Idaho in 1889: The Boise Convention

Most Idahoans never read their state constitution, and fewer still know where it came from. That is a shame, because the story explains a lot about how Idaho government still works. The long list of things the Legislature cannot do, the rules on railroads and corporations, the elected executive officers, the detailed school land provisions: all of these came out of a hot summer in Boise in 1889, when a group of lawyers, miners, ranchers and merchants sat down to write a charter for a state that did not yet exist.

This lesson walks through who wrote the Idaho Constitution, how the convention was called, what the delegates were worried about, how the people ratified it and how Congress made it official. It also shows you how to use the convention record yourself. Later lessons in this course rely on that record, and so do Idaho judges. When the Idaho Supreme Court interprets the constitution today, it often asks what the words meant to the people who adopted them in 1889.

Why Idaho wrote a constitution in a hurry

Idaho had been a federal territory for 26 years; the convention's Address speaks of the territorial system "under which we have lived for the past twenty-six years." Under the territorial system, the president appointed the governor and the territorial judges, Congress could cancel acts of the territorial legislature, and Idaho had no vote in Congress or in presidential elections. The convention's own Address to the People of Idaho, signed August 6, 1889, called this "a state of political vassalage, similar in many respects to that in which the American colonies were held by Great Britain."

Statehood was blocked for years by national politics. According to the Idaho State Historical Society's Reference Series No. 476, a divided Congress admitted no new states from 1882 through 1888, and until February 1888 there was even a serious chance Idaho would be carved up among its neighbors, with Nevada eyeing the south. After the 1888 national election the climate changed, and six northwestern territories, Idaho among them, suddenly had a path to admission.

Idaho was not ready. Montana, Washington and the Dakotas were working under an enabling act, a law of Congress that authorized them to hold a convention and set the rules. Idaho had no enabling act. A bill for one had been introduced by Senator John H. Mitchell of Oregon in December 1888, but Congress never passed it. The territorial legislature also refused to provide for a convention, so there was no money for delegate elections, delegate pay or a ratification vote.

Two governors, one call

Territorial Governor E. A. Stevenson acted on his own. On April 2, 1889, he issued a proclamation recommending that the people elect delegates on the first Monday in June to a constitutional convention to meet at Boise City at noon on July 4, 1889. His proclamation, reprinted at the front of Volume 1 of the convention record, set the size of the convention at "seventy-two members" and apportioned them among 18 counties, from nine for Ada County to one for Bear Lake.

Stevenson left office almost immediately. His successor, Governor George L. Shoup, issued his own proclamation on May 11, 1889, confirming the call. Shoup added a line that shaped the whole convention: if a county preferred to choose its delegates "by some other equitable method," those delegates would be seated anyway. "The manner of choosing delegates," he wrote, "is of less importance than that they should be representative men, of character and ability."

Most counties took him up on it. The Historical Society's account says each party was given half of each county's seats, with any odd seat going to the party that had carried the county in 1888. In ten counties the party committees simply picked the delegates; in six more, county conventions did; in Owyhee and Custer, a popular election ratified the party choices. The result was a convention with members of both parties from nearly every county, which the delegates later described in their Address as "in no sense a partisan one."

The convention: July 4 to August 6, 1889

The convention opened on July 4, 1889, as Stevenson's call had specified, with Governor Shoup in the chair. The delegates chose John T. Morgan of Bingham County as temporary president. The next day, July 5, they elected William H. Clagett of Shoshone County as permanent president by acclamation. (The convention record spells his name "Claggett" in places; he signed the Address to the People as "Wm. H. Clagett.")

The work was organized the way a legislature works. The delegates split the subjects of the future constitution among standing committees, with names such as Education, Labor, Mines and Mining, Public and Private Corporations, Municipal Corporations, and Public Indebtedness and Subsidies. Each committee reported an article with numbered sections. The full convention then debated each article in the Committee of the Whole, amended it line by line and voted on final passage.

The convention met for 28 days. On the twenty-eighth day, August 6, 1889, the president put the question of adopting the constitution as a whole. The record reports the result: "Yeas 51; nays none." (Volume 2, page 2037.) Not every delegate was present; the roll call that morning listed ten members absent. The convention adjourned that day.

The people in the room

The Address to the People said "every material, industrial and professional interest was represented" and that "the business and tax-paying portion of our people was especially prominent." Governor Shoup himself sat as a delegate; his name appears on the final day's roll call. Fred T. Dubois, the territory's delegate in Congress and one of the most determined backers of the test oath discussed below, was not a member but addressed the convention, according to the record.

Who was not in the room matters too. No women served as delegates. Members of the Latter-day Saint church were barred from voting and office under territorial law, so they had no voice. Chinese immigrants and most Native Americans were shut out of the political process entirely, and the convention wrote that exclusion into the constitution, as you will see.

What the delegates feared

A constitution tells you what its authors were afraid of. Read the 1889 text and four worries jump out.

1. Distant, unaccountable government

The Address to the People spent most of its length on the evils of territorial rule: governors "sent among us" who abused the veto, judges "sent to us from abroad" who were replaced before they learned local law, and the absence of an independent supreme court. "The most intolerable evil," the Address said, was "the changing and shifting character of our judicial decisions." The fix was a full judicial department with an elected supreme court, and an executive branch of officers elected by Idaho voters. Article IV, Section 1 still lists seven elected executive officers, and Article V, Section 6 still provides that supreme court justices "shall be elected by the electors of the state at large." Lesson 4 covers how that plural executive works today.

2. Railroads and big corporations

By 1889, Westerners had watched railroads and mining companies dominate other states' politics. The convention's answer was Article XI, "Corporations, Public and Private." Article XI, Section 5, essentially unchanged from the 1889 engrossed text, declares that "all railroads shall be public highways," makes railroad, transportation and express companies "common carriers, and subject to legislative control," and gives the Legislature power to regulate their rates. Section 6 bans "undue or unreasonable discrimination" in freight and passenger charges and forbids charging more for a short haul than a longer one on the same line.

Section 8 reserves the state's police power so that it can never be "construed as to permit corporations to conduct their business in such manner as to infringe the equal rights of individuals, or the general well being of the state." Section 18 is an early antitrust clause, forbidding companies from combining "for the purpose of fixing the price or regulating the production" of goods.

The same caution shows up in the long list of things the Legislature may not do. Article III, Section 19 bans "local or special laws" in dozens of situations, including "creating any corporation." The point was to stop lawmakers from handing out favors one company or one town at a time. Lesson 5 shows how these limits still trip up bills.

3. Mines, water and labor

Idaho's economy ran on mining, irrigation and livestock, and the constitution reflects it. Article I, Section 14 declares that land needed for reservoirs, irrigation canals, mine drainage and "railroads, tramways, cuts, tunnels, shafts, hoisting works, dumps" is a public use, so private property can be condemned for those purposes with just compensation. Article XV, on water rights, sets the rule that "priority of appropriation shall give the better right"; that article is the subject of a separate course, so we only flag it here.

Article XIII, "Immigration and Labor," made eight hours "a lawful day's work" on state and municipal works and prohibited employing children under 14 in underground mines. The 1889 version also required convict labor to stay within prison grounds; that section no longer appears in the current text, which is a good reminder that you must check the current official version before quoting anything.

4. The "Mormon question" and the test oath

The most bitter fight was over who could vote. In the 1880s the territorial legislature had adopted a test oath that kept members of the Latter-day Saint church from voting or holding office because the church then practiced plural marriage. (The University of Idaho Library's account of the test oath dates the law to 1884.) The convention's majority wanted the same rule locked into the constitution, where a future legislature could not undo it.

They succeeded. As originally adopted, Article VI, Section 3 barred from voting, jury service and civil office not only people convicted of felonies, but anyone who was "a bigamist or polygamist," anyone living in "patriarchal, plural or celestial marriage," anyone who taught or encouraged it, and anyone who was "a member of, or contributes to the support, aid or encouragement of, any order, organization, association, corporation, or society" that taught it. Because the church taught plural marriage at the time, that clause disfranchised its members whether or not they personally practiced it.

"...nor shall Chinese or persons of Mongolian descent not born in the United States, nor Indians not taxed, who have not severed their tribal relations and adopted the habits of civilization, either vote, serve as jurors, or hold any civil office."Idaho Const. art. VI, sec. 3, as engrossed and adopted August 6, 1889 (Proceedings and Debates, Vol. 2, Appendix A)

That last clause was added on the floor by an amendment offered by George Shoup and adopted on a voice vote, according to the debate record (Volume 1, pages 914 to 915).

Not every delegate went along. During the Article VI debate, delegate Parker objected that a large group of citizens would be taxed without being allowed to vote, and he told the convention: "this report is designed for no other purpose than to disfranchise a class of religious enthusiasts, who do not believe as you do, and who do not believe as I do" (Volume 1, page 918). He lost.

The territorial test oath was challenged in court, and on February 3, 1890, after the convention had finished and the voters had ratified the constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (1890), a case from Oneida County. The Court held that the First Amendment did not protect advocating what the law defined as crimes, even when done in the name of religion. The Idaho Legislature removed the statutory restrictions on Latter-day Saint voters in 1893, but the constitutional language stayed on the books until 1982, according to the University of Idaho Library.

The suffrage debate also shows a road not taken. During the same debate, delegate Sinnott proposed adding "or she" so that women could qualify as electors. The amendment failed on a voice vote (Volume 1, page 914). The 1889 text limited voting to male citizens 21 and older, while letting women keep the school election rights they had under territorial law. Idaho voters approved a women's suffrage amendment in 1896, which Ballotpedia notes made Idaho the fourth state to do so.

Ratification: November 5, 1889

The convention scheduled its own ratification vote. Article XXI, Section 6, which is still printed in the constitution, provided that the document "shall be submitted for adoption or rejection" at an election "on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, A.D. 1889," which was November 5. Ballots read simply "For the Constitution: Yes. No." Voters could strike out the word they did not want.

There was still no money for an election. The Historical Society says counties used volunteer election judges and improvised procedures, and one Hailey newspaper mocked the "pitchfork and drygoods box" system in which "anything wearing hide, hair, feathers or hoofs could vote." Latter-day Saint residents could not vote at all.

The constitution passed overwhelmingly. EastIdahoNews, citing the Idaho State Historical Society and published histories, reports the margin as about 7 to 1. The Historical Society's account says the document "still would have been approved" even if church members had been allowed to vote. (Exact county-by-county totals were published in the Idaho Statesman in December 1889; we could not confirm them against an official canvass, so we do not repeat them here.)

Statehood: July 3, 1890

Because Idaho had no enabling act, the constitution had to go to Congress for approval after the fact. Congress gave it. The Idaho Admission Act, 26 Stat. 215, approved July 3, 1890, recites that the people of the territory, "by a convention of delegates called and assembled for that purpose," had formed a constitution, that it was "ratified and adopted by the people" at an election "on the first Tuesday in November, eighteen hundred and eighty-nine," and that it was "republican in form and is in conformity with the Constitution of the United States." The act declared Idaho admitted "on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever" and declared that the constitution "is hereby, accepted, ratified, and confirmed."

Idaho became the 43rd state. Under Article XXI, Section 7, the constitution took effect "immediately upon the admission of the territory as a state." The admission act also granted sections 16 and 36 of every township for the support of common schools, the start of the school endowment lands that Article IX still governs.

What carried over from the territory

Article XXI, the "Schedule and Ordinance," handled the switch from territory to state. It kept territorial laws in force unless they conflicted with the constitution (Section 2), kept lawsuits and debts alive (Section 1), and in Section 19 made promises Congress required: religious toleration, a disclaimer of title to unappropriated public lands and Indian lands, and equal taxation of land owned by nonresidents. Section 19 says this ordinance "shall be irrevocable, without the consent of the United States and the people of the state of Idaho." Section 20 records that the convention, "in behalf of the people of Idaho," adopted the U.S. Constitution.

Why 1889 still matters in court

The original meaning of the 1889 text is not just history. Idaho courts use it to decide real cases. In Planned Parenthood Great Northwest v. State (2023), the Idaho Supreme Court asked whether a claimed right was "deeply rooted" in Idaho's history and traditions at statehood. In State v. Clarke (2019), it looked at the common law as it stood in 1889 to decide what Article I, Section 17 means for warrantless arrests. Both cases are covered in Lesson 3. If you want to argue about what a section means, you need to know what the people who wrote it said.

A note on the record itself

The debates were taken down in shorthand by a convention reporter, and the notes were filed with the territorial secretary. Nobody paid to transcribe them for more than 20 years. The Legislature finally appropriated $5,000 in an act of March 10, 1911, and I. W. Hart, then clerk of the Idaho Supreme Court, edited and annotated the two volumes, published by Caxton Printers in Caldwell in 1912. Hart admitted one gap: the printed committee reports that sat on each delegate's desk were not saved, so when a delegate moved to amend "line 14," you sometimes cannot tell exactly which words he meant.