WIWisconsin History

Chicago should have been in Wisconsin. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 drew the line between the future northern and southern states through the bottom tip of Lake Michigan, and when Illinois applied for statehood in 1818 its delegate persuaded Congress to move that boundary north to 42 degrees 30 minutes so his state would touch a working harbour. The shift took fourteen future counties, the lead diggings at Galena, and the site of Chicago. Wisconsin settlers were still filing protests and holding conventions about it into the 1840s, and lost.

Effigy mounds and the nations of the lakes

Between roughly 700 and 1100 CE, people in southern Wisconsin built earthworks shaped like bears, birds, panthers and long-tailed water spirits, a practice concentrated in this region and almost nowhere else on the continent. Thousands survive, many on ridges above rivers. The nations European traders met were the Menominee along the Green Bay shore, the Ho-Chunk in the interior, the Ojibwe around Lake Superior with their council seat at Madeline Island, the Potawatomi on the eastern lakeshore, and the Sauk and Meskwaki in the southwest. In the 1820s and 1830s the Oneida and the Stockbridge-Munsee were moved here from New York under pressure, and settled near Green Bay and Lake Winnebago. The Menominee reservation, unusually, sits on a fragment of the nation's own ancestral territory rather than land assigned somewhere else.

New France, then Britain, then nothing much

Jean Nicolet came ashore near Green Bay in 1634 looking for a route to China and, by the story told afterward, wore a Chinese damask robe to meet the Ho-Chunk. Trade, not settlement, followed. In June 1673 Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet carried their canoes over the mile-and-a-half portage between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers at what is now Portage and reached the Mississippi, opening the route that made Wisconsin a corridor rather than a destination. The Fox Wars of 1712 to 1733 nearly destroyed the Meskwaki and closed that corridor for a generation. France ceded the region to Britain in 1763 and Britain ceded it to the United States in 1783, but British traders kept working from Prairie du Chien and Green Bay until after the War of 1812, and the name Wisconsin itself descends from Meskousing, a word Marquette wrote down in 1673, filtered through French spelling and then English.

Lead, Black Hawk, and a free state in 1848

The thing that finally brought Americans in numbers was lead. From the mid-1820s miners poured into the southwest around Mineral Point and Platteville, and by the end of the decade the diggings were supplying a large share of the nation's lead for paint, pipe and shot. Many arrived too late in the season to build, dug shelters into the hillsides, and were called badgers, which is how the state got its nickname. Settlement pressure produced the Black Hawk War of 1832, which ended in a massacre at the mouth of the Bad Axe River on August 1 and 2 as Sauk and Meskwaki families tried to cross the Mississippi back to Iowa. Wisconsin Territory was organised in 1836, and James Duane Doty secured the capital for an empty isthmus between two lakes that he had bought and named Madison, after the president who had died that summer. Statehood came on May 29, 1848, as the thirtieth state. Because the Northwest Ordinance had banned slavery north of the Ohio in 1787, Wisconsin entered free without argument, and its 1848 constitution was notably liberal, protecting immigrant voting and married women's property.

Forty-Eighters, a rescued fugitive, and a fire nobody remembers

Germans arrived in force after the failed revolutions of 1848, followed by Norwegians, Poles and Czechs, and they gave the state its brewing industry, its choral societies and a durable strain of secular radicalism. Antislavery feeling was fierce. In March 1854 a Milwaukee crowd broke Joshua Glover, a fugitive from Missouri, out of jail and moved him to Canada; the Wisconsin Supreme Court then declared the federal Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, and the United States Supreme Court slapped that down in Ableman v. Booth in 1859. Ripon claims the first meeting of the Republican Party, in a small schoolhouse on March 20, 1854. Seventeen years later came the disaster the country forgot: on the night of October 8, 1871, a firestorm swept the pine country around Peshtigo and killed somewhere between 1,200 and 2,500 people, the deadliest wildfire in American history. It happened the same night as the Great Chicago Fire, which took the newspapers and the telegraph wires.

The Wisconsin Idea and the century after it

Robert La Follette became governor in 1901 and made the state a laboratory. Wisconsin adopted an open primary, put university economists to work drafting legislation, and produced the first workers' compensation law to take effect in 1911, a state income tax the same year, and the first unemployment compensation system in the country in 1932. Charles McCarthy gave the arrangement its name, the Wisconsin Idea, in a 1912 book: the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state. Milwaukee elected socialist mayors for most of the years between 1910 and 1960, including Daniel Hoan for twenty-four of them, and got clean government and sewers out of it. The same state sent Joseph McCarthy to the Senate in 1946 and watched him censured on December 2, 1954. Dairying replaced wheat after the soil wore out, and the phrase America's Dairyland went onto licence plates in 1940. Congress terminated the Menominee nation's federal status in 1954, and after a decade of organising led by Ada Deer, restored it in December 1973. Milwaukee's heavy industry, Allis-Chalmers foremost among it, thinned out in the 1980s, and the politics of the old progressive state have been close and bitterly contested ever since.

Neighbouring states' history

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