In 1835 a state and a territory came close to shooting at each other over a wedge of marsh at the mouth of the Maumee River. Nobody died. The one wound of the whole war was a knife in a deputy's side, and he lived. Congress handed the ground to Ohio, gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula for its trouble, and left a grievance that never quite went away.
A line drawn on a map of country nobody had surveyed
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set the top of the future Ohio on a line run due east from the southern bend of Lake Michigan. Nobody knew exactly where that bend was. The best map of the day, John Mitchell's of 1755, put it too far north, and a line run from the real shore met Lake Erie below the mouth of the Maumee instead of above it.
Two surveys followed. In 1817 William Harris ran the line Ohio hoped for, the Harris Line. In 1818, after Michigan objected, the Fulton Line was run by the letter of the Ordinance. Between them lay a wedge about five miles wide at the Indiana corner and eight at the lake. The mouth of the river, where Toledo would grow, sat inside it.
Why anyone wanted the mud
Canals. Two were planned to reach Lake Erie through the lower Maumee, and whoever held the river's mouth stood to hold the trade of the interior. In 1833 two paper towns on the river, Port Lawrence and Vistula, merged under a new name, Toledo, and a crowd of rival town sites sprang up along the bank, each hoping to be the canal's end. Before the railroad, a little town in the marsh could reasonably expect to become a great city.
The war
Ohio's governor, Robert Lucas, was fifty-three and stubborn. Michigan's, Stevens T. Mason, was twenty-three, the Boy Governor. Lucas moved first, asking his legislature to seize the strip. Mason, forewarned, struck first: on February 12, 1835, his council made it a crime, punishable by hard labor, to accept Ohio's authority there. Ohio's act extending its counties over the strip followed eleven days later. Both sides called out militia, some six hundred on one side and a thousand on the other, and marched them into the mud.
On April 26, 1835, a Michigan posse came on Ohio's boundary party resting in a farm field and took nine men prisoner. The two official reports disagree about whether shots were fired at anyone or over their heads. Nobody was hurt. The only blood of the war came later, when a Michigan deputy named Wood, come to arrest a Toledo partisan, was stabbed in the side by one Two Stickney. Wood lived. Stickney, whose father had named his sons One and Two, slipped across into Ohio.
A young army lieutenant helped the government's engineers re-measure the disputed latitude that year: Robert E. Lee, six years out of West Point.
That September, Ohio needed a county court to sit in Toledo to put its jurisdiction on the record, and Michigan's militia held the town to stop it. So three Ohio judges rode in during the small hours, opened court by candlelight in a schoolhouse, did the least business the law would accept, and left. In the story the valley still tells, the papers went out in the clerk's tall hat, the hat was knocked off by a branch in the dark, and the clerk and two guards crept back on their hands and knees through the weeds to find it.
The settlement
President Jackson's commissioners proposed a truce. Lucas accepted; Mason refused, and Jackson removed him from office. Congress then settled the matter: Ohio got the strip and its canal mouth, and Michigan, as consolation, was offered the Upper Peninsula, which its own delegates called a sterile waste. Michigan refused, then gave in. Short of money, and with the federal treasury about to share its surplus only with states, a second convention accepted the terms in December 1836. Histories call it the Frostbitten Convention. Within a decade the "sterile waste" turned out to hold more copper and iron than all the rest of the old Northwest combined.
John Quincy Adams, who had no stake in the strip and spoke for Michigan's cause in Congress, called it a quarrel with all the right on one side and all the power on the other: the right with Michigan, the power with Ohio. The book's own verdict is that Ohio won not because its claim was sound but because it was the older, larger and louder party.
On January 26, 1837, Congress admitted Michigan as a state, the settlement accepted.
Then, football
Sixty-two years after the war, the two met on a football field.
The whole series, game by game
Read the full chapter, "The Toledo War", in No Such Claim
This page retells, in new words, facts from Scott Flack's book No Such Claim, chapter "The Toledo War", which cites its sources. Michigan's statehood date: Act of Congress of January 26, 1837 (5 Stat. 144). Game results come from CFBD, with corrections listed on the series page.