
I studied for a time in New Hampshire. I found America both strange and familiar. I found Americans of all backgrounds to be extraordinarily patriotic. They treated their flag and national anthem with a reverence that I had never seen in Britain. They were sensitive about their Constitution and even their President. The heroes of American history were treated like saints. What else is the point of the George Washington story about him being unable to tell a lie? I was fascinated and studied American history in some detail.
The United States after winning its War of Independence was a divided society. It was divided between those who focussed on states’ rights and those who focussed on the country as a whole. It was divided between those states which had slavery and those which did not.
For the first decades as the USA spread westwards it muddled along through each crisis without ever resolving the fundamental divisions. Were states sovereign? Did they have the right to do what the United States itself did when it rebelled against Britain? Could a state leave the United States? South Carolina first threatened to secede in 1832, but the quarrel was smoothed over. A bargain was made about whether slavery could spread westwards and a compromise was made about Missouri. But slavery and states rights continued to divide the USA right up until 1860.
The Civil war is poorly understood in Britain. The crisis that led to war was the election of Abraham Lincoln. The 1860 presidential election saw North and South completely divided. Lincoln won ever state in the North, but none in a state that had slavery. The South used the SNP argument to demand secession.
[Interesting Read]
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