Nevada in The American Civil War - Admission Into Statehood

Admission Into Statehood

Nevada's entry into full statehood in the United States was expedited. Union sympathizers were so eager to gain statehood for Nevada that they rushed to send the entire state constitution by telegraph to the United States Congress before the presidential election and they did not believe that sending it by train would guarantee that it would arrive on time. The constitution was sent October 26–27, 1864, just two weeks before the election on November 7, 1864. The transmission took two days; it consisted of 16,543 words and cost $4303.27 ($59,294.92 in 2010 dollars) to send. It was, at the time, the longest telegraph transmission ever made, a record it held for seventeen years, until a copy of the 118,000-word English Standard Version of the New Testament was sent by telegraph on May 22, 1881.

Nevada had fewer than 40,000 inhabitants when it gained statehood, far fewer than the initial population of any other state (though this was not a legal barrier to statehood President of the United States Abraham Lincoln wanted an additional Northern state that would presumably vote for his reelection, and help force pro-Northern ideas into new amendments to the United States Constitution.