What does the federal government do to make a state a state?

Answer 1

There really isn't a carved-in-stone procedure for bringing new states into the federal union. The US Constitution doesn't address the matter, and subsequent legislation hasn't filled that gap.

To be fair, the issue doesn't come up often these days. No one has even asked to become a state since Hawaii was admitted in 1959. There are perennial efforts by some in the District of Columbia to have the federal capital admitted as the 51st state, but doing so would probably require an amendment to the federal constitution, and getting 37 states to agree to that would be difficult, to say the least.

In the case of Hawaii, there was strong favor among the territory's residents for statehood. The US Congress passed the Hawaii Admission Act and then-President Eisenhower signed it. In June 1959, the voters of Hawaii ratified the statehood act (by a ratio of 17:1) and Hawaii became the 50th state.

The process has been different for other states, with many variations and special conditions. A number of states have been carved out of early territorial conquests. What was once called the Northwest Territories yielded a number of states, such as Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and so on. Likewise, many other western and midwestern states were created from territory bought from France as the Louisiana Purchase. Still other states, like Texas and California, had been independent republics prior to attaining statehood.

West Virginia, once a part of Virginia, which seceded from the federal Union at the start of the Civil War, became a state when it essentially seceded from Virginia during the war!