by Mark Stein
Jesse Hawley
1. Jesse Hawley [pseud. Hercules], Genesee Messenger (New York), January 1807, in David Hosack, Memoir of DeWitt Clinton (New York: J. Seymour, 1829), 311.
2. Ibid., 323.
3. Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada Which Are Dependent on the Province of New York in America and Are the Barrier Between the English and French in that Part of the World (1724), in Ibid., 234.
4. John Lauritz Larson, “ ‘Bind the Republic Together’: The National Union and the Struggle for a System of Internal Improvements,” Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (September 1987): 363–87; Pamela L. Baker, “The Washington National Road Bill and the Struggle to Adopt a Federal System of Internal Improvement,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 437–64.
5. Hosack, Memoir of DeWitt Clinton, 347.
6. Gerard Koeppel, Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009), 7.
7. William Cooper, A Guide in the Wilderness, or the History of the First Settlements in the Western Counties of New York with Useful Instructions to Future Settlers (Dublin: Gilbert and Hodges, 1810), 21–22.
8. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), May 19, 1813; Roy I. Wolf, “Transportation and Politics: The Example of Canada,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 52, no. 2 (June 1962): 176–90; Don C. Sowers, “The Financial History of New York State from 1789 to 1912,” Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, vol. 57 (New York: Columbia University, 1914), 61.
9. Rochester Democrat, repr. in Cleveland Daily Herald, January 17, 1842; Albany Evening Journal, repr. in New York Spectator (New York City), January 19, 1842; Milwaukee Journal, February 2, 1842.
James Brittain
1. Robert Scott Davis Jr., “The Settlement at the Head of the French Broad River or the Bizarre Story of the First Walton County, Georgia,” North Carolina Genealogical Journal 7, no. 2 (May 1981): 65.
2. In addition to Davis’s “Settlement at the Head of the French Broad River,” Brittain is named in Alexia Jones Helsley and George Alexander Jones, A Guide to Historic Henderson County, North Carolina (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007); Harry McKown, “December, 1810: The Walton War,” This Month in North Carolina History (December 2006), http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/dec2006/index.html; Jim Brittain, “History Corner,” Mills River, North Carolina Newsletter 5, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 2.
3. Theodore Davidson, Genesis of Buncombe County (Asheville, NC: Citizen Company, 1922), 78.
4. Ibid., 119. The name of the grand jury foreman, William Whitson, also appears with Brittain’s in the list of dismissed commissioners. Whitson was also Brittain’s commanding officer in the state militia.
5. John Preston Arthur, Western North Carolina: A History from 1730 to 1913 (Raleigh, NC: Edwards and Broughton, 1914), 19, 33.
6. Martin Reidinger, “The Walton War and the Georgia-North Carolina Boundary Dispute” (unpublished manuscript), North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1981, cited in “State’s First Walton County Caused Ruckus,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 3, 2007.
7. Cal Carpenter, The Walton War and Tales of the Great Smoky Mountains (Lakewood, GA: Copple House Books, 1979), 26; Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 3, 2007.
8. Jim Brittain, “History Corner,” Mills River, North Carolina Newsletter 1, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 3.
9. Lucian Lamar Knight, A Standard History of Georgia and Georgians, vol. 1 (New York: Lewis, 1917), 456. Similarly, a history of Georgia coauthored by a former governor states, “A number of minor controversies concerning the boundaries have occurred at different times, but they were mostly local in character and have been settled by the mutual agreement of the state authorities. Between 1803 and 1818 several of these disputes arose between Georgia and North Carolina. In the fall of 1881 …” The transition to 1881 is a considerable leap. See also Allen D. Candler and Clement A. Davis, Georgia: Comprising Sketches of the Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, Arranged in Cyclopedic Form, vol. 3 (Atlanta: Georgia State Historical Association, 1906), 207.
10. Arthur, Western North Carolina, 33.
Reuben Kemper
1. Andrew McMichael, “The Kemper ‘Rebellion’: Filibustering and Resident Anglo American Loyalty in Spanish West Florida,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 43, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 136.
2. Isaac Joslin Cox, The West Florida Controversy, 1798–1818 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1918), 152.
3. McMichael, “The Kemper ‘Rebellion,’ ” 149.
Richard Rush
1. Richard Rush, Residence at the Court of London, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1872), 77–78.
2. National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), July 28, 1812.
3. National Intelligencer, October 19, 1813; November 30, 1813; March 31, 1815; March 29, 1815.
4. Letter from Charles Bagot to Lord Binning, Sept. 26, 1818, in George Canning, George Canning and His Friends, vol. 2 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1909), 85–86.
5. Rush, Residence, 314.
6. John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 10 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 160–61.
7. Rush, Residence, 437.
8. Letter from Rush to Democratic Citizens of Penn District, in Daily National Intelligencer, November 16, 1850.
Nathaniel Pope
1. William A. Meese, “Nathaniel Pope,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 3, no. 4 (January 1911): 7–8.
2. Pope to New York senator Rufus King, in James A. Edstrom, “ ‘Candour and Good Faith’: Nathaniel Pope and the Admission Enabling Act of 1818,” Illinois Historical Journal 88, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 244.
3. Ibid., 246.
4. J. Seymour Currey, Chicago: Its History and Its Builders, vol. 1 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1912), 118. In the nineteenth century, the same wording had appeared as a description of Pope’s argument in Congress, in John Moses, Illinois: Historical and Statistical, vol. 1 (Chicago: Fergus Printing, 1889), 227. Pope is recorded as saying that access to Lake Michigan “would afford additional security to the perpetuity of the Union, inasmuch as the state would thereby be connected with the states of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York through the Lakes.” Annals of Congress, 15th Cong., 1st sess., 1678.
5. Alexander Davidson and Bernard Stuvé, A Complete History of Illinois from 1673 to 1873 (Springfield: Illinois Journal, 1874), 295–96.
6. William Radebaugh, The Boundary Dispute between Illinois and Wisconsin (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1904).
John Hardeman Walker
1. Robert Sidney Douglass, History of Southeast Missouri, vol. 1 (Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1912), 242.
2. Samuel Cummings, The Western Pilot (Cincinnati: G. Conclin, 1848), 138–42; “Account by John Hardeman Walker,” transcription and notes by Susan E. Hough, U.S. Geological Survey, July 2000, http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/office/hough/walker.html.
3. Ibid., 142.
4. Floyd Calvin Shoemaker, Missouri’s Struggle for Statehood: 1804–1821 (Jefferson City, MO: Hugh Stevens Printing, 1916), 39.
5. H. Dwight Weaver, “Bootheel Politics, Frontier Style,” Missouri Resources Magazine (Winter 1999–2000), 21.
John Quincy Adams
1. John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1875), 208–9.
2. Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Writings of John Quincy Adams, vol. 6 (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 384.
3. Adams, Memoirs, vol. 4, 108–10, 115.
4. Ford, Writings, vol. 6, 346.
5. Ibid., 306.
6. William Graham Sumner, American Statesmen: Andrew Jackson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 104.
7. Adams, Memoirs, vol. 8, 484.
Sequoyah
1. Two notable critics of Sequoyah historiography are John B. Davis, “The Life and Work of Sequoyah,” Chronicles of Okl
ahoma 8, no. 2 (June 1930): 49–180, and Traveller Bird, Tell Them They Lie: The Sequoyah Myth (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1971).
2. Samuel C. Williams, “The Father of Sequoyah: Nathaniel Gist,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 15, no. 1 (March 1937): 3–20.
3. Traveller Bird, Tell Them They Lie, 45–46, 113.
4. S. Charles Bolton, “Jeffersonian Indian Removal and the Emergence of Arkansas Territory,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 253–71.
5. Thomas Valentine Parker, The Cherokee Indians (New York: Grafton, 1907), 13.
6. American State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 145.
7. George E. Foster, Se-quo-yah, the American Cadmus and Modern Moses (Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, 1885), 106.
8. Daily National Journal (Washington, DC), May 5, 1828; Harold D. Moser et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, vol. 3 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 52–53.
9. Charles Russell Logan, The Promised Land: The Cherokees, Arkansas, and Removal, 1794–1839 (Little Rock: Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, n.d.), 21.
Stevens T. Mason
1. Quite possibly John Quincy Adams did make this statement, or something much like it. The bill was highly controversial and strongly opposed by Adams, who had returned to Congress after his presidency. Adams’s statement of outrage at the beginning of this chapter has previously been cited in Thomas M. Cooley, Michigan: A History of Governments (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 219; Henry M. Utley and Byron M. Cutcheon, Michigan as a Province, Territory, and State, vol. 2 (New York: Publishing Society of Michigan, 1906), 358; Willis F. Dunbar and George S. May, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman, 1980), 257; and other sources. None of these sources, however, is a history of Ohio. Ohio historians may be censoring Adams, or they may have excluded the statement because there is no evidence that he said it. Adams did say, “The report of the committee of the Senate simply declares that the committee had no doubt of the right of Congress to settle the disputed boundary conformably to the claim of Ohio. That report, I think I have seen qualified in one of the official documents from the State of Ohio, as a very able report. Yes sir, and this great ability consisted in a simple declaration … of the power of Congress to settle the boundary—but not one iota of argument, nor one single allusion, to any question of right between the parties.” See Congressional Globe, 24th Cong., 1st sess., 2095.
2. The map used was by John Mitchell, Amérique septentrionale avec les routes, distances en miles, villages, et etablissements françois et anglois (Paris: M. Hawkins, Brigardier des armées du roi, 1776).
3. Don Faber, The Toledo War: The First Michigan-Ohio Rivalry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 25.
4. Report of the Committee on the Business of the State of Ohio (Feb. 4, 1803), in the Scioto Gazette (Ohio), February 2, 1804.
5. Lewis Cass to Howard Tiffin, November 1, 1817, in T. C. Mendenhall and A. A. Graham, “Boundary Line between Ohio and Indiana, and between Ohio and Michigan,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications, vol. 4 (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1895), 161.
6. Over a century later, it was discovered that Congress had never voted specifically on an act to admit Ohio into the Union. In 1953 Congress retroactively admitted Ohio to the Union as of March 1803.
7. Lawton T. Hemans, The Life and Times of Stevens Thomson Mason (Lansing: Michigan Historical Commission, 1920), 53–54.
8. Scioto Gazette, August 17, 1831.
9. “Attorney General Opinion,” Message of the Governor of Ohio at the Second Session of the Thirty-third General Assembly (Columbus, OH: James B. Gardiner, 1835), 39.
10. Monroe Sentinel (Michigan), reprinted in Cleveland Herald, July 23, 1835.
11. Hemans, Life and Times, 423–44.
Robert Lucas
1. Robert Lucas to William Kendall, in “Biography of Robert Lucas by a Citizen of Columbus,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 17 (1908): 167–68.
2. In the first case, which involved New York and New Jersey, New York boycotted the proceedings. The second, between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, came before the court in 1834, and not until 1838—the year Lucas became governor—did it finally decide how to rule on it. New Jersey v. New York, 30 U.S. 5 Pet. 284 (1831); Rhode Island v. Massachusetts, 37 U.S. 12 Pet. 657 (1838).
3. Ohio Statesman (Columbus), November 22, 1839.
4. Missouri Argus (St. Louis), November 29, 1839.
5. Claude S. Larzelere, Harlow Lindley, and Bernard C. Steiner, “The Iowa-Missouri Dispute Boundary,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 3, no. 1 (June 1916): 80–81.
Daniel Webster
1. Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1894), 45.
2. Maryland Gazette and Political Intelligencer (Annapolis), May 23, 1822.
3. Bangor Register (Maine), April 6, 1826.
4. J. Chris Arndt, “Maine in the Northeastern Boundary Controversy: States’ Rights in Antebellum New England,” New England Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 1989): 205–23; Boston Courier, January 16, 1832.
5. Maurice G. Baxter, One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 41, 276–77, 285, 502; Irving H. Bartlett, Daniel Webster (New York: Norton, 1978), 200–207, 281–86.
6. Wilfred Ellsworth Binkley and Malcolm Charles Moos, A Grammar of American Politics: The National Government (New York: Knopf, 1949), 265.
7. Ephraim Douglass Adams, “Lord Ashburton and the Treaty of Washington,” American Historical Review 17, no. 4 (July 1912): 779.
8. Arndt, “Maine,” 219–220; George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, 5th ed., vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1893), 278–83; Richard N. Current, “Webster’s Propaganda and the Ashburton Treaty,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 34, no. 2 (September 1947): 189.
9. Current, “Webster’s Propaganda,” 189; Arndt, “Maine,” 221; J. P. D. Dunbahin, “Red Lines of the Maps: The Impact of Cartographical Errors on the Border between the United States and British North America,” Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography 50 (1998): 105–25; Lawrence Martin and Samuel Flagg Bemis, “Franklin’s Red-Line Map Was a Mitchell,” New England Quarterly 10, no. 1 (March 1937): 105–11.
10. Machias Seal Island, between the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy, remains under dispute to this day. See Paul Schmidt, “Machias Seal Island: A Geopolitical Anomaly” (master’s thesis, University of Vermont, 1991), http://www.siue.edu/GEOGRAPHY/online/Schmidt.htm.
11. “An Account of the Post-Mortem Examination of the late Hon. Daniel Webster,” New York Journal of Medicine (1853): 281.
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2 (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1914), 557.
James K. Polk
1. Hans Sperber, “ ‘Fifty-Four Forty or Fight’: Facts and Fictions,” American Speech 32, no. 1 (February 1957): 5–11; Edwin A. Miles, “ ‘Fifty-Four Forty or Fight’: An American Political Legend,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44, no. 2 (September 1957): 291–309.
2. Translated in The Liberator (Boston), May 23, 1845.
3. Walter R. Borneman, Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America (New York: Random House, 2008), 194–96.
4. R. L. Schuyler, “Polk and the Oregon Compromise,” Political Science Quarterly 26, no. 3 (September 1911): 460–61.
Robert M. T. Hunter
1. Robert M. T. Hunter, Speech on the Subject of the Retrocession of Alexandria to Virginia in the House of Representatives, May 8, 1846 (Alexandria: Printed at offices of Alexandria Gazette, 1846), 8, 11.
2. South Port American (Wisconsin), July 10, 1846.
3. Raymond Gazette (Mississippi), July 17, 1846.
4. National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), May 23, 1803.
5. The canal to which Hunter referred was the Alexandria Canal, which crossed
the Potomac from the terminus of the C&O Canal at Georgetown and continued along the Virginia side of the river to Alexandria.
6. Amos B. Casselman, “The Virginia Portion of the District of Columbia,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, vol. 12 (1909): 116–17.
7. Frederick Merk, “Dissent in the Mexican War,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd series, vol. 81 (1969): 120–36.
8. National Intelligencer, January 1, 1838; January 14, 1846.
9. Mark David Richards, “The Debates over the Retrocession of the District of Columbia, 1801–2004,” Washington History 16, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 54–82.
Sam Houston
1. James L. Haley, Sam Houston (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 7–26.
2. John P. Erwin, son-in-law of the secretary of state, was appointed postmaster for Nashville (Sam Houston’s congressional district) over numerous nominees Houston had forwarded to President John Quincy Adams. Houston had some choice words regarding the fitness of the secretary of state’s son-in-law, who took offense and enlisted a well-known duelist, John T. Smith, to deliver the note bearing his challenge. Smith, accompanied by General White, serving as his witness, approached Houston, but Houston refused to accept a note from one who was of lower station, as provided in the code duello. White took issue with Houston’s interpretation of the code duello, thus insulting Houston’s honor and resulting in White’s accepting Houston’s challenge to meet on the field of honor.
3. Alex W. Terrell, “Recollections of General Sam Houston,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 16, no. 2 (October, 1912): 113–36.
4. Haley, Sam Houston, 52–61.
5. M. K. Wisehart, Sam Houston: American Giant (Washington, DC: Luce Publishers, 1962), 56.