|
The Toledo War (1835–36), also known as the Michigan–Ohio War, was the almost bloodless boundary dispute between the U.S. state of Ohio and the adjoining territory of Michigan. Originating from conflicting state and federal legislation passed between 1787 and 1805, the dispute resulted from poor understanding of geographical features of the Great Lakes at the time. Varying interpretations of the law caused the governments of Ohio and Michigan to both claim sovereignty over a region along the border, now known as the Toledo Strip. When Michigan petitioned for statehood in 1835, it sought to include the disputed territory within its boundaries; Ohio's congressional delegation was in turn able to stall Michigan's admission to the Union. Beginning in 1835, both sides passed legislation attempting to force the other side's capitulation. Ohio's governor Robert Lucas and Michigan's 24-year-old "Boy Governor" Stevens T. Mason were both unwilling to cede jurisdiction of the Strip, so they raised militias and helped institute criminal penalties for citizens submitting to the other's authority. The militias were mobilized and sent to positions on opposite sides of the Maumee River near Toledo, but besides mutual taunting there was little interaction between the two forces. The single military confrontation of the "war" ended with a report of shots being fired into the air, incurring no casualties. During the summer of 1836, Congress proposed a compromise whereby Michigan gave up its claim to the strip in exchange for its statehood and approximately three-quarters of the Upper Peninsula. The compromise was considered a poor outcome for Michigan; nearly all of the Upper Peninsula was still Indian territory at the time. Voters in a state convention in September soundly rejected the proposal. In December 1836, the Michigan government, facing a dire financial crisis and pressure from Congress and President Andrew Jackson, called another convention (called the "Frost-bitten Convention") which accepted the compromise that resolved the Toledo War. The later discovery of copper and iron deposits and the plentiful timber in the Upper Peninsula more than offset Michigan's economic loss in surrendering Toledo. == Origins == In 1787, the Congress of the Confederation enacted the Northwest Ordinance, which created the Northwest Territory in what is now the upper Midwestern United States. The Ordinance specified that the territory was eventually to be divided into "not less than three nor more than five" future states. It was determined that the north-south boundary for three of these states was to be "an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan."〔.〕 At the time, the actual location of this extreme was unknown. The most highly regarded map of the time, the "Mitchell Map", placed it at a latitude near the mouth of the Detroit River. This meant that the entire shoreline of Lake Erie west of Pennsylvania would have belonged to the state that was to become Ohio. When Congress passed the Enabling Act of 1802, which authorized Ohio to begin the process of becoming a U.S. state, the language defining Ohio's northern boundary differed slightly from that used in the Northwest Ordinance: the border was to be "an east and west line drawn through the southern extreme of Lake Michigan, running east ... until it shall intersect Lake Erie or the territorial line (Canada ); thence with the same, through Lake Erie to the Pennsylvania line aforesaid." Because the territorial boundary line between the U.S. and Canada ran through the middle of Lake Erie and then up the Detroit River, combined with the prevailing belief regarding the location of the southern tip of Lake Michigan, the framers of the 1802 Ohio Constitution believed it was the intent of Congress that Ohio's northern boundary should certainly be north of the mouth of the Maumee River, and possibly even of the Detroit River. Ohio would thus be granted access to most or all of the Lake Erie shoreline west of Pennsylvania, and any other new states carved out of the Northwest Territory would have access to the Great Lakes via Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior.〔.〕 During the Ohio Constitutional Convention in 1802, the delegates allegedly received reports from a fur trapper that Lake Michigan extended significantly farther south than had previously been believed (or mapped). Thus, it was possible that an east-west line extending east from Lake Michigan's southern tip may have intersected Lake Erie somewhere east of Maumee Bay, or worse, may not have intersected the lake at all; the farther south that Lake Michigan actually extended, the more land Ohio would lose, perhaps even the entire Lake Erie shoreline west of Pennsylvania.〔 Addressing this contingency, the Ohio delegates included a provision in the draft Ohio constitution that if the trapper's report about Lake Michigan's position was correct, the state boundary line would be angled slightly northeast so as to intersect Lake Erie at the "most northerly cape of the Miami () Bay." This provision would guarantee that most of the Maumee River watershed and all of the southern shore of Lake Erie west of Pennsylvania would fall in Ohio.〔 The draft constitution with this proviso was accepted by the United States Congress, but before Ohio's admission to the Union in February 1803, the proposed constitution was referred to a Congressional committee. The committee's report stated that the clause defining the northern boundary depended on "a fact not yet ascertained" (the latitude of the southern extreme of Lake Michigan), and the members "thought it unnecessary to take it (provision ), at the time, into consideration."〔.〕 When Congress created the Michigan Territory in 1805, it used the Northwest Ordinance's language to define the territory's southern boundary, which therefore differed from that in Ohio's state constitution. This difference, and its potential ramifications, apparently went unnoticed at the time, but it established the legal basis for the conflict that would erupt 30 years later.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Toledo War」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|