How New States Join the Union, From Vermont in 1791 to Hawaii in 1959

Thirty-seven times, Congress has done something the great empires of history almost never did with their frontiers: it has taken new land and its people and made them an equal. Not a province, not a dependency, not a lesser member with a different flag, but a state with the same two senators, the same sovereignty and the same dignity as Virginia or Massachusetts. Ask the old imperial capitals how often they offered their provinces that deal, and then wait for the silence.

That remarkable record rests on one short clause of Article IV and one ordinance passed by the old Confederation Congress in the summer of 1787. Together they built a road from wilderness to statehood that America walked from Vermont in 1791 to Hawaii in 1959. The road has had detours, a few of them very strange. Let's read the text, walk the history in order, and see what it teaches about the Union, about consent and about the principle that a new state comes in as an equal or not at all.

The text

Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 reads:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

And Clause 2, the Property Clause, gives Congress power over the lands that would become new states:

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.

Read the first clause for what it grants and what it forbids.

1. Congress "may" admit new states. Admission is discretionary. No territory has a constitutional right to become a state.
2. No state may be carved from another state without consent. Both the state's legislature and Congress must agree.
3. No state may be formed by joining states or parts of states without consent. Again, the legislatures concerned and Congress.

Notice what the text does not say. It does not say new states come in on equal terms. The Convention considered language to that effect and dropped it; Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, wary of the growing West, wanted Congress left free. Equality came anyway, from the Northwest Ordinance, from practice and finally from the Supreme Court.

The Northwest Ordinance: the road to statehood

While the Convention met in Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress in New York passed the Northwest Ordinance on July 13, 1787. It organized the territory north and west of the Ohio River, and it is one of the great charters of American liberty. We tell its full story in The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 Banned Slavery and Promised Schools.

The ordinance created a three-stage path.

1. Stage one. Congress appointed a governor, a secretary and three judges to govern the territory and adopt laws from the existing states.
2. Stage two. Once the territory had five thousand free male inhabitants of full age, it could elect a general assembly and send a non-voting delegate to Congress.
3. Stage three. Once any of the future states within it had sixty thousand free inhabitants, it would be admitted "on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever."

The ordinance provided for not less than three nor more than five states from the territory. They became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, with part of Minnesota besides. It also forbade slavery in the territory and declared that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The First Congress reenacted it in 1789 under the new Constitution.

That phrase, "equal footing," is the most important idea in the whole history. The original thirteen states could have kept the West as a colony, as every empire before them did with its frontiers. They promised equality instead.

Vermont and Kentucky: consent at work

The first two admissions show the consent requirement in action, and both involved a state giving up a claim.

Vermont, 1791. Vermont declared itself an independent republic in 1777 and governed itself for fourteen years, coining money and running a postal service, while New York and New Hampshire both claimed its land. Vermont's 1777 constitution was the first in America to prohibit adult slavery. New York finally agreed in 1790 to drop its claim in exchange for a payment of thirty thousand dollars to settle the land titles of New Yorkers. With New York's consent secured, Congress admitted Vermont as the fourteenth state on March 4, 1791. Vermont is a reminder that statehood was the choice of an already self-governing people, not merely a gift from Congress.

Kentucky, 1792. Kentucky was part of Virginia. Its settlers, cut off by the Appalachians from the state capital, held a series of conventions demanding separation. The Virginia legislature passed acts consenting to separation, and Congress admitted Kentucky on June 1, 1792. This is the clause exactly as written: a new state formed within the jurisdiction of another, with the consent of that state's legislature and of Congress.

Tennessee followed in 1796, formed from land North Carolina had ceded to the federal government. Ohio, the first state carved from the Northwest Territory, was admitted in 1803 after Congress passed an enabling act in 1802 authorizing its people to write a constitution. Enabling acts became the standard tool for the rest of the nineteenth century. Maine was separated from Massachusetts with Massachusetts' consent and admitted in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise.

Michigan and the Toledo Strip

Admission has sometimes come with conditions, and sometimes with comedy.

In the 1830s, Michigan Territory and the State of Ohio both claimed a strip of land along their border that included the port of Toledo. Militias from both sides mobilized in 1835, in what became known as the Toledo War. The casualties were famously light: the principal bloodshed was a single stabbing, and nobody died. Congress resolved the matter by conditioning Michigan's admission on giving up the Toledo Strip, and compensated Michigan with the western Upper Peninsula. Michigan at first refused, then accepted, and was admitted on January 26, 1837. The Upper Peninsula's later copper and iron suggest Michigan got the better bargain, which is cold comfort to anyone who has spent February in Marquette.

Texas by joint resolution in 1845

Texas came into the Union as an independent nation, recognized by the United States and by several European powers, with its own president, army and debts.

Texas won independence from Mexico in 1836 and sought annexation almost at once. The issue was tangled up with slavery and the risk of war with Mexico. In 1844 President John Tyler sent the Senate a treaty of annexation, and the Senate rejected it, far short of the two-thirds a treaty requires. Tyler then tried a different path: a joint resolution of Congress, which needs only a simple majority in each house. Congress passed it, and Tyler signed it on March 1, 1845, days before leaving office. Texas accepted, and was admitted on December 29, 1845.

Critics argued that a foreign nation could be acquired only by treaty. Defenders answered that Article IV says simply that "New States may be admitted by the Congress," with no requirement of a treaty, and Texas was being admitted as a state. The precedent held. The joint resolution also allowed up to four additional states to be formed from Texas with its consent, an option Texas has never used. We discuss the Senate's treaty role in Two-Thirds of the Senate, How the Treaty Clause Was Built to Be Hard.

West Virginia in 1863: consent in wartime

West Virginia is the hardest case, because it tests the consent clause under the most extreme conditions.

When Virginia's convention voted to secede in April 1861, the people of its northwestern counties, with few slaves and close ties to Ohio and Pennsylvania, refused to go along. Unionist conventions at Wheeling organized what they called the Restored Government of Virginia, under Governor Francis Pierpont, and claimed to be the lawful government of the whole state. That restored legislature then gave Virginia's "consent" to the formation of a new state from its western counties.

Congress passed an admission act, and President Abraham Lincoln, after asking his cabinet for written opinions and finding them divided, signed it on December 31, 1862. Congress required a gradual emancipation provision in the new state's constitution. West Virginia was admitted on June 20, 1863.

Was that consent real? The Restored Government had been recognized by Congress, which seated its senators, and by the President. Under the logic of Luther v. Borden (1849), which held that the political branches decide which government of a state is legitimate, the consent was constitutionally sufficient. After the war, Virginia sued over two counties, Berkeley and Jefferson, and in Virginia v. West Virginia (1871) the Supreme Court held that Virginia had consented to their transfer. Lincoln's own reasoning was candid: he distinguished secession against the Constitution from a division made in support of it. Whatever one thinks of the legal footing, the result was a state formed by Unionists who refused to leave the Union. The consent clause and the Guarantee Clause meet here, as we explain in A Republican Form of Government Is a Promise Article IV Makes to Every State.

Equal footing becomes law

The Northwest Ordinance promised equal footing to five states. Over time, Congress wrote the same phrase into nearly every admission act, and the Supreme Court made it a constitutional principle.

In Pollard's Lessee v. Hagan (1845), the Court held that Alabama, like the original states, held title to the land beneath its navigable waters, because a new state enters with the same rights of sovereignty as the old ones.

The strongest statement came in Coyle v. Smith (1911). Congress's enabling act for Oklahoma, admitted in 1907, required that the state capital stay at Guthrie until 1913. In 1910, Oklahoma moved its capital to Oklahoma City. The Supreme Court upheld the move. Congress may set conditions before admission, the Court held, but once a state is admitted it stands on an equal footing with every other state, and Congress may not impose permanent restrictions on its political powers that it could not impose on the original thirteen. The power to locate its own seat of government belongs to every state, so it belonged to Oklahoma.

The equal footing doctrine is federalism's promise to every new member: no second-class states.

Utah, Arizona and the price of admission

Two more admissions show how Congress and presidents used their discretion.

Utah's statehood was delayed for decades over the practice of polygamy. Utah was admitted in 1896 only after its constitution prohibited plural marriage "forever."

Arizona's constitution, drafted in 1910, allowed voters to recall judges. President William Howard Taft, a future Chief Justice who believed judges must be insulated from popular pressure, vetoed the joint resolution admitting Arizona in 1911. Arizona removed the judicial recall, was admitted on February 14, 1912, and promptly amended its constitution to put the recall back in. That episode is Coyle v. Smith in action: before admission, Congress and the President may demand terms; after admission, the state is equal and free.

Alaska and Hawaii in 1959

The last two admissions completed the map.

The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, a deal mocked at the time as "Seward's Folly" after Secretary of State William Seward. Hawaii, after the overthrow of its monarchy in 1893 and a brief republic, was annexed by joint resolution in 1898. Both were organized as territories, and both pressed for statehood for decades.

Congress passed the Alaska Statehood Act in 1958, and Alaska became the forty-ninth state on January 3, 1959. Hawaii's admission act followed in March 1959, Hawaii's voters approved statehood by a wide margin that June, and Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959. Both came in on equal footing, with two senators each, exactly like Delaware in 1787.

The strongest objection, and the answer

The objection. If admission is just an act of Congress, nothing stops a temporary majority from admitting new states to gain seats in the Senate. Congress could admit the District of Columbia by statute, or split a large state into several with its consent, and permanently change the balance of the Union. A process that easy to manipulate is a danger to the republic, and the Founders should have required a supermajority.

The answer.

1. Partisan admissions are as old as the Union, and the system absorbed them. Admissions were often paired to keep balance, Vermont with Kentucky, Maine with Missouri, Alaska with Hawaii. The Dakotas were admitted as two states in 1889 in part for political reasons. The Senate has survived all of it. The remedy for partisan admissions is political accountability, not a new clause.
2. The consent clause already blocks the easiest abuses. No state can be split or merged without its own legislature's agreement. That is a real check against carving up a state for advantage.
3. The District is a special case the Constitution addresses directly. Article I, Section 8 makes the seat of government a federal district under Congress's exclusive authority, and the Twenty-Third Amendment gives that district electors on the assumption that it remains a district. Admitting it as a state by ordinary statute raises constitutional problems that do not arise for a territory. We explain why in Why the Capital Is a District, the Seat of Government Clause Explained.
4. Equal footing cuts both ways. Every new state gets the same Senate seats the small founding states fought for in 1787, a bargain we describe in The Connecticut Compromise Passed by One Vote on July 16, 1787. Admission adds members to a federal Union; it does not change the rules by which they govern.

The verdict: the admission power is broad by design, limited by consent and disciplined by equal footing. It has worked thirty-seven times.

What it means now

The story of admissions is the story of a country that refused to keep colonies. Every new state was a promise kept: that self-governing Americans on the frontier would someday govern themselves as fully as Virginians did. That promise is why federalism has room to grow. Each state, old or new, is a laboratory with the same powers, a subject we explore in Federalism Lets Fifty States Experiment, and the Constitution Planned It.

Debates over future admissions, whether of the District or of a territory such as Puerto Rico, should be argued on these terms: what the text permits, whether consent is genuine, whether the new state would be a true equal, and whether the people concerned want it. Those are questions for Congress and the people, argued openly.

The case in brief

1. Article IV lets Congress admit new states at its discretion but forbids forming a state from another state, or by joining states, without the consent of the state legislatures concerned and of Congress.
2. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 built the road to statehood and promised admission "on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever."
3. Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792), Texas (1845) and West Virginia (1863) show consent, discretion and wartime improvisation at work.
4. Coyle v. Smith (1911) made equal footing a constitutional rule: Congress may set terms before admission but cannot leave a state second-class afterward.
5. Alaska and Hawaii in 1959 completed a record no empire matched: thirty-seven territories and claims turned into equal, self-governing states.

What you can do: read Article IV, Section 3 on our Constitution page, then look up the year and the enabling act by which your own state was admitted, and share it with a student studying for our civics test.