Admission of New States
Admission of New States Under the Articles of Confederation, the original 13 states were “admitted” to the union based on what historian Peter Onuf calls the “doctrine of state succession.” That is, these new states formed in confederation with one another would succeed the colonies, largely maintaining the territorial boundaries that had ex- isted prior to the American Revolution as well as the existing laws and authority of the colonies. Beyond the original thirteen states, the ability to admit new states belongs to the U.S. Congress and the federal government as is spelled out in the U.S. Constitu- tion.
As a practical matter, however, the Constitution is vague as to the criteria for ad- mission. Given this, Congress would rely on the preconstitutional precedents for state- hood admission set forth in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. Defining guidelines for the admission of the territories of the Northwest as states, the Ordinance declared that new states were to be admitted on equal footing as existing states, allowed for the forma- tion of governed territories, and pro-vided that upon reaching the population threshold of 60,000 free people, a terri- tory could submit a state constitution to the Congress for approval and statehood admission. Although the ordinance says little about the economic situation of the territory, it became an important crite- rion for potential states; Congress ex- pected the potential state to be not only
ARTICLE IV, SECTION 3, CLAUSE 1 New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
independent and prosperous, but also beneficial to the country. The Northwest Ordinance not only governed the admis- sion of states of the Northwest, but also served as the precedent for future state- hood decisions.
As the United States underwent ef- forts at territorial expansion under its policy of Manifest Destiny, the govern- ing of new territories and the admission of new states would continue to occupy the national government. Moreover, given that statehood brings with it at least one seat in the House of Repre- sentatives, two seats in the Senate, and at least three votes in the Electoral Col- lege, strategic partisan calculations have played key roles in statehood decisions. Indeed, after more or less consensus- oriented statehood admission decisions in the first decade of the republic, crit- ics noted that the regional and partisan motivations of the Louisiana Purchase were laid bare by Thomas Jefferson’s ex- traordinary move.
Such partisan and especially regional motivations came to dominate national statehood decisions. With slavery in- creasingly dividing the United States’ North and South, and with neither southern nor northern interests wanting to cede representational and Electoral College advantages to the other side, statehood admission politics boiled down to a system of interregional com- promise whereby one free state would be admitted alongside one slave state. Free state Indiana’s admission in 1816 was closely followed by Mississippi’s admission in 1817, and Illinois’s and Al- abama’s were paired for admission in 1818 and 1819 respectively. And, when Missouri sought admission, the free state of Maine was carved out of Mas- sachusetts in order to offset any south- ern advantage. As regional tensions heightened from the eve of the Civil War to Reconstruc-
STATE
Delaware Pennsylvania New Jersey Georgia Connecticut Massachusetts Maryland South Carolina New Hampshire Virginia New York North Carolina Rhode Island Vermont Kentucky Tennessee Ohio Louisiana Indiana Mississippi Illinois Alabama Maine Missouri Arkansas Michigan Florida Texas Iowa Wisconsin California Minnesota Oregon Kansas West Virginia Nevada Nebraska Colorado North Dakota South Dakota Montana Washington Idaho Wyoming DATE OF ADMISSION December 7, 1787 December 12, 1787 December 18, 1787 January 2, 1788 January 9, 1788 February 6, 1788 April 28, 1788 May 23, 1788 June 21, 1788 June 25, 1788 July 26, 1788 November 21, 1789 May 29, 1790 March 4, 1791 June 1, 1792 June 1, 1796 March 1, 1803 April 30, 1812 December 11, 1816 December 10, 1817 December 3, 1818 December 14, 1819 March 15, 1820 August 10, 1821 June 15, 1836 January 26, 1837 March 3, 1845 December 29, 1845 December 28, 1846 May 29, 1848 September 9, 1850 May 11, 1858 February 14, 1859 January 29, 1861 June 20, 1863 October 31, 1864 March 1, 1867 August 1, 1876 November 2, 1889 November 2, 1889 November 8, 1889 November 11, 1889 July 3, 1890 July 10, 1890
tion, the potential for interregional compromise was limited. Emerging as early as California’s admission in 1850, a new pattern of seeking regional and partisan advantage took hold. From 1850 to the end of reconstruction in
1876, Republicans succeeded in admit-
ting eight new states. Often assessing
the party composition of a candidate for
statehood admission, Republicans used
their advantages and the lack of Demo-
cratic and southern voices in Congress
to admit even those states that had not yet met the population requirements of the Northwest Ordinance. This pattern was maintained throughout state admissions poli- tics of the nineteenth century as Republicans turned an Electoral College victory, as well as a narrow House majority and an expanded Senate majority, into six new states admitted in 1889 and 1890 alone.
Statehood admission in the twentieth century returned to the compromise pattern of the pre–Civil War era although the basis of the compromise is the expected partisan- ship of the state, as one presumed Democratic state will be paired with one presumed Republican state. This pattern does not portend well for Washington, D.C.’s contem- porary campaign for statehood, as this largely Democratic state suffers opposition for lack of a Republican pair.
That Congress could create and admit new states conveyed a supremacy of the na- tional government over both the new states as well as the old. As historian Peter Onuf observed, “If new states were equal to the old states, old states would be equal to the new, and thus share in their diminutive character. Statehood defined in these terms was not only compatible with a stronger union: it demanded one” (Onuf 1982, 459). SEE ALSO: Northwest Ordinance of 1784; Northwest Ordinance of 1787
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, “Congress and the Territorial Expansion of the United States,” in Party, Process and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress, ed. David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, 392–451 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Peter S. Onuf, “From Colony to Territory: Changing Concepts of Statehood in Revolutionary America,” Political Science Quarterly 97, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 447–59; and Charles Stew- art III and Barry R. Weingast, “Stacking the Senate, Changing the Nation: Republican Rotten Boroughs, Statehood Politics and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 6 (1992): 223–71.
Margaret M. Butler and Douglas B. Harris