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Show GRANTS TO STATES ON ADMISSION TO UNION 307 tained in the ordinance . ..." It then offered the people of Kansas their own propositions, respecting donations of public lands that eliminated the grant for eleemosynary institutions and reduced that for public buildings to 10 sections, provided they would adopt the usual disclaimer ordinance.66 On this basis Kansas became a free state on January 29, 1861. Minnesota Meantime, two additional territories had become states, further assuring that the combination of "Northern Doughface" and Southern slavery interests would not control the Congress much longer. Minnesota, the first of the two, was no more welcomed by the South than Kansas, though there was less reason to oppose its admission because this state came up through the usual procedure favored by Congress, commencing with an enabling act. The delay Minnesota experienced in gaining admission was partly the result of factional and party wrangling within the territory and partly owing to the fact that the attention of a nearly distraught Congress was focused on the Kansas question.67 Like Iowa, California, and Texas, Minnesota attracted population at an amazing rate in the fifties so that it had scarcely been created as a territory before it was time to consider statehood. Congress enacted its enabling measure on February 26, 1857, and offered Minnesota the usual grants. Minnesota Territory had meanwhile been given $40,000 for public buildings and $20,000 for a penitentiary.68 Party wrangling got the territory to such a pass that two conventions met simultaneously, one Republican and one Democratic; each drafted its own constitution, which were Population of Minnesota* 1850_______........._______________ 6,077 1852__________________________......20,000 1855........______.....____.....___40,000 1856________________________________100,000 1857_____.......___....._____......150,092 1860______________________......____172,023 ¦ The round figures are estimated, the others are census data and the official count of the territory in 1857. Blegen, p. 173. reconciled and submitted as one by the territorial government for congressional approval. Minnesota avoided the difficulty into which Kansas had fallen when it tried to dictate to Congress the boundaries and the grants of land it should be given. In Minnesota's case speculators working through the delegates attempted to have the boundaries that Congress had specified changed but they were ultimately defeated, perhaps partly because it seemed to some delegates that the surest way to gain entrance into the Union was not to offend congressional susceptibilities. Southern opposition because Minnesota was to be a free state was enough to bear. The constitution of the Republican convention contained a provision respecting the school lands the state was assured of receiving that was retained in the final constitution and was to be of great importance in the future, though it affected Federal-state relations to no degree:69 The proceeds of such lands as are or hereafter may be granted by the United States for the use of schools within each township in this State, shall remain a perpetual school fund to the State, and not more than one-third of said lands may be sold in any two years, one-third in five years, and one-third in ten years; but the lands of the greatest valuation shall be sold first, provided that no portion of said lands shall be sold otherwise than at public sale. The principal of all funds arising from sales or other disposition of lands, or other property, granted . . . shall forever be preserved inviolate and undiminished. . . . 66 12 Stat. 127. 87 Theodore G. Blegen, Minnesota a History of the State (Minneapolis, 1963), p". 220. 68 9 Stat. 403, 438 and 11 Stat. 167. 69 Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention for the Territory of Minnesota (St. Paul, 1858), p. 613. |