On this day in history, 150 years ago, Confederate artillery pieces opened fire on a federal fort known as Sumter. Thus, the American Civil War had begun. Four years later, over 600,000 men would be dead and an unknown amount of civilians. The result? Shelby Foote said it best, "'The United States are' is how you used to hear the country referenced before the war. After the war it was 'the United States is'. That's what the war did. It turned us into an 'is'."
And we still have a long way to go before every calling ourselves a "union" again...
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1 comments:
Too true. and yet the Founders had no desire for one 'superstate' like the one they had just fought for their freedom... they intended invididual, sovereign states with representative governments and officials who would be regular working class citizens. those citizens would take time away from home and job to serve, then go back to their jobs.
Only in the last 75 years or so has the toxic idea of a central, federal government which dominates every aspect of each person's life, come into being. And the sooner we end it, the better.
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