The Minnesota Territory came into being on June 1st, 1830, as the castoff part of the former Iowa Territory. It held just a few thousand white settlers, mainly along the Mississippi River (nearly a third of whom lived in St. Anthony, which has always remained far and away the largest city in Minnesota, even in the present). The western and northern portions of the territory remained populated mainly by native peoples, including the Sauk and Meskwaki nations, who had been largely forced out of Iowa in the 1820s, along with the Ojibwa and Lakota nations, who more traditionally called the area home.  

Over the next decade, as more and more people moved in along the Mississippi and its tributaries, and as the state of Iowa filled in with more people to the south, it became plausible that statehood for Minnesota might be on the horizon. St. Anthony, in particular, prospered both as the home of Fort Pike, which acted both as a defense against the natives to the west and the British to the east and as a busy international crossing with the town of Kaposia in British Wisconsin (part of the province of Upper Canada). Like its southern neighbor, Minnesota was a free territory and saw the establishment of many smaller farmsteads, especially across the southern and eastern parts of the territory, following the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, along with the Ceder, Iowa, Des Moines, and Little Sioux Rivers that came up from Iowa. The settlers who built those farms were a curious mix of English-speakers from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, along with newly arrived immigrants from Scandinavia and the German states (especially by the mid-1840s, as revolts and counter-revolts gripped central Europe). Territorial politics were dominated by the Democrats, similar to Iowa, with the Federalists having some influence in St. Anthony among the more educated, business-minded folk. This Federalist-leaning is considered a contributing factor to the push in 1844 to move the territorial capital from St. Anthony to Mahkato, even though the official reasoning was to avoid having the capital on an international border. Mankato was staunchly Democratic, and considered the heart of Minnesota’s southern “farm country.” 

In 1845, during the first year of the Haines Administration, statehood suddenly loomed large. With war again breaking out between Imperial and Republican Mexico, it looked as if the United States would get drawn into the fighting, meaning an uptick in commerce across Jefferson Territory, which formally petitioned for statehood in February. Minnesota politicians and businessmen had seen the writing on the wall, so to speak, and they had organized a constitutional convention the previous fall shortly after the capital had been moved to Mahkato. The constitution was approved in January by voters, and the petition for statehood was sent to Franklin just weeks after Jefferson’s request. On April 2, 1845, President Haines signed Minnesota’s enabling act, bringing the North Start State into the Union as the 27th member.