GDG- States Rights and Union

[Alan David Brunelle]

Good morning Laurie,

I've always wondered about the latter point as well: for example, you 
read about the men who went to West Point around this period of time, it 
did not seem to be unusual for some young man (late teens) to just pick 
up, get on a train or horse, and cross the country to get there - all by 
himself. I guess people were just more self-reliant about traveling 
distances.

Alan
PS. My favorite story on this line was when reading a biography of John 
Adams, and finding that when his ship ended up in Portugal, he and his 
son (JQA) just walked/rode from there to Paris (rather than wait for 
another ship to head up to France).

I have to do a mapquest to get from my house to somebody who lives less 
than 5 miles away, and here you find a father/son just "walking to 
Paris" back in the 1700's!

Laurence D. Schiller wrote:
> Esteemed GDG Member Contributes:
>
>
> Hello Alan - your last paragraph sums up what I had originally said 
> about the states never having been independent entities. As far as 
> your first comment, I would like to say that the idea that Americans 
> were mostly 'homebodies' is not really true. Perhaps in the mountains 
> of Appalachia, but, if you look at the rosters of regiments north and 
> south, a great percentage had been born elsewhere and moved to where 
> they joined. There was much more travel and movement in the US than 
> Burns would have us believe. Just as two examples, my first person in 
> the 2nd, William Bradshaw, was born in Burlington Vt. and moved to 
> Wisconsin in 1848. His family had come from Ireland just 2 years 
> before his birth. My other character, George Hammitt of the 104th 
> Illinois, was born in Licking Ohio but moved to LaSalle County 
> Illinois in 1858. These fellows were certainly aware that it was a big 
> country.
>
> Best,
>
> Laurie
>
>>>
>> 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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