I recently read Shelby Foote’s Narrative of the Civil War. Something that stuck out to me was how even after the war, the southern leaders insisted that the South and North were separate nations bound together in the same country, like England and Scotland are separate nations in the UK. How prevalent is this thought today? Are we one nation, or multiple?
28 comments
One nation.
The similarities outweigh the differences by *far*.
No, it’s a very elaborate setup
Unless you’re counting nations like the [Navajo Nation](https://www.navajo-nsn.gov/), no.
We were never multiple countries assembled into Voltron States of America.
A group of seditionist traitors does not make us 2 nations.
Define what a nation is.
Yeah, no shit southern leaders thought of themselves as a separate nation. We thoroughly dispelled that notion.
I don’t think so. I think we are certainly large enough to do so, but even with some division in culture, we share more than we differ.
>the southern leaders insisted that the South and North were separate nations bound together in the same country,
They were wrong.
I guess its more important how you define nation. The US has a lot of jurisdictions that have some major cultural differences but we are all part of the same nation.
This really sounds more like a semantic argument than anything else. Fundamentally what’s really the difference between a “nation” in the sense of Scotland//England/etc or a “state” in the sense of American states? I mean ignoring the specifics of governance, both are partially self-governing regions which are subject to a federal government, yet with some degree of guaranteed independence. Both sets have distinct local culture, accent, and even variations in language. Both sets have unique histories which set them apart from others within their set.
I think it’s really just semantic.
We are one nation. Back then the idea of America was based around the cooperation of sovereign states much more than now. The classic example is that before the Civil War it was “*these* United States” and after it was “*the* United States.”
The cooperation of states now is more about the structure of government now than a significant cultural force. It isn’t comparable to the UK, which has countries that has been sovereign for hundreds of years that eventually formed a union in their own way. American states have never been truly sovereign in a significant way (except Hawaii), so they aren’t like little countries, but they also aren’t simply administrative divisions.
One nation. Under God.
I’m a member of the Lummi Nation.
Yes and no; in that the US is mostly composed of a single nation, but within it are also Native American nations (e.g. the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Nation, the Oneida Nation, etc).
If you were to ask the people who rebelled against England in 1776 and later went on to write the US Constitution what they considered the US to be, they probably would not have called it “one nation”. They would have considered it a confederation of independent states, hence the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation proved to be too weak for a lot of people and hence the Constitution was written, though not without much strife. The Senate was created to protect the original idea of sovereignty of each state and was made the senior house of the legislature. Small north-eastern states like RI did not want to give up their sovereignty to their large neighbors. They considered the individual states to retain ultimate sovereignty, and hence the New Jersey Plan. The ultimate agreement that led to the adoption of our Constitution also set the groundwork a Mexican Standoff of sorts between the States and the Federal government that persisted for decades over where ultimate sovereignty ultimately resided. The Civil War, in addition to settling the slavery question, settled the sovereignty question by force, but that doesn’t mean the founders of this country would have agreed.
The North also flirted with the idea of secession at Hartford during the war of 1812. They never attempted anything, but it shows that the idea of secession was not just a southern invention. Both sides played the state’s rights card when it suited them. Any group of people will always claim philosophical ideals when it suits them and discard them when it doesn’t. In the end, on questions like this, might makes right. The Union Army won the Civil War, and therefore the Northern vision of the US is “right”.
The states are more of separate nations. The south as a whole doesn’t have a unified government that isn’t the federal. But individual states do have their own laws and stuff
That’s kind of an ongoing discussion that’s still getting sorted out.
When the United States was first founded, it was a loose confederation of individual states. That didn’t work out, so a new Constitution was passed that created a more powerful federal government, while preserving state sovereignty. But a lot of that was left somewhat vague. And, since then, the power of the federal government has grown significantly.
So, it comes up every once in awhile where either the federal government or a state does something that the other believes is an overstep, and a lawsuit is filed, and the courts have to sort it out. The various cases involving the interstate commerce clause are good examples.
The way it stands now, the federal government wields broad power over states, but a lot of the governance of states still occurs at the state or even local level.
This is just a matter of semantics. Traditionally a “nation” was more or less synonymous with ethnicity, and a country was a legal authority that controlled a particular territory.
So, countries like Austria-Hungary were usually considered “multi-national states” as they contained various distinct peoples.
Today, nation and country have become synonymous in common parlance. So, in that sense the US is one nation. In the older sense, America is as far from being “one nation” as any country in human history lol.
No. One nation, but state sovereignty is still a thing to some extent (the phrase is actually included on Illinois’ state flag). That’s why each state issues their own driver’s licenses, has their own gun laws, etc.
Nope.
We talk about our differences a lot, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t 70-80% the same.
I can pick up and move to any part of the US and experience almost no culture shock.
We are one United States.
In this thread: people conflating the idea of nations with nation-states.
Yes.
While we are governed by the same core set of Federal laws with constitutional rights, several states ACT as their own entity as far as they can get away with legally and even going against federal laws (like in the case of recreational weed) by seeing a law as out dated or above Federal mandate, and more of a states rights.
Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Montana, Utah, Oklahoma, North Carolina, New York, to name a few.
The Roe/Wade debacle will galvanize this in a way that gun laws haven’t.
There is a reason there are 2 sides to Federal involvement on a state level. What started all of this was money.
Money is used as a weapon . I remember Louisiana being one of the last holdouts to observe the Federal doing age act. It was giving no road funding for 4 years, even though “officialy” complying in 1986. Businesses and clubs were not hammered, signs were not posted, reflecting the drinking age until 1988.
Click it or ticket was another. Mandated health insurance another. Welfare was nearly as big a slush fund as the highway act.
The highway act of 1956 is when the government took advantage of state politicians greed. X funds were distributed for X miles of highway. This created a piggy bank to be plundered in each state, while allowing the fed to keep filling it up as long as specific federal laws were endorsed on the state level. This led to patch work roads, levees, and bridge work in the 60s, that have needed or been replaced multiple times in some cases due to bilked funds.
So I say yes.
If the fed wasn’t greasing pockets states like Texas would have broken off in the 70s when that gained steam. Of course the laws governing joining the union stated that the federal government has the say so in such matters, opening the door for military force if such a direction was taken.
Since 1901 no Governor has endorsed a secede agenda, but congressmen in 19 states have, kind of showing where the money trickles down and where it doesn’t.
I do expect that chatter to start back up this summer, but its only for optics and votes.
And, this is my view, not one generally shared, but easily verifiable 🙂
#We are Yugoslavia in the flesh
If you count the various Native American nations and various US territories.
No, we all hold the same ideals and are part of one nation, but I heard that foreigners sometimes look at the individual states as mini-countries.
No, the states are basically provinces more than their own countries as the federal government still has overall control/say over the states individual governments.
On the books there is some legacy details like I think technically Texas is still separate, but in reality, it’s one nation, noting like Scotland and the U.K.
No, we are one nation. That was just lost causers being salty about losing the war. If anything the US became more unified, at least on a government level, following the Civil War.
No, legally the US is one unified country.