They are linked, the difference being that the Missouri Compormise made Maine a state and Missouri a territory with the expectation that it would quickly draft a constitution.
Nope. Instead of size which is immaterial to representation in the Senate, the tradition was to add one slave state and one free state at the same time for balance. We can look back and see why this sort of balancing act is tenuous (Bloody Kansas anyone?) and the situation grew more complicated after the Dred Scott decision in 1857 meant “free states” were not really slavery-free.
Back to your question, Texs was awkward considering that Florida had just been admitted but we really wanted Texas and as an independent republic, it was not even a US territory. Perhaps Iowa and Wisconsins admissions were fasttracked to balance Florida and Texas but then we end up with California (a free state) and yet again the free/slave balance is skewed.
They became territories (not states) through the same law, the appropriately named Kansas-Nebraska Act.
I suspect there was a movement to clean up the US and start having territories become self governing states. Imagine how difficult in 1889 and 1890 it would be to have the Pacific Northwest or Dakota be run from Washington DC. The nine-day thing was probably just taking all of the open statehood petitions and Congress voting on them at the same time. After 1890, as pointed out below Utah had issues (but note the took the key step in 1890). Oklahoma was Indian Territory so let’s not open that can of worms and I suspect New Mexico and Arizona did not meet the number of resident requirements at the time. Alaska and Hawaii were not in the contiguous United States so I have no clue what the thinking about them at the time was.
Good question. I have heard that it was because the Mormons claimed most of the Southwest as the State of Deseret which held up statehood but that was settled by the Feds with the creation of the Utah Territory in 1850. The other theory that I have heard that I think is true is that the Feds wanted the Mormons to give up polygamy before obtaining statehood. Remember that as a territory, the marriage laws were controlled by the federal governmnet but as a state, Utah could make their own marriga laws. So I don’t think it is a coincidence that the Mormons disavowed polygamy in 1890leading to acceptance of their next petition for statehood.
As mentioned, the criteria for admission were mostly population, economic development, and between 1820 and 1860 the slave/free balance. (Texas, though geographically big, was not extraordinarily large in population at the time of admission)
As for the Plains/West states, according to Stein’s How the States Got their Shapes, while those lands were still Territories, as they would progress from Unorganized to Organized as the size of settled population and economic activity increased (and as it became clear what were the key centers thereof), they would be then subdivided into more manageable sizes and there developed a sort of standard practice of averaging out a certain number of degrees of latitude and longitude from the original territory’s baseline. You notice in the map a number of those states, whose east/western or north/southern borders are a continuing line from one pairing to the next, suggesting that at some point that was the edge of a “parent” territory that was later subdivided.
While they were territories those jurisdictions also were subjected to changes to benefit those that were already states. For instance the Federal government ceded to already-admitted Nevada large parts of the Utah and Arizona Territories over the 4 years after admission.
The 1889 thing was mostly a coincidence, although settlement in those territories didn’t really start taking off until the Northern Pacific railroad was completed in 1883. It seems that 6 years was apparently how long it took to get the requisite population settled in and a statehood committee going. Of course, the Dakotas were a twofer since it was one territory until they admitted it as two states.
Trivia note: Alaska and Hawaii are two of the four states that did not adjoin an existing state at the time of its statehood. The other two are California and Louisiana.
Texas was a more a political entity that was added as one piece to the US, rather than a “state sized” piece carved out of a larger block of territory. Texas was admitted with the provision that it could divide itself into 5 states, the other southern states wanting this to create more slave states, but Texas itself never was wild about this, and asside from turning over land north of 36-30 to the US so it could be a slave state, and selling other land to the US to pay down debt, remained the same size. The books “How the States got Their Shapes”, is a good resource to understand the political backstory behind why states boundaries are where they are.
This was the notion in the book “Under the Prophet in Utah” by Frank J. Cannon. (Available free on Project Gutenberg.) Cannon was (well, he says so in the book) the bloke who went from Utah to Washington D.C. to negotiate statehood, and took with him the pledge from the Mormon Elders that they would give up polygamy. That pledge made statehood possible.
(Cannon has a lot more to say on the subject, but not relevant to this discussion. Suffice to say he did not favor polygamy.)
This reminds me of a related question I tried to find some answers on but failed: Why were new states introduced into the union at all, rather than the existing states expanding their territory? I never understood the desire or reasoning to add entirely new states, since each new state further dilutes the control the existing states have over the federal government, by making their portion of the Senate smaller by total percentage (each state had 7.69% of the Senate when there were 13 of them, but now each state only commands 2% of the senate).
Besides questions of practical manageability of governance given c.1800 modes of transportation and communication, not all of the original states had viable western claims, and many of those who did had conflicting such claims, so that would have been a mess to resolve and it was eventually agreed that the western territory claims would be surrendered to the federal government. Plus at the time of the Constitution already settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee were stirring to separate from Virginia and NC, and Vermont was operating as a de facto independent republic refusing to submit to being part of either NY or NH, so it became a foregone conclusion that there would be new states admitted. Once the pattern was established, save for cases like Texas and California that did not go through the Organized Territory stage, the policy became to segment the territories into units of manageable population and size and admit them as each became economically and politically viable.
On the question of size, it’s worth noting that California is one of the few states where the participants in the state Constitutional Convention got to choose their own state boundaries.
The final version they came up with, which is the current state of California, is often described by historians as the “small state” option. One proposal considered by the convention was to include all of what the Mexicans had called Alta California, which would have included all of present-day Nevada, plus considerable swaths of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.
One of the delegates at the California Constitutional Convention, a guy named McDougal, proposed a state boundary that would place the state between 32 and 42 degrees North (pretty much the current north-south reach of California), but would also have extended the state east to the 105th degree of longitude, which would have placed the eastern border somewhere in the middle of present-day Colorado and New Mexico.
McDougal recognized that Congress might have a problem with a state this large, and there were also delegates who argued that, even if it were allowed, such a large state would be almost impossible to govern. McDougal’s plan would also have encompassed the Mormon settlements of the Great Salt Lake, and some delegates expressed concern that the “religious peculiarities” of the Mormons, as well as their clear desire to separate themselves from other groups of Americans, would not make them very good candidates for California statehood.
It seems likely that a few of those pushing for the “big state” version of California might also have believed that such a large state would inevitably be split into two or more smaller states. While the Convention agreed early on that California would not be a slave state, there were a few who harbored the hope that it might be split into a Northern and Southern California, with slavery allowed in the southern part. Some even proposed a two-state split, somewhere around Santa Barbara, which would have been in line with the 36[sup]o[/sup]30’ boundary put in place in the Missouri Compromise.