A passage in Lincoln's first Inaugural Address stuck out to me, and I wanted to see what you all thought of it. "Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassible wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this."
Lincoln is right that physically, the South cannot separate from the North. But most continents make up many different countries, unlike North America. I think the United States is way too big a country to work together cohesively, and the Civil War is an example of this. Why can't the South and the North split up? They would still need some sort of working relationship as separate countries, but I don't understand why Lincoln thought that just because they couldn't physically separate, they wouldn't be able to be two distinct countries.
I think your last point may be the nub of Lincoln's comment -- they would need some working relationship.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for North America comprising a single country, I suspect Mexicans and Canadians would raise an eyebrow.
The deeper problem of succession for Lincoln may have been the ideological one, for which physical proximity is a stand-in (and not perhaps a very strong supplemental argument): can a government by the people cohere and endure at all? Remember the idea was still fairly new, and most people in the world believed it could not work. I think we're still wondering.
I didn't mean to imply that North America only consists of one country- I just meant that it doesn't make up a lot of different countries.
ReplyDeleteSuppose the south been allowed to succeed. The north would no longer be under any compunction about returning fugitive slaves, and if abolitionist sentiment continued to grow in the north, eventually we can easily imagine plenty of causes for a war after all.
ReplyDelete