Why two Carolinas, two Virginias, two Dakotas, but one big ol Texas?

13 comments

1. Why not?

2. [removed]

3. The Carolinas were because of their colonial charters.

   The Dakotas were just named that way when they became states.

   West Virginia split off from Virginia due to the civil war and kept the name but added west to avoid confusion with their traitorous neighbors.

4. East Virginia, like Germany, was controlled by USSR after the war. After we got it back, West and East Virginia never became unified, unlike Germany.

5. And yet Texas is smaller now than it was when it was a sovereign nation.

6. reject modernity, return to long carolina

7. *They* don’t want you to know this, but it’s for the good of all mankind. A unified Carolina, Dakota, or Virginia would be an unstoppable force of nature that, individually, could easily strongarm the US and use its resources to conquer the world. We split them in half to focus their overwhelming power on each other to keep the world free from their influence.

   Texas, on the other hand, is just full of hot air. That’s why it’s so big.

8. Texas, after defeating Santa Anna in its war of independence, was its own sovereign nation before it became a state.

   Virginia was one state. It split during the Civil War. West Virginia was pro Union. Virginia was pro Confederacy.

   The Carolinas were split by the English crown before the U.S. declared independence.

   The Dakota’s split after controversy over the location of a capital, the Dakota Territory was split in two and divided into North and South in 1889

9. Historical and cultural reasons for all. Virginia was over slavery, not sure for the other two

10. Virginia split before the Civil War, Carolinas were founded separately, the Dakotas had opposite population centers (northeast and southeast), Texas was admitted as one unit due to having a low population, with the stipulation that it can choose to break into up to five states once it had more people

11. One is one too many.

12. The original plan was to divide up Texas into a few different states, but since Texas was annexed during the time of slavery, adding a bunch of new slave states would have thrown the free/slave state balance in chaos. States that had abolished slavery seriously did not want pro slavery states to have a majority in the senate.

13. When Carolina was founded, its proprietors were given a tract of land so insanely big that they decided to adopt what was effectively a federal colony system to run it, where there would be autonomous sub-colonies which were all answerable to a colony-wide government which was answerable to the proprietors. When the area lost its proprietorship and was taken over by the British government directly, they ignored the old charter and just adopted the sub colonies of North and South Carolina, and made Georgia its own colony.