Lincoln Unites the Divided House

 On June 16th 1858 in Springfield Illinois, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous “House Divided” speech. The “house” was “the nation” but the word “house” better suited Lincoln’s purpose. He wanted to put an end to “slavery agitation” but he complained that the Federal Government’s Kansas-Nebraska Act had not ended but increased the agitation. “I believe,” he said, “that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.” Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent in the election of 1858 for US Senator from Illinois, warned that Lincoln was calling for “a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states”. Seven years later more than 600,000 Americans from the north and the south had died fighting one another in 8000 fights including 384 major battles all over “America” but “the nation” survived whole and now free of slavery, although the man who had first proclaimed that a division existed in the union had been assassinated. There had certainly been political division over slavery but there had been no division at all in the “house” over the question of whether the 34 states of the union were sovereign or not. In 1861 all the states were sovereign but by 1865 state sovereignty as it existed before the war was gone, wiped off the American share of the North American continent by the Civil War along with slavery. 

Daniel McNeill

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Historians Rewrite American History

 No historical writer has ever stated the bare fact that a President of the United States had used in the Civil War an American army against Americans. Instead they busied themselves rewriting American history to make it fit harmoniously with the new direction Abraham Lincoln's revolution was taking the United States. Historians used two concepts to help fashion their postwar version of our history, “America” and “the nation”. “America” already existed before the first appearance on the east coast of  European immigrants. “America” transformed Europeans soon after their arrival on her shores into Americans. The English colonists from England who arrived in 1620 at Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were some of the first Americans and the political compact they agreed to on their ship, the Mayflower, before settling on the land was an embryo of democratic concepts that would one day be embodied in the US Constitution that established Washington as the head of “the nation”. American colonists in Massachusetts rebelled in 1695 for independent rule and, assembling an armed force of 1500 men, drove the British governor Andros out of Boston. This was the most important rebellion in “America” in early colonial times against British rule and was clearly, according to historians, the first rumblings of volcanic forces that would one day roar forth in a fiery blast and form “the nation”. Massachusetts’ colonists 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. This allowed historians to again jump on the “America” bandwagon and announce that the Massachusetts men had revolted in “America” to set up an independent government for “the nation”.  The Massachusetts men were American patriots and even before George Washington, a Virginian, came to Cambridge Massachusetts in 1775 to take command of their army, they had begun the American Revolution, the  bold event that showed the world the deep strength seething within the American heart and soul to found “the nation”. Samuel Adams, the firebrand organizer of the New England rebellion, instigated the Boston Tea Party, attended the first and second 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 a national 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” and that he had led the rebellion against Britain in her name. We have records of him referring to Massachusetts as  his “country” as far back as an essay he wrote on liberty and sedition in 1748 at a time when he could not possibly be referring to “the nation”. In another essay in the Boston Gazette in 1771, he writes about “the liberties of our country”. His country, Massachusetts, had put an army in its fields, had issued its own currency, the Pine Tree Shilling, and had fought alone for three months with an army of over 20,000 men against a powerful European nation. Adams left behind too much written evidence that proved that he was not rebelling in the name of “the nation” so historians ignored him as best they could and some even wrote books deriding him as a crank.

Daniel McNeill

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A Revolutionary Purpose

 The limited powers assigned to Washington by the Constitution, basically full power over the military and diplomacy and some limited legislative and juridical powers, could not possibly be sufficient for what Lincoln declared was a "national" government. American states had gambled that they could give up some of their sovereignty and yet remain sovereign. They attached 10 amendments to the Constitution before ratifying it. The tenth amendment 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 certainly have been an odd way to set up a “national” government since the powers delegated are limited. Lincoln used the word “national” to describe the government he became president of in 1861 because his revolutionary purpose was to make the Federal Government a national government.

Daniel McNeill

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Lincoln Goes National

 After the Civil War, historians began writing American history as though the domination of all Americans by the Federal Government was inevitable. Yet for a large part of our history the seat of the Federal Government, Washington DC, did not exist and when it was created, it was not located in any of our states. We chose a separate location for it taking small portions of land from the states of Virginia and Maryland. Abraham Lincoln declared in his inaugural speech of March 4th 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 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 the limited powers that the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the new government possess.

Daniel McNeill

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Four Roman Emperors, Two American Consuls

 In 69 AD, Rome had four emperors, Galba, who was killed by the Praetorian Guard, Ortho, who committed suicide, Vitellius who was killed by Vespasian’s soldiers. Rome then gained stability again under the fourth emperor, Vespasian. Trump is now the American emperor (so to speak) and Biden is set to undo him and take over imperial (again so to speak) power. But McConnell, the head of a cohort of  Republicans in the Senate, is looking to seize power. If Biden gains national rule, Washington may resemble ancient Rome politically. Before the dictatorship of emperors, Rome was ruled by two consuls who shared power equally. Will it turn out that Biden will be one consul as president and McConnell the other consul as head of the senate? Usually in the Roman Empire, one consul dealt outside of Rome with various parts of the empire and the other consul dealt with local business in Rome. Biden will have full diplomatic power and will deal with relations outside of Washington, but the other consul (always so to speak), McConnell, will be fixed in Washington controlling with his stamp of approval legislation. During the time of the four emperors, Rome was plagued by terrible civil wars. Let’s hope that the memory of ancient civil disasters in the Roman Empire will keep our three aspirants to enormous power civil.

Daniel McNeill

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A Nation With No New Californias

 When the tyrant Caesar was assassinated, more tyrants followed. Empires are ruled by one man and so are nations. The national feelings of elation at the defeat of Trump were real and glorious but Washington has rarely used its enormous power nationally. So watch out. Do you want a new California somewhere beyond our borders or are you alright with being pressed forever within our present boundaries? When I began arguing 9 years ago in this blog that we should admit new states to our 50 from all over the world, no one agreed. Look at Cuba on a map. It’s big and fertile and sun-drenched with hundreds of miles of oceanfront land. I know you are against admitting Cuba as an American state but I am baffled trying to figure out why. The Cubans, you say, don’t want to be  Americans like the happy Cuban-Americans in Florida. They don’t want to be free to move to any one of 51 states and work there and vote there as citizens by simply living there. We should forget about Cuba and work here solving our own problems in our nation. We don’t want to have the right to go and live anywhere in Cuba with the same rights and privileges we would have moving to, say, New Mexico. We don’t need new Californias. We like things as they are. Okay, but there’s a big problem. Washington doesn’t govern. It uses its power as it wants not as we want. So you have your nation, I admit it, even though it is a fact that there has never been a nation, a viable nation, on the continent of North America. But that’s it. No new Californias. No new Cuban-Americans making hundreds of dollars more than what they now make working for peanuts in Cuba. We don’t want a United States of the World. Who knows, we may not even notice it when the next tyrant pops up in Washington.

Daniel F. McNeill https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L5IXSGO

Americans Cast Out a Fascist Hoodlum

 What Americans did in casting out the tyrant Trump was followed on the media by the world. The world saw our complicated and radical political system at work and even the most intelligent among them did not understand it. Trump did not hold onto dictatorial power because he was not the head of a sovereign state. He became the dictator of the government in Washington but the legal power to hold and and certify the results of a presidential election belongs exclusively to fifty sovereign states. Each state certified independently according to its own election laws what candidate for the presidency its citizens preferred. The dictator of the sovereign state of Belarus decided last August to elect himself president by falsifying the results of the election he organized. He controlled the election process and he manipulated it to remain a dictator. He was the head of a sovereign state and Trump was not. I do not mean at all that the government in Washington does not have great power. Trump had taken personal control of all of Washington’s power by putting his own people in charge of the federal courts and all the federal agencies and bureaucracies. He succeeded in making himself the king of America and my fellow Americans rose up bravely and magnificently and voted him out of his kingship. I am not afraid to say what it was: the election of Joe Biden was a reenactment of the victory over the king of England which resulted in the democratic document Magna Carta. The English-speaking people of the world who live in democracies know what we  English-speaking Americans did. We saved democracy in the United States by ripping our country out of the clutches of a fascist hoodlum. The United States will never be ruled by a king as long as we remain forever loyal to the government in Washington and at the same time freely and bravely exercise our democratic rights as citizens of fifty sovereign states.

Daniel McNeill

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L5IXSGO