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Born in Virginia on October 22, 1811 and raised in
Kentucky, eighteen-year-old Stevens T. Mason came to the Michigan Territory
in 1830 when his father was appointed territorial secretary. A year later,
when the elder Mason resigned and left Michigan, President Andrew Jackson
appointed the younger Mason to serve as his father’s replacement. When
Michigan Territorial governor George B. Porter died in July 1834, Mason
became acting governor. Among Mason’s first actions was to make Michigan a
state.
Mason faced enormous problems. Congress denied
Michigan’s move toward statehood because of an uncertainty over who owned a
nearly 500-square-mile tract of land known as the Toledo Strip. Both
Michigan and Ohio claimed the land, which included the mouth of the Maumee
River. Ohio wanted Toledo because it planned to connect Lake Erie with the
Mississippi River via rivers and canals. The original controversy stemmed
from a Northwest Ordinance provision that stipulated an east and west line
drawn through the southernmost point of Lake Michigan would be the
north-south dividing line between the future states of Ohio and Michigan.
Depending on who surveyed the line, it ended up in either Ohio or Michigan.
During the summer of 1835, Michiganians and Ohioans
struggled to assert ownership over the strip. The result was the bloodless
Toledo War. The struggle reached a climax in early September when the “boy
governor” (a nickname Mason hated) led a Michigan “army” to Toledo to stop
Ohio from formally proclaiming ownership of the Toledo Strip. Mason’s
actions led a frustrated President Jackson to fire that “young hotspur” and
appoint another territorial governor.
Despite the distractions of this border “war,”
Michiganians gathered in Detroit and prepared a state constitution in the
spring. On October 5, 1835, voters approved the state constitution and
elected Mason governor of a state that did not exist. On November 2, 1835,
Mason was inaugurated Michigan’s first governor. Aware that bringing
Michigan into the Union was beyond his power, Mason adjourned the
legislature until February 1836. Surely by then, Mason believed, Congress
would have acted to invite the territory to become a state.
In June 1836—after much debate--Congress proposed that
Michigan relinquish claims to the Toledo Strip in exchange for the western
Upper Peninsula. (Accepting Michigan’s claim to the Toledo Strip meant that
both Indiana and Illinois would have to scale back their northern
boundaries. It was a presidential election year and the combined electoral
votes of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana totaled thirty-five, while Michigan’s
paltry electoral votes stood at three. Michigan did not stand a chance.) A
bitter Mason accepted the compromise, telling his citizens to “discard
excited feeling” and avoid any actions that might cause “permanent loss and
lasting injury to ourselves and the nation.”
It would not be easy, but finally on January 26, 1837,
Michigan joined the Union.
Governor Mason worked hard to develop the nation’s
twenty-sixth state. He ordered a state geological survey, endorsed an
innovative education plan for a state-directed free school system, proposed
the University of Michigan be established at Ann Arbor, recommended a ship
canal be built around the falls at Sault Ste. Marie and promoted a grandiose
improvement plan that included roads and railroads.
Easily reelected in 1837, Mason ran into trouble when a
severe depression swept the nation in the late 1830s. He became the
scapegoat for Michigan’s problems—most notably a botched $5 million loan to
build railroads and canals. Publicly abused and slandered by his political
opponents, a depressed and discouraged Mason did not seek a third term.
Instead, he moved to New York City in 1841, where he practiced law.
On January 4, 1843, the thirty-one-year-old Mason died
from pneumonia and was buried in New York City. Decades later, the Michigan
legislature brought the governor’s remains back to Detroit where they rest
to this day.
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