The Toledo War - Michigan's Consolation Prize RoadyGoat
1835In 1835, Ohio and Michigan nearly went to war over Toledo. Conflicting federal laws from 1787 and 1805 had both states claiming a 468-square-mile strip along their border. Ohio's governor sent 600 armed men. Michigan's twenty-four-year-old Boy Governor, Stevens T. Mason, countered with a thousand troops. The two militias glared at each other across the Maumee River. At the so-called Battle of Phillips Corners, Michigan militia fired warning shots over Ohio surveyors' heads and arrested nine of them. The only blood shed in the entire war was when a deputy sheriff named Joseph Wood was stabbed, nonfatally, while trying to arrest an Ohioan. President Andrew Jackson intervened, removed Mason from office, and brokered a deal. Ohio kept Toledo. Michigan got statehood plus the entire Upper Peninsula as a consolation prize. Michigan was furious. The UP was remote, frozen wilderness that nobody wanted. But the irony was enormous. The Upper Peninsula turned out to be extraordinarily rich in copper and iron ore, becoming America's first great mining region. Michigan got by far the better deal. Toledo got a minor league baseball team.
