Alva Review-Courier -

On the last day of October 1864 Congress granted statehood to Nevada, just in time for November’s presidential election. As expected, the voters of the new state gave their Electoral College votes to President Abraham Lincoln, who was running for a second term.

A decades-old law required that any territory asking to become a state had to have 60,000 residents. Nevada’s population was not even close to that number. The 1860 census had counted only 6,857 people in the area!

And even though Congress expanded Nevada’s borders after 1864 and new residents kept showing up to prospect for gold and silver, the state’s population did not top 60,000 until the census of 1880.

Since the population was often mobile, following mining “strikes” into other regions, Nevada’s total residents quickly dipped back below the 60,000 threshold. The 1900 census, for example, still counted only 42,335 souls in the state.

But Nevada statehood was not about an area being settled to the point that its citizens deserved admission to the Union. It was about helping President Lincoln get re-elected by creating three new Electoral College votes.

It was also about increasing Lincoln’s clout in Congress, especially in the U.S. Senate. Each new state, in addition to casting ballots for president, also sends two members to the Senate and (usually) one or two to the House of Representatives.

Nevada was the 36th state, but since 11 of its counterparts had seceded from the Union, the Senate went from 48 to 50 members when Nevada became a state. Nevada’s Republican senators added to the GOP’s majority in that venerated body.

Earlier, we noted that rules can be followed – or they can be ignored. And we have now seen that Lincoln and Congress ignored completely the rule about population when admitting Nevada to the Union.

But this was not the first time that Lincoln and Congress had broken a rule to admit a new state; they had also done so a year earlier when creating the 35th state, as we will see next week.