GDG- States Rights and Union

[Alan D. Brunelle]

Dennis Lawrence wrote:
> Esteemed GDG Member Contributes:
>
>
> Hello,
>
> did this originate with Shelby Foote's telling of it in The Civil War 
> series? Or had that been a common statement before the airing of THE 
> SERIES? 
I think there were two parts to this from Foote:

(1) The notion that as the men in the various armies marched through all 
those states, they picked up the idea of being part of one great nation. 
It's easy to think of your state as your country, when you hardly ever 
go 20 miles away from your home. It's another thing altogether, when you 
have marched from Wisconsin, down through Georgia and up the Carolinas, 
then march through Washington DC. [Or, leave your home in Alabama, march 
up through Virginia, and from there onwards through Maryland and into 
Pennsylvania, to some obscure little town called "Goetzeburg" or some such.]

(2) I _believe_ it was Foote in his Civil War book series that noted 
Lincoln's morphing from using "union" early in his presidency to 
"nation" at the end. For example, in his 1st inaugural he uses "Union" 
something like 23 times, and "Nation" not at all. While by the time he 
got around to writing The Address, we see the use of "nation" 5 times, 
and zero references to "union". (In his 2nd inaugural we see nation 4 
times and union 4 times).

And speaking of President Lincoln, let's see what he has to say about 
this topic in his first inaugural - the first quote, I think, is 
wonderfully Lincoln: who else could get to the root of the problem so 
simply:

"If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of 
States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be 
peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to 
a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require 
all to lawfully rescind it?"

and in the next paragraph, he discusses history a little bit:

"Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that 
in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history 
of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It 
was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was 
matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was 
further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly 
plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of 
Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects 
for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was /'to form a more 
perfect Union.'"

Alan
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