Page:Journal of the Sixth Legislative Council of the Territory of Michigan.djvu/141

5.] The committee in Congress, to whom the constitution of Ohio was referred, reported that the proposition to change the boundary was not submitted to that body in a proper shape, nor by any competent authority, and therefore that it was inexpedient to consider it then.

The question of a division of the north-western Territory was presented to Congress again in the year 1805, on the application to separate Michigan from Indiana, to which the former was attached on the admission of Ohio. On the eleventh day of January, 1805, the Territory of Michigan was created. The act declares "that all that part of the Indiana Territory which lies north of a line drawn east from the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan, until it shall intersect Lake Erie, and east of a line drawn from the said southerly bend, through the middle of said lake to its northern extremity, and thence due north to the northern boundary of the United States, shall, for the purpose of temporary government, constitute a separate Territory, and be called Michigan."

Again was this fundamental line brought to the attention of government in the year 1812. On the 20th of May of that year, an act was passed by Congress, which authorized the surveyor general, under the direction of the President, "to cause to be surveyed, marked and designated, so much of the western and northern boundaries of the State of Ohio, &c. as divide said state from the territories of Indiana and Michigan, agreeably to the boundaries as established by the act, passed April 30,1802."

Thus it appears, that from the time the northern boundary was first fixed by Congress, to the year 1812, the general government has recognized no other than the east and west line from the southern extreme of Lake Michigan, as the true boundary of the states which border upon the Ohio river; and that it has steadily persevered in the intention to dispose of the whole of the Territory north of that line, at some future period, as should be deemed most expedient.

The right "to attach" the Michigan territory to the state of Ohio, at any period after the admission of that state, which Congress attempted to reserve in the second section of the act of 1802, ^cannot be sustained by any principle contained in the ordinance of 1787. The power to declare the inhabitants of our country, without their consent, subject to the laws and jurisdiction of any state, is not, it is supposed, granted to the general government by the constitution of the United States. If Congress can enlarge the boundaries of one state in this manner, it may at its pleasure reduce the largest state in the Union below the smallest.

The original states have been secured in their boundaries by charters or by agreements. If the United States was truly the sovereign over the territory north-west of the Ohio river, the