When the Confederacy lost its Constitution, the United States lost its as well.
Even earlier as Garry Wills writes that Lincoln at Gettysburg, “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.”
Today we have something even better than the old U.S. Constitution: we have the one million page - or is it two million pages now - Federal Register to regulate our lives and conduct.
If you hate America so much you should probably leave. I’d be very happy to help you pack.
The American DisunionLondon, September 6, 1861
The founders of the American constitution doubted whether the Federation of no more than the thirteen original States was not too large to retain identity of interests and stay under one rule. “But let experience,” said Washington in one of his letters, solve the question; to listen to speculation in such a case was criminal.” Sixty years ago, Jefferson, who in some respects represents more than Washington the present mind of the republic, touched on the possible event that now has happened. In eighteen ’three, when some expected from the acquisition of Louisiana, further division of the Union into an Atlantic and a Mississippi Confederacy, he said—what a year ago there was no statesman in the North wise enough to repeat after him—“Let them part by all means if it is for their happiness to do so. It is but the elder and younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if better.” And again, forty years ago in eighteen ’twenty, the Missouri question produced from him these pregnant word. “Although I had laid down as a law to myself, never to write, talk or even think of politics, to know nothing of public affairs, and therefore had ceased to read newspapers, yet this Missouri question aroused and filled me with alarm. The old schism of Federal and Republican threatened nothing because it existed in every State, and united them together by the fraternism of party; but the coincidence of a marked principle, moral and political, with a geographical line, once conceived, I feared would never more be obliterated from the mind; that it would be recurring on every occasion, and renewing irritations until it would kindle such mutual and mortal hatreds as to render separation preferable to eternal discord. I have ever been among the most sanguine in believing that our union would be of long duration; I now doubt it much, and see the event at no great distance. My only comfort and confidence is that I shall not live to see this.” What Jefferson expected, has occurred. . . .