Quote:I agree with a lot of what you said, but I will say that the Founders envisioned the United States as only being a small Country with a limited form of central Government with more power given to the States. They never could have dreamt that the United States would have ever expanded past the Ohio Valley and West of the Mississippi River. Let alone having a flag with each star representing 50 States and a handful of territories and possessions that we have today in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.
The AOC fulfilled that role of unifying the Colonies as one independent body of States, but you also have to consider with what I said earlier about the Civil War and how it could have been averted if the AOC was still the law of the land at that period of time. A lot of the issues between States during the Civil War are rooted in many of the old Federalist vs Anti-Federalist debates in Philadelphia and Princeton that were happening at that time.
There was actually a special provision within the AOC which stated that Canada was free to join up with the rest of the US at anytime. So maybe out there in some Parallel Universe there actually exists a United States where Canada (or at least Quebec), would be apart of the US right now.
If the AOC was still around, we would have had a system of Government which was very similar to that of Switzerland in the 18th and 19th Centuries. With the States replacing the role of Swiss Cantons. In fact, the Founding Fathers (or at least Jefferson), wanted to model the United States after Switzerland and NOT the Roman Republic and certainly not Ancient Athens. Even though many of our ideas of a Republic were borrowed from that of Ancient Rome.
That pretty much finishes my rambling for the night lol.
While I don't disagree with what you've stated, the idea that the founding fathers not envisioning a 50 state union doesn't improve the AoC in my opinion. They may not have envisioned such a place, but it was Thomas Jefferson - a particularly important founding father, who favored a system with less government power than was granted by the Constitution - that went ahead and used powers that were arguably beyond the scope of the Constitution to make the Louisianna Purchase happen.
Also, yes, it's possible the AoC would have avoided the Civil War, but you have to consider whether or not the AoC would have had the capacity to allow us to expand to the point of controlling such a large amount land thus limiting the number neighbors that we have to deal with. I would say that has played a big role in the US being relatively peaceful
on home soil. Afterall, it's a lot easier to invade when all you've got to do is walk across a line on a map than it is to travel across an ocean.
