John C. Sullivan - Honey War

Honey War

After Sullivan died in 1830, the Sullivan Line was extended in the west to the Missouri River in 1836 as the U.S. government in the Platte Purchase bought all the land west from the Indian Boundary Line and then permitted Missouri to annex the land. As part of the purchase, Missouri wanted the Sullivan Line resurveyed. Joseph C. Brown who was involved with establishing the Fifth Principal Meridian from which most of land in the Louisiana Territory was mapped was hired by Missouri to resurvey the land. Brown was to say that instead of using the mouth of the Kansas, the northern should have been determined by its relation to the mouth of Ohio River. Brown said the border should be 9.5 miles (15.3 km) north of the Sullivan Line at what is now Lacey-Keosauqua State Park in Keosauqua, Iowa. Brown's Line was not recognized by Iowa. Missouri sent Clark County, Missouri sheriff to collect taxes in the strip and was arrested. According to legend Missouri tax collectors cut down three trees that had honey bee hives to collect honey in lieu of taxes. State militias from both Missouri and Iowa were called out before the governors eventually agreed to let the Supreme Court decide the case which it did in State of Missouri v. State of Iowa, 48 U.S. 660 (1849), upholding the Sullivan Line noting that is how it was written in state's constitution. The line was resurveyed to correct various jogs as disputes were to continue over the line into the 20th century.

Read more about this topic:  John C. Sullivan

Famous quotes containing the words honey and/or war:

    I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life.... They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It’s wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.
    Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)

    From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
    Charles Darwin (1809–1882)