'Battle Born': Nevada Becomes a State by Telegram
On October 31, 1864 — eight days before a presidential election — Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Nevada the 36th state after its constitution arrived by telegraph.
Nevada became a state by telegram — all 16,543 words of it.
In the fall of 1864, with the Civil War raging and a presidential election eight days away, Abraham Lincoln wanted Nevada in the Union. A loyal new state would cast three electoral votes for his reelection and, just as important, send congressmen who could help pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.
There was just one problem: Congress needed Nevada's new constitution in hand, and the copies sent by ship and stagecoach hadn't arrived. So Territorial Governor James Nye turned to the fastest technology of the age. On October 26, two telegraphers sat down in Carson City and began tapping out the entire constitution — 175 pages — in Morse code. With no direct line to Washington, every word had to be re-transmitted at relay stations in Salt Lake City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. It took two days and cost $4,303 — roughly $88,000 in today's money — making it the longest telegram ever sent, a record it held for seventeen years.
Lincoln received it, and on October 31, 1864, he proclaimed Nevada the 36th state.
Nevada had barely 40,000 residents — an astonishingly small population for statehood — but it had something Washington valued more: the Comstock Lode, the richest silver strike in American history, discovered in 1859. The territory, carved from western Utah in 1861, had filled almost overnight with miners, merchants, and boomtowns like Virginia City. Its mines were already bankrolling the Union war effort.
The rush to statehood had been frantic. Congress authorized a constitutional convention in March 1864 — Nevada's first attempt at a constitution had failed the year before — and the delegates met in Carson City that July, writing the document in less than a month. When copies sent by ship and stagecoach failed to arrive in Washington, the telegraph was the last resort. It worked with days to spare.
The gamble paid off, at least politically. Nevada voted for Lincoln in November, and its legislature ratified the Thirteenth Amendment the following February.
The state's motto says it all: 'Battle Born.' Nevada is one of only two states admitted during the Civil War, and the only one whose birth certificate traveled by wire. Every Nevada Day, the state still celebrates the last Friday in October — close to, if not exactly on, the day a telegram made it a state.
Photo: Virginia City, Nevada, in 1867–68 — a Comstock mining town in Nevada's first years of statehood — photographer unknown, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
