Just a quick response to two cliches that I’ve had chance to encounter over the past number of days:
1) Here’s one repeated by those who blame Abraham Lincoln for the coming of a strong national government to America [most people first heard this, I think, when Historian Shelby Foote said it in the documentary The Civil War by Ken Burns]:
Before Lincoln, people would say ‘The United States are…’, but after, it was ‘The United States is…’.
If, indeed, the Federal Government was put permanently on the course to domination as a result of The Civil War, perhaps, people began this rephrasing because doing so was an emotional response to the greatest carnage the people of North had ever seen or probably ever heard of, that this was a way of expressing that ‘The Union, she was preserved’.
If you want to put the blame correctly for…
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