MIMichigan History

Michigan gave up Toledo and was handed the Upper Peninsula

Through 1835 and into 1836, Ohio and the Territory of Michigan marched militia toward a wedge of land at the western end of Lake Erie that each claimed, because the Northwest Ordinance drew the line one way and Ohio's constitution described it another. No one died in the Toledo War. A deputy sheriff was stabbed with a penknife. Congress ended it by awarding Ohio the Toledo Strip and giving Michigan the western Upper Peninsula as compensation, land nobody in Detroit particularly wanted. The convention accepted under protest in December 1836 and Michigan was admitted on January 26, 1837. Within fifteen years the consolation prize was shipping copper off the Keweenaw and iron out of the Marquette Range, and Toledo looked like a bargain.

The Council of Three Fires

The Anishinaabe held the peninsulas long before any of that. The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi, allied as the Council of Three Fires, controlled respectively the straits and the northern shores, Lake Superior, and the southwest toward the Saint Joseph River. Wyandot villages sat near the mouth of the Detroit River, while Menominee, Miami and Sauk territory touched the edges. People had been cutting native copper out of Isle Royale and the Keweenaw for several thousand years and trading it down the Mississippi, long enough that pits and hammerstones were still visible when nineteenth century prospectors arrived and simply followed them.

Fort Pontchartrain and three sovereigns

Jacques Marquette founded a mission at Sault Sainte Marie in 1668, making it the oldest continuously occupied town in the state, and another at Saint Ignace in 1671. Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac planted Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit on the narrows of the river on July 24, 1701, specifically to keep English traders out of the upper lakes. France lost the whole interior in 1763, and the Odawa leader Pontiac besieged Detroit for five months that summer in a rising that ran across the Great Lakes. Britain then kept Detroit and Mackinac for thirteen years after the 1783 peace treaty said otherwise, surrendering them only in 1796 under the Jay Treaty.

Copper, iron, pine, and a party started in a field

Michigan abolished capital punishment for murder in 1846, the first English-speaking jurisdiction anywhere to do so, and has never brought it back. Two years earlier the surveyor William Burt had watched his compass needle swing uselessly near Negaunee, which is how the Marquette iron range was found; the Soo Locks, finished in 1855, made it possible to move that ore past the rapids at Sault Sainte Marie and down to the furnaces. Keweenaw copper mines drew Cornish, Finnish and Italian labor into a district that stayed the country's leading producer until the 1880s. White pine logging stripped the lower peninsula between the 1860s and the 1890s, and Michigan lumber rebuilt Chicago after its fire. On July 6, 1854, antislavery Whigs, Free Soilers and Democrats angry about the Kansas-Nebraska Act met outdoors at Jackson because the hall could not hold them, and organized as the Republican Party.

The industry that reorganized the country

Ransom Olds was building cars in Detroit by 1899. Henry Ford incorporated the Ford Motor Company on June 16, 1903, ran a moving assembly line at Highland Park from 1913, and announced the five dollar day on January 5, 1914, which pulled workers out of the American South, Appalachia, Poland and Lebanon. William Durant assembled General Motors at Flint on September 16, 1908. Detroit's Black population went from roughly 6,000 in 1910 to more than 120,000 by 1930, into a housing market fenced off by restrictive covenants. Sit-down strikers held GM's Fisher Body plants at Flint from December 30, 1936 until February 11, 1937 and forced the corporation to recognize the United Auto Workers, the decisive victory of American industrial unionism. Willow Run was turning out a B-24 bomber roughly every hour by 1944.

What came after the boom

Freeway construction through Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, redlined mortgages and a police force at war with the neighborhoods it patrolled produced the uprising of July 23 to 27, 1967, which left 43 people dead and accelerated a population loss Detroit has never reversed. Coleman Young was elected the city's first Black mayor in 1973. The Mackinac Bridge, opened on November 1, 1957, finally tied the two peninsulas together after 120 years of ferries. Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history on July 18, 2013 and emerged from it in December 2014. Flint, switched to Flint River water in April 2014 without corrosion control, spent years with lead coming out of its taps.

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