Toledo War - Origins

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 ; thence with the same, through Lake Erie to the Pennsylvania line aforesaid."

Because the territorial boundary line between the US 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 were in fact 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 location of the southern extreme of Lake Michigan), and the members "thought it unnecessary to take it, at the time, into consideration."

When Congress created the Michigan Territory in 1805, it used the Northwest Ordinance's language to define the 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.