History Time! Michigan Enabling and Statehood Acts

Many states proudly post the text of the legislation establishing their statehood on their governmental web site. Michigan does not do this, probably because the Enabling Act of 1836 has the shameful title of "An Act to establish the northern boundary line of the State of Ohio, and to provide for the admission of the State of Michigan into the Union upon the conditions therein expressed." So, as a public service at the start of Year 178, here is the text of the Michigan statehood act of January 26, 1837.

An Act to admit the State of Michigan into the Union, upon an equal footing with the original States.

Whereas, in pursuance of the act of Congress of June the fifteenth, eighteen hundred and thirty-six, entitled “An act to establish the northern boundary of the State of Ohio, and to provide for the admission of the State of Michigan into the Union upon the conditions therein expressed,” a convention of delegates, elected by the people of the said State of Michigan, for the sole purpose of giving their assent to the boundaries of the said State of Michigan as described, declared, and established, in and by the said act, did, on the fifteenth of December, eighteen hundred and thirty-six, assent to the provisions of the said act, therefore:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the State of Michigan shall be one, and is hereby declared to be one, of the United States of America, and admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original States, in all respects whatever.

SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the Secretary of the Treasury, in carrying into effect the thirteenth and fourteenth sections of the act of the twenty-third of June, eighteen hundred and thirty-six, entitled, “An act to regulate the deposites of the public money,” shall consider the State of Michigan as being one of the United States.

APPROVED, January 26, 1837.

After the jump, the aforementioned Enabling Act of 1836.

21 Jump Street

This post is Mathman approved!

As some of you may know, this past weekend, I pulled off the rare football trifecta, watching a high school game on Friday night at my alma mater, Saturday was the Michigan/Notre Dame game and Sunday, I went to Ford Field for the Lions/Vikings game. Three games, three wins. A pretty neat circumstance. As we were walking out of the game, I snarkily noted "Lions 2-0, Michigan State 3-0, Michigan 1-2. We are in the end times gentlemen."

And that is when my friend Mike stated the following premise (essentially):

"Each year, there's a pile of 20 wins and Michigan, Michigan State, and the Lions divvy them up between them."

So I did the math from 1970 (the year of the NFL-AFL merger and Bo's second year in Ann Arbor)

(and for the purposes of this, I did not count ties as half wins. They were ignored.)

The results after the jump...

The bold number is the highest win total for the year.

Graphically:

So what did we learn? Well, actually it's that there's a pile of 21 or so wins available and the teams seem to divvy them up amongst themselves. So Mike was very close to being right without any significant research, just off the top of his head.

Outliers: 1982: the NFL Strike Year, which cost the Lions seven chances to win. Presuming that they went 4-5 in the 9 games, an extrapolated 7-9 would bring that up to 17, which would be almost right there. Still a bad year.

1984: But if you're going to have a set of collective bad years in Detroit, that would be the year to do it.

1991: Mike's initial premise buster as stated to me isn't actually that far off because of how bad Michigan State was.

1997: Michigan goes undefeated and wins the (Mythical) National Championship, Lions make playoffs, Michigan State not awful under Nick Saban.

1999: Michigan goes to the Orange Bowl, Lions amazingly make playoffs post-Sanders retirement, and Saban gets his season to get him lured to LSU.

And, as Geoff pointed out to me in writing this up, Michigan is responsible for roughly 9 of those wins a year, leaving MSU and the Lions to fight over the other 12 between them.

Conclusions: Well, sir, the data support no conclusions as yet. The absence of activity in the Pacific suggests this could be just an exercise. But when you look at how often Michigan has carried the banner, it is amazing considering that the Lions have three more chances a year for most of those years, if not four. Let's hope that this year is the good kind of 1999 style outlier and everyone ends up happy (maybe flip the result of the Michigan/Michigan State game that year, just to be safe).