How the States Got Their Shapes Too

by Mark Stein

  This field of failures was the terrain into which Norton ventured in 1990. Over the years, the struggle had become further complicated by the terrain dividing into various battlefields: statehood, retrocession to Maryland, territorial status, and limited voting rights. But risky terrain for fundamental rights had always attracted her. Though a rookie in Congress and, as a nonvoting delegate, batting without a bat, she made her play within months of her election. The Washington Post reported:

  Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton … acknowledging that statehood faces an uphill battle, introduced legislation that would create the state of New Columbia.… Under Norton’s bill, the boundaries of the new state would be the same as the District’s, excluding the Mall and other federal landmarks such as the White House. These would be made part of a federal enclave that would remain under direct congressional control.… Critics have long contended that the Constitution would have to be amended to achieve statehood.

  Over the years, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have consistently opposed or supported DC statehood. During his 1991–92 presidential campaign, Democrat Bill Clinton supported DC statehood despite having opposed it as the governor of Arkansas.6 Likewise, among present-day Republicans there are some who maintain that Congress can extend voting representation to DC residents without having to amend the Constitution. Two of the most prominent of such Republicans are Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and Kenneth Starr, a former federal judge appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, then appointed solicitor general by President George H. W. Bush, and later selected to be the independent counsel investigating misconduct by President Clinton.7 In his 2004 testimony before Congress, Starr pointed out:

  The judiciary has rightly shown great deference where Congress announces its considered judgment that the District should be considered a “State” for specific legislative purposes.… In 1949, the Supreme Court’s Tidewater decision … confirmed what is now the law: the Constitution’s use of the word “State” in Article III cannot mean “and not of the District of Columbia.” Identical logic supports legislation to enfranchise the District’s voters: the use of the word “State” in Article I cannot bar Congress from exercising its plenary authority [over the District] to extend the franchise to the District’s voters.

  Despite the fact that Starr and Hatch agreed that the Constitution need not be amended to provide voting representation to the District, politicians from both parties continued to invoke the need for a constitutional amendment in order to cloak other concerns. “Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton bristled several times when witnesses contended that the proposed statehood legislation is unconstitutional,” the Washington Post reported in March 1992, when her bill was under consideration by the House Committee on the District of Columbia. The following month, the committee sent Norton’s bill to the floor of the House. With every (nonretiring) member of the House having to face the voters in November, opponents of representation for the District now uncloaked their actual concerns. “President Bush recently criticized a District law expanding homosexual rights,” the Post reported in a May 1992 article headlined, “Statehood Stirs Up Opposition.” The article quoted a mass mailing by Senator Jesse Helms that told voters, “I’ve already got my hands full fighting the far-left, ultra-liberals in Congress. And the last thing I need is having to battle Jesse Jackson.” (At the time, African American leader Jesse Jackson lived in the District of Columbia.)

  This opposition effort, which its backers ratcheted up as the November election approached, succeeded. “Citing recent overwhelming defeats for the District on issues such as the death penalty and gay rights, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said she will not ask lawmakers to vote on statehood before they adjourn,” the Post announced in October. “Norton said she remains upbeat about statehood’s chances for several reasons, including the chance that Bill Clinton might be elected President.”

  Following the election of President Clinton, Norton again introduced a proposal for DC statehood. The bill’s supporters emphasized that the population of the District exceeded those of Alaska, Wyoming, and Vermont, that District residents paid taxes and served in the military just as other Americans did, and that the Constitution did not prevent Congress from granting voting rights to the District. Norton spoke to the issue’s core. “We are debating whether at last to grant full citizenship to a group of people on whom every duty of citizenship has been imposed,” she stressed on the House floor. “This nation was formed precisely because Americans paid taxes to a sovereign who afforded them no representation. The animating principle of American democracy has been no taxation without representation.”

  Michigan Representative John Dingell, one of the most powerful Democrats in the House, spoke in opposition to DC statehood. “I have heard many, many complaints about people being denied constitutional rights,” he responded. “There is no constitutional right whatsoever that is being denied to the citizens here. If they do not like the way the government is run, they can pack up and move out.”

  Dingell was not the only Democrat opposed to DC statehood. Though the Democrats constituted a majority of the House of Representatives, the measure failed 277 to 153.

  This defeat was followed by another. The era’s political winds were propelling the Republican Party into increasingly conservative positions and, via those same winds, increasing popularity. In the 1995 congressional elections, the Republicans won a majority of the seats in the House and maintained that majority for the next twelve years. During this time, Norton knew she needed to adjust her tactics. Since a core belief of the Republicans was that the nation benefited from tax relief, Norton sought to persuade her Republican colleagues via that aspect of the District’s status. The Post reported this shift in February 1995:

  Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s representative on Capitol Hill, has long advocated D.C. statehood by arguing that the city’s situation constitutes “taxation without representation.”. Norton has come up with a new plan: no representation, no taxation. This week, she introduced legislation to exempt District residents from paying federal taxes.… Norton’s plan probably won’t become reality soon. The federal government … is not likely to give up $1.6 billion in revenue.

  This effort failed, as the Post had predicted.

  In addition to the challenges in Congress, Norton has also faced challenges from those residents in the District who believe she should pursue other avenues toward representation. “Eleanor Homes Norton is a 10-term delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.… Douglass Sloan is a Ward 4 advisory neighborhood commissioner.… He wants her job,” a neighborhood newspaper reported in 2010, quoting her challenger: “She’s been there 20 years … and she hasn’t gotten anywhere.” Despite an energetic campaign, Sloan won only 9 percent of the vote in the 2010 Democratic primary, and Norton again triumphed in the general election.

  Eleanor Holmes Norton may or may not eventually succeed in achieving statehood for the District of Columbia. What is certain, however, is that if she does not, others will take up the torch—for it is the same torch that has been carried by every individual in this book. It is a torch that illuminates the lines inside us, that define who we are. The lines on the American map are also our interior portraits. Americans don’t always find each other attractive, but each of us desires to be acknowledged, to count. In this nation, that desire is a right. The quest for that right is the torch carried by Eleanor Holmes Norton.

  Notes

  Roger Williams

  1. Letter from Roger Williams to the Town of Providence, in Publications of the Narragansett Club, 1st series, vol. 6 (Providence: Narragansett Club, 1874), 279.

  2. Williams’s religious basis for the separation of church and state was not rooted in acceptance of other religions; he actively sought to convert non-Christians. His views were rooted in Puritan tenets. From these he derived the belief that, since mankind is comprised of those who are bestowed with Divine Grace and those who are not, and since we cannot know who amon
g us has been bestowed with Grace, forced worship brings suffering to those bestowed with Grace by empowering others—whom we have no way of knowing whether or not they are bestowed with Grace—to impose laws regarding a realm where only God has jurisdiction. See Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, ed. Richard Groves (Macon: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Alan Simpson, “How Democratic Was Roger Williams?” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 13, no. 1 (January 1956): 53–67.

  3. Simpson, “How Democratic Was Roger Williams?”; Mauro Calamandrei, “Neglected Aspects of Roger Williams’ Thought,” Church History 21, no. 3 (September 1952): 239–58; Sidney V. James, “Ecclesiastical Authority in the Land of Roger Williams,” New England Quarterly, 57, no. 3 (September 1984): 323–46.

  4. LeRoy Moore Jr., “Roger Williams and the Historians,” Church History 32, no. 4 (December 1963): 432–51; Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Typology of America’s Mission,” American Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 135–55.

  5. Roger Williams, “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Examined and Answered,” in Publications of the Narragansett Club, 1st series, vol. 1 (Providence: Narragansett Club, 1866), 325.

  6. LeRoy Moore, “Roger Williams and the Revolutionary Era,” Church History 34, no. 1 (March 1965): 57–61.

  7. Edmund J. Carpenter, Roger Williams: A Study of the Life, Times and Character of a Political Pioneer (New York: Grafton, 1909), 126.

  Augustine Herman

  1. Samuel Hazard, ed., Annals of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Hazard and Mitchell, 1815), 281.

  2. Francis Vincent, A History of the State of Delaware (Philadelphia: John Campbell, 1870), 320.

  3. James McSherry, History of Maryland (Baltimore: Baltimore Book Company, 1904), 246–49.

  Robert Jenkins’s Ear

  1. Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich the Second, called Frederick the Great, vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1868), 503.

  Robert Tufton Mason

  1. Collections of the New Hampshire Historical Society, vol. 8 (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1866), 264.

  2. Letter from the General Court of Massachusetts to Oliver Cromwell (1651), in Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Massachusetts Bay, 2nd ed. (London: M. Richardson, 1765), 521.

  3. Letter from New England Ministers to Oliver Cromwell (1650), in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th series, vol. 2 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1854), 118.

  4. Petition of Robert Mason, in Albert Stillman Batchellor, ed., State of New Hampshire Documents Relating to the Masonian Patent, vol. 29 (Concord, NH: Edward Pearson, 1896), 101–3.

  5. Gov. John Endicott to Charles II (1661), in Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., American History Told by Contemporaries, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 454–55.

  6. Opinion of Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Nov. 8, 1660, in Batchellor, State of New Hampshire Documents, 106–7.

  7. A. H. Buffinton, “The Isolationist Policy of Colonial Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly, 1, no. 2 (April 1928): 161.

  8. Charles II to Massachusetts Government, March 10, 1675, in Batchellor, State of New Hampshire Documents, 111.

  9. Publications of the Prince Society: Capt. John Mason (Boston: Prince Society, 1887), 104–5.

  10. Royal Commission on New Hampshire (1679), in William Forsyth, Cases and Opinions of Constitutional Law (London: Stevens and Haynes, 1869), 136.

  11. Charles II to Massachusetts Government (1682), in Batchellor, State of New Hampshire Documents, 123.

  12. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New Hampshire, vol. 1 (Dover, NH: S. C. Stevens and Ela & Wadleigh, 1831), 114–15.

  13. Allen’s daughter was married to Massachusetts Governor John Usher. Under Usher’s leadership, Massachusetts bought Gorges’s claim to Maine, finalizing its annexation of the territory. Why Massachusetts did not also purchase the Mason claim is unknown. See John Gorham Palfrey, History of New England, vol. 4 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 207; Belknap, History of New Hampshire, 1:252.

  14. Isaac W. Hammond, ed., State of New Hampshire, Miscellaneous Provincial and State Papers: 1725–1800, vol. 18 (Manchester: John B. Clarke, 1890), 72.

  Lord Fairfax

  1. Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., The Writings of George Washington, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam, 1889), 4.

  2. William Hand Brown, ed., Archives of Maryland: Letters to Governor Horatio Sharpe (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1911), 15.

  3. James V. L. McMahon, Historical View of the Government of Maryland, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Lucas, Cushing, 1831), 64–65.

  Mason and Dixon

  1. Anonymous, “The Rights o’ Man,” Punch 38 (January 28, 1860): 41.

  2. Edwin Danson, Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America (New York: John Wiley, 2001), 54–55.

  3. H. W. Robinson, “Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779): A Biographical Note,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 94, no. 3 (June 20, 1950): 273.

  4. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, Field Notes and Astronomical Observations (autograph manuscript), in Report of the Secretary of Internal Affairs of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Edwin H. Meyers, 1887), 145.

  5. Thomas D. Cope, “Some Contacts of Benjamin Franklin with Mason and Dixon and Their Work,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95, no. 3 (June 12, 1951): 238.

  Zebulon Butler

  1. Williamson, James R., and Linda A. Fossler, Zebulon Butler: Hero of the Revolutionary Frontier (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 14.

  2. Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 10 (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 215.

  3. Williamson and Fossler, Zebulon Butler, 61.

  4. Robert J. Taylor, ed., The Susquehannah Company Papers, vol. 7 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1969), 245–46.

  Ethan Allen

  1. Connecticut Courant, June 1—June 8, 1773.

  2. Walter Hill Crockett, Vermont: The Green Mountain State, vol. 1 (New York: Century History, 1921), 182.

  3. Ibid., 338.

  4. Ibid., 341.

  5. Ibid., 370.

  6. Hugh Moore, Memoir of Col. Ethan Allen (Plattsburgh, NY: O. R. Cook, 1834), 48–62.

  7. Prentiss C. Dodge, Encyclopedia Vermont Biography (Burlington, VT: Ullery Publishing, 1912), 12.

  8. Ibid., 15.

  Thomas Jefferson

  1. Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, in The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, ed. John P. Foley (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900), 940.

  2. H. Hale Bellot, “Thomas Jefferson in American Historiography,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 4 (1954): 135–55.

  3. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., “Jefferson, the Ordinance of 1784, and the Origins of the American Territorial System,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 29, no. 2 (April 1972): 231.

  4. Jefferson to Monroe, July 9, 1786, in Berkhofer, “Jefferson, the Ordinance,” 257.

  5. J. M. Keating, History of the City of Memphis, Tennessee (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason, 1888), 72–78.

  6. Congress did not officially adopt Jefferson’s proposed surveying method until it enacted the Land Ordinance of 1785.

  John Meares

  1. J. Richard Nokes, Almost a Hero: The Voyages of John Meares, R.N., to China, Hawaii, and the Northwest Coast (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1998), 9–11.

  2. John Meares, “Memorial to the House of Commons,” in London Daily Advertiser, May 20, 1770.

  3. Public Advertiser (London), May 31, 1790; November 10, 1790.

  4. “[There is a] settlement at the Columbia River … formed before the late war [of 1812] and broken up by the British … in the course of it.… As the British government admit explicitly their obligation under the first article of the treaty of Ghent to restore the post, there can be no question with regard to the right of the United States to resume it.” Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Writings of John Quincy Adams, vol. 6 (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 402–3.

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sp; 5. John Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North-West Coast of America (1790; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1967).

  6. London World, February 23, 1791.

  Benjamin Banneker

  1. Davis S. Shields, ed., American Poetry: The 17th and 18th Centuries (New York: Penguin, 2007), 574.

  2. Sylvio A. Bedini, The Life of Benjamin Banneker (New York: Scribner, 1972), 17.

  3. Martha E. Tyson, “Banneker: The Afric-American Astronomer,” in The Posthumous Papers of Martha E. Tyson, edited by Her Daughter (Philadelphia: Friends’ Book Association, 1884).

  4. Pennsylvania Mercury, October 15, 1791.

  5. Michael Hardt, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence (New York: Verso, 2007), 85.

  6. Ibid., 86.

  7. Bedini, Life of Benjamin Banneker, 238.