The Toledo War – When Michigan and Ohio Nearly Killed Each Other Over a Strip of Land
Picture this: it’s 1835, and two entire states are mobilizing militias to fight over a piece of land that’s barely eight miles wide. The Toledo War was a boundary dispute between Ohio and Michigan over what is now known as the Toledo Strip, a 468-square-mile region that both states claimed. When Michigan petitioned for statehood in 1835, both sides passed legislation attempting to force the other’s capitulation, with Ohio’s Governor Robert Lucas and Michigan’s 24-year-old “Boy Governor” Stevens T. Mason instituting criminal penalties for residents submitting to the other’s authority.
Both states deployed militias on opposite sides of the Maumee River near Toledo, but the single military confrontation ended with shots being fired into the air, incurring no casualties, with only one non-fatal stabbing of a law enforcement officer. What makes this whole affair even more absurd is that Ohio raised 10,000 men while a Michigan newspaper welcomed them to enter the Toledo Strip and find “hospitable graves” there.
Bleeding Kansas – The Civil War’s Violent Dress Rehearsal
Bleeding Kansas was a series of violent civil confrontations in the Kansas Territory between 1854 and 1859, emerging from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas. The conflict was characterized by years of electoral fraud, raids, assaults, and murders carried out by proslavery “border ruffians” and antislavery “free-staters,” with 56 political killings documented during the period, though the total may be as high as 200.
‘Bleeding Kansas’ was a term coined by the New York Tribune in 1856, and the factional violence clearly showed that the issue of slavery could only finally be dealt with through military action. On May 21, 1856, hundreds of border ruffians crossed into Kansas and entered Lawrence to wreak havoc, setting fire to buildings and destroying the printing press of an abolitionist newspaper, officially igniting a guerrilla war.
The Utah War – When America Almost Invaded the Mormons
The Utah War (1857–1858), also known as the Utah Expedition or Buchanan’s Blunder, was an armed confrontation between US government forces and Mormon settlers in the Utah Territory, lasting from May 1857 to July 1858. Although the war featured no significant military battles, it included the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where Mormon militia members disarmed and murdered about 120 settlers traveling to California…