Why Did a "Howling Wilderness" Become Michigan's Capital?

Abstract

Why Did a "Howling Wilderness" Become Michigan's Capital? Eric Dobberteen (bio) In 1847, Michigan traded its capital for a swamp.1 Detroit had been Michigan's territorial and state capital since 1805 and had become the state's biggest city and a significant port. By the 1830s, it was also an entrepot for settler migration from the East Coast to the Great Lakes and the old Northwest Territory. So why move the capital at all? And why move it to a "howling wilderness" that only in time would become the city of Lansing?2 Considering the capital-placement experiences of the twenty-five states that preceded Michigan into the United States, moving the capital from Detroit was nearly inevitable. By the time Michigan became a state in 1837, many other states had moved their original capitals, some several times. These moves usually resulted from intra-state sectional pressures created as populations spread (usually westward) from the first settlements. Lower Michigan's three neighbors—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—had all moved capitals from their originally settled geographic edges to sites closer to the center of each state. There was little chance that Detroit, regardless of its size, wealth, and power, could remain Michigan's capital perched in the southeastern corner of a large and growing state. In contrast, the legislature's surprising 1847 selection of Lansing—little more than a sawmill on the Grand River—was not inevitable, and the reasons behind it were more complicated.3 It is important to examine Michigan's experience not just in terms of how pressure grew to move the capital from Detroit, but also why it was moved to Lansing. The state developed its own brand of sectionalism between and among the four east-to-west tiers of counties stretching across the southern half of the Lower Peninsula; a sectionalism that ultimately influenced the 1847 legislative process, allowing legislators from the two northern tiers to join forces and snatch the capital from more likely candidates. [End Page 107] Thanks in part to the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, Detroit in the early 1830s was growing and vibrant, but its role as the capital came under attack as early as 1835, before Michigan officially became a state. In June 1835, delegates drafting what would become the state's first constitution debated the issue of moving the capital. Votes to move it, at least temporarily, to Ann Arbor in Washtenaw County or Barry in Jackson County ultimately failed, as did counter attempts to make Detroit the permanent capital.4 Though the delegates made no final decision during the convention, they specified in Section 9 of Article XII of the first constitution that Detroit continue as the capital until 1847 pending selection of a "permanent" site.5 By 1847, every state but Massachusetts had moved its capital at least once. While each state's circumstances varied, this history had common themes Michigan repeated.6 Moving a capital frequently resulted from the natural outward migration of a state's population from the originally settled area containing the capital to the more remote frontier. This demographic expansion created sectional tensions and political pressures to move the capital closer to a shifted population center. Christian Montès referred to this repeated process as a "westward/centrality" pattern that occurred in twenty-two different states.7 Michigan's nearest neighbors in the Northwest Territory—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—had experienced this centralizing process, moving their capitals from their first-settled edges toward their geographical centers.8 The westward/centrality pull on a capital was more than a desire for some abstract geographical symmetry. The outwardly dispersing population generally created a rural/urban divergence of occupation, class, wealth, and even religion between the older and newer regions. These differences engendered intra-state sectionalism frequently summarized as a rural distrust of cities, often including the original capital. One historian concluded that the westward movement of capitals was "almost exclusively a [intra-state] sectional issue."9 Michigan experienced this same pattern. As its population moved westward and northward from the southeast corner of the state, the same rural/urban divisions took hold. Many Michiganders soon concluded that Detroit wielded too much...