every Mexican by telling Americans living in the country to ignore a call to illuminate all homes in celebration of Mexico's Independence Day.4 President Pierce then sent word to Gadsden to come home.

James Gadsden did not live to see the railroad for which he had labored so long. He died in 1858. The railroad was delayed by the approach and outbreak of the Civil War. Only after Union troops secured the Southwest in 1862 did planning and construction begin. As it turned out, Senator Benton had been right. Adequate pa.s.ses did exist through the mountains north of the Gadsden Purchase, and in laying out its main line, the Southern Pacific Railroad did not pa.s.s through the Gadsden Purchase.

TEXAS, NEW MEXICO, OKLAHOMA, KANSAS, NEBRASKA.

(SOUTH DAKOTA, NORTH DAKOTA, COLORADO, WYOMING, MONTANA).

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS.

The Line on Slavery: Erasing and Redrawing

The issues between Mr. Lincoln and myself ... are direct, unequivocal, and irreconcilable. He goes for uniformity in our domestic inst.i.tutions, for a war of sections, until one or the other shall be subdued. I go for the ... right of the people to decide for themselves.

-FROM THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas established more present-day state lines than any other individual. Two of those borders later resulted in the location of even more state borders than he had directly established. In addition, because of his role in creating the present-day boundaries of Texas-New Mexico, Oklahoma-Kansas, and Kansas-Nebraska, Douglas twice prevented the United States from breaking apart over slavery. What more must one do to become president? (Answer: Run against someone other than Abraham Lincoln.) Actually, Douglas beat Lincoln in their 1858 Senate race. That was the election during which the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates took place. It was also after Douglas had created the boundaries that temporarily averted the Civil War. Illinois voters loved Douglas for this achievement, since the state was economically connected to both North and South. It was connected to the North through the Great Lakes to the Erie Ca.n.a.l. It was connected to the South through its rivers, virtually all of which flow to the Mississippi.

Stephen A. Douglas (1813-1861) (photo credit 29.1) As a towering figure in the struggle to avert the Union's breakup, Douglas, a short man, was known as "the Little Giant." Like the towering Lincoln, he rose from difficult circ.u.mstances. Born in Vermont in 1813, Douglas was only three months old when his father died. After his schooling, he relocated to Illinois at the age of twenty-again, much like Lincoln, who migrated to Illinois at twenty-one. Both men undertook the study of law.

Within two years of his arrival, Douglas was elected to the state legislature, where he served with another newly elected young legislator. (Need I say who?) Douglas looked back at those days (through politically tinted gla.s.ses) during the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates: Lincoln is one of those peculiar men who perform with admirable skill everything which they undertake.... He was just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot-race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper; could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together; and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse-race or fist-fight excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody that was present and partic.i.p.ated.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates, stripped of their backhanded compliments and oratorical ornaments, were about slavery. More precisely, they were about Douglas's record in the U.S. Senate regarding slavery: his coauthorship of the Compromise of 1850 and sole authorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Today these laws are mainly names memorized for tests. Back then they tested the nation's ability to survive. The Compromise of 1850 created a crack in America's largest political dam; the Kansas-Nebraska Act caused the dam to collapse.

That dam was the Missouri Compromise, enacted in 1820 to settle the slavery disputes that had flared anew after the Louisiana Purchase. It stipulated that no new state or territory north of 3630' could have slavery, with the exception of Missouri. It blocked the conflict well enough for the Louisiana Purchase, and even when Texas later joined the nation. But after the vast acquisition of lands in the Mexican War, the South could see that continuing the dividing line at 3630 would no longer maintain parity between free states and slave states. Added to the South's concerns were California (filled with gold) and New Mexico (filled with Mexicans). These three issues created an explosive political mix.

Slave and free states, 1848 California had organized its own boundaries without waiting for congressional authorization-boundaries so large that they crossed the Missouri Compromise line. But Congress had yet to vote on whether or not to accept those boundaries.

The region now known as New Mexico was populated by people who had not sought to join the United States. Minimizing their potential animosity was crucial, since their population was centered in Santa Fe, easily accessible to Mexico. The Polk administration a.s.sured the region's residents that, unless their local laws violated the Const.i.tution, their laws would remain in force. Their laws prohibited slavery.

Both the events in California and the emerging territory of New Mexico raised hopes in the North and caused alarms in the South. A new level of intensity infused editorials in Southern newspapers. "It was to be hoped that the rapacity of the ... North would have been satisfied with having monopolized the whole of California," Georgia's Savannah Morning News commented, "and that for the sake of appearances at least, they would for a time have abstained from any interference with the territory lying contiguous to, and belonging to, the slave states."

Stephen Douglas was now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, which had responsibilities for proposing where territorial boundaries would be located and for structuring territorial governments. If his committee chose to deviate from the Missouri Compromise, it could send such legislation to the Senate floor. Because the Missouri Compromise was the lynchpin in the dispute over slavery in new territories, Chairman Douglas was sitting in a highly precarious chair. It was the chair in which he most wanted to sit; if he could sufficiently satisfy both North and South, his chances of winning the presidency would be greatly enhanced.

He sought to achieve that goal through the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills dealing with California statehood, the creation of the New Mexico Territory, the Texas-New Mexico boundary, slave trade in the District of Columbia, and fugitive slaves. Taken together, they were designed to counterbalance each other in terms of the slavery dispute.

Douglas himself wrote the bills involving New Mexico. In his Texas-New Mexico boundary bill, the United States purchased land from Texas (still greatly in debt from its years as a republic) and annexed that land to New Mexico. In his bill creating the New Mexico Territory, its citizens were allowed to decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery. The same choice was also given to California. The Missouri Compromise was set aside.

Douglas believed the Missouri Compromise was more than set aside; he believed it was eliminated. Most important, he believed the nation's inability to reach agreement on slavery had now been resolved by a larger issue on which the nation did agree: democracy, whereby the people decide. "It was one of the great merits of the compromise measures of 1850," Douglas told his fellow senators, "that they furnished a principle ... to prevent any strife, any controversy, any sectional agitation in the future.... A geographical line had been abandoned and repudiated by the Congress of the United States and, in lieu of it, the plan of leaving each territory free to decide the question for itself was adopted."

Indeed, Douglas's approach to ending the nation's division over slavery succeeded in 1850, though it did so by dividing the divisions. Some on both sides accepted it; others on both sides did not. The editors of Georgia's Macon Weekly Telegraph were shocked and offended that the legislation had given New Mexicans the right to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, declaring in September: Is there any outrage, is there any farce, too gross to be perpetrated on any Southern right, or to be approved under ... [the] new-found discovery of the inherent right of a people of a territory to sovereignty? ... The submission of the South will soon find that, although their sense of honor and their regard for right is extinct, yet the position they have a.s.sumed of being kicked by the North indefinitely is quite as uncomfortable even to timid servility.

In October, up in Vermont, the editors of Brattleboro's Weekly Eagle were equally outraged: There is joy in Washington ... over the "Settlement of our Slavery Difficulties." ... The consent of certain citizens to forego their purpose of dissolving this Union ... is deemed an occasion suited to these demonstrations of joy and thankfulness. We infer from the nature and magnitude of the concession made to slavery, that free men have been greatly in the wrong. We have been guilty of some grave offence for which severe atonement was demanded.

Amid the clamor, the public failed to notice that the new Texas-New Mexico boundary, for which Douglas was responsible, set the stage for future states in a way that transcended the issue of slavery. Time would show that Douglas had located the boundary precisely for the future division of the New Mexico Territory into two states, virtually equal in size, thus providing a maximum buffer for New Mexico's Hispanic citizens, who greatly feared Texans (see "Francisco Perea and John Watts" in this book). It is one of the three most brilliant straight lines on the American map.

The other two equally brilliant straight lines were drawn by the same man. They resulted from the fact that the Compromise of 1850 did not, as Douglas had hoped, end the debate over slavery. It flared up yet again in December 1853, when Douglas sent to the Senate floor his committee's bill for the creation of Nebraska. Ironically, what reignited the debate was that aspect of Douglas's bill that he thought had settled the argument: popular sovereignty. In this instance, however, popular sovereignty had the opposite effect than it had had in the Compromise of 1850. It now raised hopes in the South and alarms in the North. A Mississippi newspaper claimed that Douglas's Nebraska bill "will put to the test professions which have been made by the Northern men," while an Ohio paper described the bill as "a crazy, dangerous, and dishonorable effort to break down the Missouri Compromise."1 Douglas was not discouraged. He believed he had the key; the problem had to do with the door. The nation needed two doors: one opening on Nebraska, the other on a territory called Kansas, carved from the southern end of his original Nebraska proposal. Creating the two territories simultaneously made it possible that one would choose slavery and the other would not.

Douglas's 1850 boundary line antic.i.p.ating future New Mexico and Arizona Douglas introduced the revised bill in January 1854, and indeed it did make a difference. Although Northerners continued shaking their fists, they now added insults aimed at Douglas. "Year after year we have warned those who have been disposed to yield much to the South for sake of harmony," an editorial in New Jersey's Trenton State Gazette declared, disparaging the Little Giant of the Senate by adding, "Now we find the Missouri Compromise, always regarded with religious faith by its great originator, Henry Clay, attacked by a pygmy statesman."

Douglas's addition of Kansas also made a difference in the South. They now resumed shaking their fists. But, unlike the North, they did not shake them at Douglas. They shook them at the North for continuing to shake their fists, even after Douglas's two-state response to northern fist shaking. The conflicts were becoming increasingly complex. Each camp, however, believed the matter was becoming increasingly clear. "We have never read speeches which more completely and irrefragably established what [the Kansas-Nebraska Act] proposed to do, than have the efforts of the friends of Mr. Douglas' Bill," the Macon Weekly Telegraph a.s.serted. "The enemies of the measure have in every instance been ... forced to take some poor pitiful shift of abolition, maudlin cant, or irrelevant discussion."

As with the Compromise of 1850, the furor over slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska Act diverted attention from the significance of Douglas's boundary lines. Though he originally proposed that Kansas's southern border be located, quite logically, adjacent to Texas at 3630', shortly after the bill was introduced he shifted the border to 37. This shift left a gap of one-half of one degree. Today that gap is the Oklahoma Panhandle. Why did Douglas do this? "The southern boundary of the proposed territory ... is on the line of 3630'," Douglas noted when introducing the amendment to shift the boundary, explaining, "[My] attention has been called, by the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, to the fact that that boundary would divide the Cherokee country; whereas, by taking the parallel of 37 north lat.i.tude as the southern boundary, the line would run between the Cherokees and the Osages."

That sounded plausible ... except for the fact that American Indian boundaries were unaffected by state lines. Two weeks later, Senator William Sebastian, the committee chairman to whom Douglas referred, revealed the truer reason when he stated on the floor of the Senate, "[My] committee is maturing a policy which ... directly affects the terms and conditions upon which the t.i.tle of the Indians to the lands guaranteed to them by treaty, within the proposed limits of these territories, is to be extinguished." Shifting the line simplified the task of extinguishing various Indian treaties.

In addition, the shift enhanced the geometry for future states-though it left that pesky gap. With a boundary at 37 as a baseline, two tiers of equally s.p.a.ced future states emerged. One was a tier of prairie states: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, each having three degrees of height. Just to their west was a tier of mountainous states: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, each with four degrees of height.