Napoleon Adds 14 States to the Union

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

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

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Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

George Washington The Referee

When George Washington took the oath of office in 1789 in New York as the first president of the United States, the occasion was so solemn that it was indeed like the awesome moment of the birth of a nation except that no nation came into being and Washington was not sworn in as the head of any state. He considered his role as president that of a referee. Most American historians nonetheless crowned the event as the birth of a nation and volumes have since been written attempting to unite American history since the arrival of Europeans in the seventeenth century as the story of the germination and birth and growth of a nation. This view is false. George Washington as commander of the Continental Army had led a rebellion that was not a national event since he fought in a civil war between colonists subjects of the British Parliament and King. It is fairly easy however for historians to call anyone who lived in the thirteen colonies an American and any action of the central government set up by the rebels national. George Washington became president of a federal government of thirteen states whose governors had powers that could be described more accurately as national than his. The truth is that as law and as fact there was no national government anywhere because none of the American governments were fully sovereign. The states had great powers and reinforced by the powers granted the Federal Government, they acted as sovereign nations. A state governor had the same police powers as any nation-state governor. The people lived under state constitutions and state courts and they now had the fantastic new liberty of having the right under the Constitution to cross state borders and live in any state they chose with full political rights. State governments were now even more secure in their power since a provision in the Constitution allowed them to appeal to the American army for help in putting down insurrections in their states. George Washington was a charismatic figure like Napoleon in Europe and he could have embodied a nation as did Napoleon if there were a basis for one. Instead he was a referee. He had as head of the executive branch sovereign powers over the military and diplomacy. But he did not fight any foreign state and the diplomatic actions he undertook did not affect Americans greatly. Foreign nations recognized the new government as a nation because it acted as a nation when dealing with them. At home, citizens of the new form of the union were enthused with developing their states and the continental territories open to them all the way to the Mississippi River. Foreigners and American historians called them Americans  living in an American nation, but the title given their president at his inauguration, “George Washington, president of the United States” indicated that the country Americans lived in was the United States. They did not care much how foreigners and historians defined their political system as long as it let them live freely as free men on the move in free states and wide-open territories.

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German Idealism Discovers America

The German philosopher Hegel wrote the greatest work examining humanity’s progress towards the expression of the divine in history. In his Philosophy of History, he examines the progress in world history of what he calls “universal spirit”. This spirit expresses itself throughout history in a variety of finite forms among many peoples all of which fail to reveal the universal spirit absolutely. Each finite form of universal spirit is inevitably surpassed in a dialectical movement of history by a new finite form which reaches however a higher form. Hegel identifies the progress of the world towards universal spirit as progress towards freedom. The oriental world, he writes, knew only the freedom of one man, as the pharaoh in Egypt. The Greek and Roman world knew the freedom only of some men, since slavery was instituted. The Protestant Germanic states of Hegel’s time, the early nineteenth century, finally realize the freedom of all. “The essential being,” he wrote, “is the union of the subjective with the rational will: it is the moral whole, the state, which is that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom”. Hegel was right that the European nation-state, set up by middle-class lawyers with laws protecting the riches of the middle class and exempting the rich from most taxes, was a historical development that granted at least the rich freedom. He did not know what might develop in the future beyond the European world of his time, but he did declare that “America is therefore the land of the future where in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history shall reveal itself.” According to American history, the nation-state is itself a burden that the world must get rid of if world history is to become unburdened. The true burden of America is to show the world that universal spirit reveals itself more fully in a union of states than in isolated nation-states. If the United States of America can transform itself to the United States of the World, universal spirit and universal freedom have a chance to become at last universal on our earth.
Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

   
   

Unnecessary State Powers and Compulsory Democracy

Once a state gives up its right to make war on other states and to conduct diplomacy with other states, what rights does it need to keep its integrity as a state? Does it need the right to set up tariffs to protect the economy within its borders from competition with other state economies? Yes, unless it is a member state in a union with other states worldwide who have agreed to get rid of all tariffs and make all commerce among states free. Must a state recognize by a passport or other official documents who its citizens are and who have the right to work within its borders? Yes, unless it is in a union of states who all agree that anyone from any state in the union can by right be a citizen of any of the other states with the right to vote and to work and to run for public office by simply deciding to reside in some chosen state. But if there is universal citizenship in such a union, how can a state govern its own affairs and protect its citizens from criminal behavior if it has stripped itself of normal state powers? It has state and local police under the control of a state governor and it has a state judicial system as well as a state constitution. How does it protect its state government from rule by a dictator and from corruption by state officials? There is no protection from dictatorship or corruption in a nation-state isolated from other states. Even in democratic nation-states, elected officials sometimes act like dictators and support corruption. The only way to permanently assure real democracy is for states to give up a completely independent state judicial system and make all its citizens subjects also to a federal judicial system with a Supreme Court as the final judge of the validity of all laws made by any government. Only a system with dual governments at both the federal and state levels can produce the independent out-of-state authority needed to arrest corrupt officials of any state and to put them in jail for their crimes. This means that there will be a central government established with supreme legal power. Isn’t this the death of democracy? How can democracy exist in a state that has given up so much power? The central government’s army will protect every state from invasion and guarantee a republican form of government in every state. Well, what about taxes? Why should a state give up its exclusive right to tax its citizens? Why should it allow a central government to also tax them? To finance freedom, peace, justice and democracy. When citizens in nation-states send all their tax monies to one government, they get little back and they often end up financing corruption in various forms, legal and illegal.

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How To Ratify The American Constitution

When George Washington appeared at the first meeting of the Constitutional  Convention in Philadelphia in May of 1787, he was voted president of the body unanimously. During the debates designed to secure a more perfect union of the states by transferring some sovereign state powers to a central government, Washington was mostly silent. He believed it was his duty not to lend his prestige for or against any particular position. As he sat silently as president, he listened as the powers that the new government would have emerged from the debates. The men came like Washington in carriages from great distances over poor dirt roads. A few were acquainted but most were strangers to one another. But as the debates went on and they met socially at dinners in taverns, barriers between them fell and they grew more comfortable with one another. The convention of men coming great distances was an embryo of the Congresses that would meet year after year once the Constitution was ratified by the states. No one was perfectly satisfied with the final document they signed and sent to state legislatures to reject or ratify. Washington had his doubts about what was decided as did many others but he reasoned correctly that there were provisions in the Constitution for amending it. The founding fathers divided the powers of the new government between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. They granted  absolute sovereign powers only to the executive branch over diplomacy and the military. They did their best to try to solve a political problem that no congress of men had ever tried to solve before. How could they preserve the power of thirteen sovereign states and at the same time create a central government with enough power to defend the union and keep it united by limiting state power? They knew that the powers they granted the federal government would be tested by events in the future history of America and they knew that its powers might be increased by radical interpretations of the Constitution by unpatriotic men desiring only money and power. However they made another power absolute and safe from malicious interpretations in addition to military and diplomatic powers. The Constitution gives the federal Congress the absolute power to admit new states. It can pass a bill admitting new states to our union any time it wishes. George Washington did not participate in the debates but he ratified the Constitution by signing it. We citizens of the union can ratify it every time we elect men and women to represent us in a new Congress in Washington DC who will work like the men in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to create a more perfect union and to share sovereign powers between the Federal Government and the states justly. And since our Congress has the absolute power to admit new states, any national state in the world can also ratify the Constitution by applying to the American Congress for admittance to our union.
Daniel McNeill
Read a complete book on American history showing the destiny of Washington to be a world
 central government of the united states of the world at:usoftheworld.com/history  






































   

Cuba The Fifty-first State?

Capitalism as an economic system has been dead in Cuba for more than 60 years but not baseball. Cubans are passionate baseball fans. They gather in parks in Havana and talk baseball intensely. They fill baseball stadiums and watch and cheer excitedly. Capitalism has been alive in Cuba for more than 60 years in the minds and hearts of Cubans because baseball  is a capitalistic game. When a batter gets a life as a base runner, he is like a man seeking economic success. He finds himself alone in hostile circumstances surrounded by enemy individuals seeking to block his advancement. He has gained something by reaching one of the three bases but it is not a lasting success and as long as he remains on base, he is threatened by the failure of an out. To succeed he must go beyond the danger of failure by scoring a run. No one in a capitalistic economy wants to remain a prisoner of the hard fight to survive in the day-to-day economic struggle. The base runner, like a capitalistic entrepreneur, waits keeping a sharp eye on the actions going on around him for an imbalance to develop. The following batters or base runners sometimes cause either a favorable or unfavorable imbalance. The base runner must be ready to use a sudden change in the conditions around him to his advantage. He must profit from a sudden imbalance by advancing along the bases. Nothing is sure. He can fail. Everything is a chance, a gamble. He must be constantly alert for something to happen, always ready to invest himself in an enterprise if what happens seems favorable to the enterprise. More fail than succeed. The economy of the three bases is hard but unlike the communist economy outside the Cuban ballpark, it must not be manipulated for some good enterprise common to all men so that it can remain natural and hostile and allow only the fittest and the luckiest to succeed. The world outside the ballpark owes a Cuban a living but in the ballgame the world does not owe the base runner a living. He must pay his own way or be eliminated. The roars from a ball park in Cuba or anywhere else are loud with elemental meaning because the celebration of survival and success in a baseball game is the voice of a joy that has suddenly conquered a deep pain rooted in capitalism. The three great creations of the American people are the Constitution, the Federal Reserve banking system, and baseball. Cubans already have the third. Let’s hope that they join their state one day to the union of American states and gain also the other two.

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Nation-states and a Union of States

The nation-state is a European invention. The Romans began the long fight to establish their empire beginning as a tribe living among the 7 hills of Rome. European nations developed typically in patterns of historical experiences much like those of the Romans, but the Romans ended up with an empire, the Europeans with the nation-state. The Romans fought heroic battles to enlarge their territory. They subdued neighboring tribes and established new borders and then went beyond the borders to new conquests. So did Europeans. The Romans made a central city, Rome, the seat of their expanded territory. The Europeans did the same setting up London and Paris, Madrid and Lisbon and other European cities as the seat of some expanded territory. The Romans took their tribal language, Latin, refined it and forced it on the natives of their conquered territories. The English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and all the other leading tribes of other European territories did the same. The most powerful confederation of tribes selected one of many languages, refined it and forced it on all the remaining tribes in their nation-state. The Romans won heroic life and death struggles with enemies to confirm their conquests and their imperial identity as Romans in a settled territory with a distinct language. The Europeans did the same except that they called their newly founded empires states. The European states grew up over long periods of crises and wars into firmly established unities of peoples with racial similarities and with well developed languages protected by armies eager for glorious wars to vindicate their national honor. The African and American states never went through similar experiences. Europeans left them with the boundaries of states and with European languages but without a living inner kernel of common creative and dramatic historical experience necessary to give birth to a genuine nation.
     The union of the thirteen original sovereign American states was a unique construction. The American Constitution is generally understood to have been a masterful creation using doctrines of revolutionary European political theorists of the age of enlightenment. This is not true. Rationalist philosophers in Europe railed against the endless wars among their European nation-states but none of them theorized about setting up some kind of new supranational government whose purpose and being was designed to unite states rather than to be only just another national state among national states. The government of the United States of America was just such a supranational creation. The government in Washington set up by the Constitution was “The Government of the United States”. It had a purpose and a being for the united states not over the united states. Washington D.C., a non-state located in no state, was the seat of a government of a union of 13 sovereign states who had each dared to legally limit their sovereignty to receive the benefits of free interstate commerce and citizenship. The government of a nation-state restricts the freedom of its citizens by imprisoning them within borders. A union of states continually opens up for its citizens grand possibilities beyond all borders. European nation-states limit for their citizens what is possible. The 50 American states teach their citizens that there are no limits and that everything is possible.

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