World Unity 33

    Jefferson and Madison, the third and fourth presidents, were men of culture and thought who had direct experience of the fight for independence and the formation of the Constitution. Historians usually concentrate on a conflict during this period between Federalists, who wanted a strong central government, and conservatives who were for states rights. Thomas Jefferson never gave up his firm conviction that Virginia was his country and not the United States but any conflict in his mind between federal and state power faded when Napoleon of France sold him the territory France possessed west of the Mississippi River, from Louisiana on the gulf of Mexico to territory in the far northwest on the Pacific Ocean, for 3 cents an acre.  Settlers were already moving westward into the open lands east of the Mississippi and now in addition a huge new open territory was added to the union west of the Mississippi all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Napoleon was doing his best with his army to set up in Europe a union of states in a French empire and he more than doubled the future size of the American union by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. While the Napoleonic wars were going on in Europe and Madison was president, America began a war with Britain in 1812. Madison had to flee Washington D.C. when it was occupied by British forces. He returned the next day to examine government buildings set on fire by the British. But by 1812, 5 more states had been admitted to the union. The war proved that a European nation-state might set fires in the seat of the union’s government but none of them could stop the advance of a union of states with limited sovereignty and democratic freedoms. During the war, the 5 New England states met in Hartford Connecticut to consider secession from the union. The war against Britain was clearly not in the region’s economic interest and New Englanders were concerned also that the admission of new states reduced their political power in the central government. But an extraordinary new way to organize humanity’s political life in a new revolutionary system was underway and the New Englanders at the conference in Hartford voted to remain a part of it. In Europe after the Napoleonic wars, independent nation-states reappeared with full independent power and the strongest set out with their ships to conquer and subjugate more peoples worldwide for their colonial empires. But in the new open territories in America, new free states were set up with guaranteed democratic governments and unalienable human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The 5 New England states showed the political power states with limited sovereignty possessed when they asserted their right to secede and then rejected secession. George Washington died 16 years before Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo in 1815. George Washington had created a democratic union of 13 states that would expand to 50 by admitting in 1959 the state of Hawaii. Napoleon lost his battle to unify Europe but he succeeded in expanding the American union by selling it enough territory for 14 new states. A future United States Of The World will have for its history books two heroes who personally created 27 of them.
Daniel McNeill Read other posts. theunitedstatesoftheworld.blogspot.com

World Unity 32

    On July 4th 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, both John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia died. The two had worked together during the rebellion to keep their colonies and the other colonies united against Britain. They both served as president of the United States and kept up a friendly relationship with one another communicating by letter until their deaths the same day. In 1826, 24 states were in the union. For historians of the period from 1814 to 1861 when the Civil War began, the union’s extraordinary and rapid growth should have been their main theme, but instead they focus on a trend they discovered in the union towards nationalism and contrast this with what they call sectionalism. A union of 24 states stretched out over a continent the size of Europe, each with sovereign powers, would naturally be expected to have separatist tendencies but none of any importance emerged. New England was a strong and prosperous area with a Protestant body of English-speaking people and a cultural unity based on 200 years of common history. But New England considered secession from the union and then rejected it. Historians however seize its tendency towards secession as a strong example of sectionalism. Virginia is cited as sectionalist because it considered itself a sovereign state and opposed decisions of the Supreme Court that reduced its sovereignty. The Supreme Court held that the states had not full but limited sovereignty and the court’s increase of power is cited by historians as the correct tendency of the union, one towards nationalism. But the actions of both New England, the home of Adams, and Virginia, the home of Jefferson, both give evidence of the firm sense of sovereignty that was powerfully alive in the states before the Civil War. And there were now 24 of them. Both Adams of Massachusetts and Jefferson of Virginia would have been shocked to learn that the revolutionary democratic union that they had helped create was somehow transforming itself, according to historians, from a union to a nation-state. What could motivate historians to tell the story of a rise of national power in the government in Washington D.C., which was neither fully sovereign nor a state, rather than the extraordinary birth of 24 free democratic states all with the same degree of sovereign power as that exhibited by the New England states and Virginia? The answer is that historians write with a view ahead to what will happen on April 6 1861, the start of a civil war between two groups of states. Historians must show somehow, even though the actual history of the period does not show it, that seeds of division between sections of the union were developing that inevitably would burst forth into civil war. In reality, the union was sound and developing magnificently. There were sectional tensions in the union but the union was not the problem. The union did not cause the Civil War. One politician, Abraham Lincoln, caused it. Lincoln was the problem.
DanielMcNeill amazon.com/author/graceisall 
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World Unity 31

    A terrorist massacre in Paris, a terrorist state in Iraq and Syria, more than a 100,000 illegal immigrants in Italy. What is the link between these events? They are the result of education and prosperity reaching only a minority of people in the world. The only real solution is providing education and prosperity for everyone in the world. The political system necessary to start the long and difficult fight to eliminate ignorance and poverty worldwide already exists in the United States. Yet we Americans waste our time and money trying to solve the problem by military means alone as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democracy without corruption is an essential weapon in the war for worldwide education, freedom and prosperity that we, the prosperous people of the world, must fight. We Americans must eliminate in our public talk and in our minds the myth that we are a nation like other nations. We have the power under the Constitution to act as a nation when dealing with foreign nations but it is false that we are but a mere nation. We have added 37 new states to our union since 1789 and we must add many more to kill poverty both in the United States and in the world. Entrance to our union of democratic states offered to all the states of the world is not just a way to defeat ignorance and poverty worldwide, it is the only way. No nation-state has ever had the American political experience of setting up new state after new state  and giving each a strong central government ordered by its Constitution to provide every state in the union with a democratic government and protection  from corruption and military invasion. Who is better prepared to give new states secure borders than we with our powerful army, navy and air force already positioned worldwide? What advanced economy  better than our economy could infiltrate and update the economies of new states? Would our powerful banks and our highly sophisticated Federal Reserve central banking system somehow block economic growth in new states? We have thousands of college graduates who could find careers in newly admitted states as teachers. We have thousands of small-business owners with advanced technical know-how who could easily move to new states and create jobs. Any state that joins our union will attract investors from all over the world who know that their investments will be backed financially and militarily by the American government just as it now backs investments in the present 50 states. Washington D.C. will become even more powerful with the addition of new states but it deserves additional power because it is the world’s new Rome and history has taught us to keep Rome as powerful as possible or ignorant barbarians will destroy the civilized world.
Daniel McNeill amazon.com/author/graceisall
Read all World Unity writings at: usoftheworld.com

World Unity 30

   Abraham Lincoln declared in his presidential inaugural speech of March 4 1861 that the Federal Government was a “national” government yet it possessed no national territory except the District of Columbia which was a stateless district. The American Constitution never uses the word “national” or “nation” or “Federal Government” anywhere. It says its purpose is to form “a more perfect union…for the united states of America” and it then enumerates powers that the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the new government possess. The tenth amendment to the Constitution states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Clearly the Constitution is about delegating certain powers to a central government and this would have been an odd way indeed to set up a “national” government since the powers delegated are limited. President Lincoln used the word “national” on  March 4 because his purpose was to make the Federal Government a national government. A month later on April 6, he started the Civil War and won it using his army against Americans living in 11 southern states. Winners of all major wars everywhere gain as a reward for their victory a rewrite of history purged of their misdeeds. Historians accepted Lincoln’s revolutionary view that America was a nation and then went to work to show that all American history up to Lincoln was nothing less than the germination of a nation that he pulled deftly from the womb of time and set solidly on its feet in Washington D.C..

   The English colonists from England who arrived in 1620 at Plymouth in Massachusetts became Americans and the political compact they agreed to for their small community became an embryo of democratic concepts that, according to historians, would one day be embodied in the US Constitution that established Washington as the head of a nation. Colonists in Massachusetts rebelled in 1689 for independent rule and, assembling an armed force of 1500 men, arrested the British governor Edmund Andros. According to historians, these were the first rumblings of volcanic forces that would one day roar forth in a fiery blast and form a nation. The Massachusetts colonists who fired their rifles at the British army at Lexington and Concord in 1775 and killed or wounded nearly 200 British soldiers as they drove the enemy regiments back to the safety of Boston were Americans. George Washington, a Virginian, came to Massachusetts in 1775 to take command of the New England army that historians renamed the American army. Samuel Adams, the organizer of the Massachusetts rebellion, instigated the Boston Tea Party, attended the first two continental congresses in Philadelphia, signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Articles of Federation and supported the ratification of the Constitution by Massachusetts. Samuel Adams might have been elevated by historians to the level of an American hero like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson if he had not constantly and outspokenly made it clear to his fellow colonists that Massachusetts was his country. Historians did not allow anyone on their lists whose deeds could not be nicely metamorphosed as presages of the nation Abraham Lincoln’s military victory required.  

   No defined geographical area is named “America” and no nation has ever established itself, including within its borders a well-defined distinct people, on the North American continent. This fact did not stop historians from finding “America” and the “nation” wherever it was convenient. In the public schools, our history books never taught us that the true majesty and glory of America derived from the successful union of 50 sovereign states with open borders and democratic governments. We were educated as though it were a matter of indifference if we happened to live in Massachusetts or Louisiana. Washington was the head of a nation but it had never built and funded a public school or university in any state, it had never built and funded a public hospital in a state, it had never built and sustained state roads or state transportation systems, it had never established and maintained libraries outside of the District of Columbia, it had never established and funded police and fire services outside the District of Columbia, it had no power to register births and deaths because a United States citizen can be born and die only in one state of many states, it had no power to marry couples under civil law, it could not incorporate banks and corporations, and it had also nothing to do with hundreds of  professions and public organizations and public activities that were governed by state authority. No one taught us that the state we happened to live in had power to do everything necessary for the public good as in any other state anywhere in the world except that it had no power to wage war or conduct diplomatic activities with other states. The armies of historians who followed Lincoln had done their job. Since we had a nation, it was none of our business to open our eyes and see that an extraordinary unfolding and development of humanity into a new revolutionary political system unlike anything in its past had happened among us.

Daniel McNeill Read all World Unity Writings usoftheworld.com

World Unity 29

   In the 1830s and 1840s, Herman Melville was writing about a mad New England sea captain who felt at home only with his feet on the deck of a ship sailing the oceans of the world crazy to soothe the rage in his soul by killing a white whale. Henry Thoreau was writing about how he lived alone in the woods creating for himself his own world. Edgar Poe’s poetry sent him wandering like an ancient ship on waves of despair searching for ideal beauty. Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing about evil men with maniacal passions dominating times long past. And Ralph Emerson was giving his American Scholar lecture at Harvard College declaring that a man should conform to nothing except the universal designs of nature that send rhythms of a powerful poetry to the soul of a man bold enough to rely only on himself. Where was there even a hint of some kind of national ambiance encircling and nourishing the imaginings of such men? Yet what an unique culture grew out of the strange ambiguities of antebellum America! If only we had had honest historians and honest critics, we might have been indoctrinated in our schools by a native literature and philosophy not bound any longer by the intellectual and spiritual borders that enclosed writers in nation-states. We did not have any nation. No blooming national will added extra heartbeats to the imaginative pulse of our writers. Instead, the history of the time inspired anti national feelings. The Federal Government was supporting land speculators and slave owners eager to drive Indians from their lands and to use the new territories for slave plantations. Under President Van Buren, a treaty was approved with the Cherokees which amounted to nothing less than their forced removal from their lands in Georgia to the plains west of the Mississippi River. In April 1838,  Ralph Emerson wrote an open letter to the President in which he said, “…a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country anymore?” Abraham Lincoln declared in his Gettysburg speech of 1863 that the Declaration of Independence in 1776 had created “a new nation". Subservient historians have since blinded our eyes to the real meaning of our history. Most Americas of antebellum times did not feel a political sentiment within them that united them to a nation. They lived in a union of sovereign states and the union’s glory resided in the simple fact that it could not be united culturally or politically into a single national block. The New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about “the anomaly of two allegiances of which that of the State comes nearest home to a man's feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law and has no symbol but a flag.” Addressing national sentiment, he wrote, “I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one’s native state.”  In 1857 Henry Thoreau, the author of Walden,  listened to a lecture by the anti-slavery abolitionist radical, John Brown, and said that it was the first time in his life that he ever felt he lived in a nation. Abolitionism was partly a substitute for national feeling. When an Abolitionist spoke at a meeting with moral inspiration against the evils of slavery, he was speaking against a foul condition of human beings that was legal according the laws he lived under but outlawed by the laws of the nation that he so ardently desired might exist but in fact did not exist. Ironically, Abraham Lincoln by starting the Civil War did give all Americans a nation, but he could not create by his machiavellian machinations one nation for all of them. By forcing Americans to fight one another, he created while the war lasted two nations, one north and one south.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

World Unity 28

   After the Civil War, men hungry for power worked to weaken  the sovereign powers of the states. Washington had assumed enough sovereignty to defeat in war 11 of the states. The federal army held them under martial law for 5 years. The military power that the Federal Government possessed was something that every American now reckoned with and feared. Everyone knew that Washington could use its army against whomever it wished and that it was further solidifying its power with a federal police force and federal prisons. The radical Republicans in power in Congress after Lincoln’s assassination had supported the war and now did everything possible to further reduce state sovereignty. They tried to impeach Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-president, who succeeded him to the presidency. He was against the movement towards expanded federal power and wanted to restore the Washington government and the union to their prewar status. He  survived his impeachment trial in Congress by one vote. In law and in fact, the federal government was no more sovereign now than it had been before the war, but the Republican party understood with fervor that something close to full sovereignty could at last be seized by a united group of men. They expanded federal power by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution. They used the court system to strike down state laws that opposed federal policies or tried to regulate business practices.

   Everything worked against the sovereignty of the states and towards the sovereignty of the Federal Government. Everything except the Constitution. The Constitution does not assign full sovereign power to any state. Instead it takes sovereign powers away from all the states of the union and gives sovereign powers to a central government that is not located in a state. It not only refuses to the Federal Government the status of a state but also separates its power among three branches, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The Constitution makes no government completely sovereign and forces every one of them to be democratic. The Federal Government marched ahead after the Civil War towards the status of a national state without being a state and the states, weakened by the war, believed they had lost the status as states with nearly full sovereign power that they had had before the war. The rush towards the creation of postwar America as a nation was based on the fiction that the Constitution had created a national government located in Washington D.C.. At the same time, the states suffered from the fiction that the ratification of the Constitution had left them with nearly full sovereign power when in reality such a degree of power had already been taken away from them by the Constitution. The Constitution had limited the powers of all American governments to such a radical degree that they were all doomed forever to be capable of functioning only as democracies.

   But the radical Republicans had nonetheless discovered that a political party with branches and supporters in every state could wield sovereign powers from the top down if it could establish solid political centers of power in all the states from the bottom up. The Constitution could be amended but it could never award full sovereignty to any government. The two party system became the only route towards the exercise of something close to full sovereignty by Washington. The two party system is in full force today but so is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the entire legal system of the union, both state and federal, would be nullified. Without it, all the states would become fully sovereign and separate nation-states. The Washington government would still be a non-state agency located in a stateless district but its powers would be invalid because it would no longer have the supreme power and duty of organizing states into a just union. Two political parties can continue to fight for supreme central power but without the Constitution and the Union, no power would exist that they could seize.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

Saving Washington To Save The World

50 states exercised their sovereignty by electing Donald Trump president of a government in Washington that is not located in any state and is not fully sovereign. American states parcel out their sovereignty assigning part of it to a central government and keeping the greater part for themselves. The citizens of the states vote for representatives to the legislatures of 2 governments neither of which are fully sovereign. It is impossible to rule a united group of sovereign states despotically. A fully sovereign nation-state is always ruled despotically either by one dictator or by some group of men elected democratically. The most important political objective of citizens of any state should be to make most laws regulating how they live. The fullest amount of political freedom should be the objective not the fullest amount of sovereignty. If Donald Trump were the president of a sovereign state, his total inability to govern would be a disaster. As it is, he and the other money-grabbing politicians in Washington simply grab and grab because government is mostly done locally. But Washington has absolute sovereignty in limited areas that directly affect world military and economic security. Trump's mismanagement is weakening an international system ruled by Washington whose collapse would be the worst economic disaster that has hit the world since the fall of the Roman Empire. We Americans must remain firmly loyal to Washington and support it for good or bad. We need to save the world by offering nation-states worldwide open admittance as new states to our union. But if we don't keep Washington safe and secure there will be no world to save.

Daniel McNeill amazon.com/author/graceisall
usoftheworld.com