Experimenting With Confederation Chapter 6 Section 1: Fill & Download for Free

>>>>Let that sink in for a moment. Only two verses in the Bible which place Jesus’s birth against historical events, and they miss each other by at least NINE YEARS.<<<<OK, it’s sunk in. The fact is that the current annual dating of the Current Era is based on the destruction of Jerusalem, which is existentially certain and the year, 70, having a significant numerological symbolism representing, in this case, the end of Jewish eschatology.It’s pretty firmly established that Jesus was born during a range of dates, the most likely date being 6 BCE based on the probable year of His crucifixion minus 33. We really don’t know. It isn’t particularly important.What is more interesting to me is the demonstration of immaculate conception in John 4. The Pro-Life version is that the Samaritan woman was a whore and a slut who came to the well at noon because she was ashamed to come when all the other women came to the well at sunset (Cf: Genesis 24:11) and Jesus gave her a new lease on life, which is true, but for a different reason than the salvation Evangelicals are selling.Like Tamar in Genesis 38, the Samaritan woman came to the well to get pregnant. She was practicing philandry and had had children from 5 men and she wanted another baby but the man she was with wasn’t getting the job done. So, she saw this stranger by Jacod’s Well (which anchors the allusion to Tamar) and took her water jar out to solicit His assistance in her enterprise (children were a form of social security in those societies).When she gets there, Jesus opens the bidding and she goes along with what she assumes to be a pick-up line that this rabbi employs, with “living water” being a euphemism for “seed”. When He gets to that part, she tries to close the deal with “ “Sir, give me this water so that I will not get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water,” which can be usefully translated to ‘Let’s fuck!”But Jesus is a virgin. He’s a good Jewish boy, avoiding fornication and all, and goes to the cross not “knowing’ women in a, well. Biblical way. I don’t have a brief, one way or another, regarding His sex life, but He was blind-sided by the women with the chronic menstrual flow because He lacked even the superficial gynelcoloical acquaintance hitting the pin would have provided,So, He tells her to fetch her husband, If you are familiar with “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” Jesus is playing the role of the girl and the Samaritan woman is playing the role of the boy, rounding third and heading home when He says Stop Right There: “Go, call your husband and come back.”Her reply “I have no husband” can be transliterated as “I don’t need no fucking husband! Let’s get busy!”To which Jesus amazes her with a history of her fertility and why she came to the well “The one you have now, he’s not yours” which means, the guy you want to get you pregnant is shooting blanks and Jesus can fix it.Now, while this revelation gives her pause, it doesn’t discourage her, for she resumes the dialogue where it left off but with a different understanding of who she is dealing with and the significance of His patter which Jesus extends into a very succinct theological construct, to which she responds with what may the first indications of a growing disappointment that this will not turn out as she wished. But what Jesus has in mind is to make her the first of her tribe to be a true worshipper and the first Evangelist in the Gospels.At the same instant He says “…I who speak to you am He.”…the spirit of God makes her pregnant just like it made His mother pregnant under identical circumstances.She know immediately that she is pregnant. Mature women, that is, women who have had children, know when they are fertile and when they catch. She knew what had happened and she was reduced to speachlessness just at the moment His Disciples returned from shopping and were scandalized by everything they witnessed going on, breaking the spell and sending her back to rouse her neighbors into seeking Jesus out.Whateve it was she said to motivate her neighbors, it echoed the Magnificat of Mary in Luke.Let that sink in for a minute. Then add this to the mix:Well, first of all, I have been in a working relationship with the Holy Spirit since 1954, although I didn’t realize it was the Holy Spirit until quite recently. I knew I was in relationship with something and until about 2014, I assumed it was God the Father and/or The One as described in Revelation 4.2. But it has been the Holy Spirit, all along.Secondly, Cornelius, the centurion featured in Acts 10, is the only person in the Bible I identify with. I am an Army brat and I was raised by, with and turtored to become a centurion in the fullness of time. If you go to , the header displays the altar of the chapel I attended from high school until I got back from Vietnam and buried my parents. For that reason, I approach the Bible from an anthropological perspective as opposed to the neo-Israeli perspective 2000 years of scholarship which has produced the anachronistic conceits and ideological fallacies of much of the current dialogue. I’m not free of them, but I have come to see the Protestant reliance on Solo Scriptura, particularly as it asserts its necessity for salvaton, as a gnostic construct similar to Islam and, functionally, denies the Holy Spirit.Cornelius wrote the Gospel of Mark. Like Pilate, Cornelius was a member of the Praetorian Guard and, as a very senior centurion, seconded to Palestine as Pilate’s chief of military intelligence. The Gospel of Mark begins when Jesus appears over the Roman military horizon as a potential insurgent and a survelllance file is opened and maintained on Him as a purely routine exercise in force protection. Consequently, all the pericopes that begin with “Immediately”, 41 in all, are eye-witness spy reports collected before Jesus was arrested, the phrase “immediately” being a literary device for inserting these events into the narrative arch.Cornelius wrote (or, more likely, was the senior editor of a staff of analysts) the Gospel of Mark after his debriefing of Peter described in Acts 10. Cornelius is the same centurion featured in Matthew 8/Luke 7 and the only other person besides Abraham who is justified by faith directly by God in the Bible (consequently, he and his household are the only people in the Bible to be baptized by the Holy Spirit before being baptized by water). The Gospel of Mark was prepared as an intelligence assessement that was shipped up the chain of command to Rome for the information of the Emperor, who, by the time it got to Rome, was Claudius sometime around 40 CE.This was not the first intelligence report to bubble up to Rome regarding Jesus. Tiberius Caesar proposed that Jesus be elevated to the status of legal deity, which the Senate rejected mostly out of spite, some time before his death in 37. Tiberius also introduced the soldier’s “Christian” label to Rome. This event is cited in Tertullian’s Apology, Chapter 5. Tiberius was compelled to make this proposal from intelligence coming out of Palestine which probably resembled the Roman content in the Gospel of Peter, plus Cornelius’ own direct experience with Jesus and Jarius, the president of the Capernaum synagogue.The Praetorian Guard (nick named The Italian Cohort in the same way the Old Guard is the nick name of the !st US Infantry at Ft Myer) represented a combination of the modern military general staff, executive agencies and judiciary and was a unique social innovation. The centuriou, a creature of the rule of law, represented a horizontal structure that differentiated the true warfare of Rome from the real warfare of everything that came before.And the intelligence product that the Praetorian Guard delivered to the emperor was excellent as evidenced by the exposure of Sagenus’ plot and execution by Tiberius in 31. Luke reflects on the effectiveness of the Roman intelligence services in the throw-away observation in Acts 24:22. The fact is that Luke sat down with Peter and Cornelius in an interview that resulted in Acts 10 during the time Paul was imprisoned in Caesarea. Everything from Acts 16 - 28 was recorded by Luke in real time (as a physician/wicca, he would routinely journal his daily observations: it was a very Aristotilean impusle). Acts was probably begun first as an amicus brief in support of Paul’s eventual defense in Rome. Pilippians 1:13 indicates that Paul successfully defended his Epistle to the Romans before this tribune. Among other things, Romans 11:22 demonstrates how the ethic Paul extracts from the continuum of the Law of Moses to Christianity overlays with the secular rule of law behind the Roman republican structures. Romans 3:21 represents the divine endorsement of the shift from the aesthetic as the organizing principle of society to the ethic of secular government as established by Socrates in his submission to the rule of law as the duty of citizenship. The structures and processes of the US Constitution evolved, by way of John Knox’s Book of Discipline and Federalist 10, from this transfer of social technology.Luke’s brief was expanded to include a further expansion of the Gospel of Mark by Theophilus, a Roman equestrian acting as the case officer on the Jesus desk and a member of the Christian house church of the Praetorian Guard. Theophilus was the George Smiley of the Roman version of MI6.In terms of the relationship between Christianity and “Scientific illiteracy”, the epistemological impact of the reality of resurrection in extablishing the moral substance of the God Hypothesis runs straight as a laser to the paradigm shift arising from the reconciliation of Decartes with Locke by Isaac Newton and, from there, man on the moon, In fact, the Hegelian aspect of the model of history you employ to misconstue the Bible, generally, and the Gospels, in particular, is a direct result of the epistemological impulse set into motion by the systematic narrative of the Bible. In this respects, Jesus is a test tube baby arising from a consistent ethical context to validate the God Hypothesis. To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, Jesus allows us to remove a number of infinities in order to consider the physical universe within the limits of phenomenological ultility.As for the Holy Spirit, if you think “Visualize Whirled Peas” every time you see a weather map on TV, in time, mankind will be able to optimize global weather, “Visualize Whirled Peas” appeals to the sense of humor of the Holy Spirit. The problem with the Sola Scriptura gnostic model of American Evangelism is that it denies the Holy Spirit and all the hate mongering and fear mongering the “spiritual warriors” associated with Mike Pence and Betsy Devos tend to generate the extreme weather patterns that have become common place since Reagan brought all his crypto-Nazis to town.Other than that, Samuel Weber, you are exactly correct.(What follows is a response to a Samuel Weber response)Wishful thinking, Sam.COMMENTARY:Matthew 8:10 When Jesus heard this, He marveled and said to those following Him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.To understand exactly what it is Jesus is talking about is pretty much summed up in the encounter between Cornelius, the centurion featured in Acts 10 and Jesus. Cornelius is the only person in the Bible besides Abram in Genesis 15:6 who is justified by faith directly by an aspect of The One described in Revelation 4:2. With Abram, it was by God the Father, who I tend to associate with Jehovah the Patriarch, the Our Father of the Lord’s Prayer. With Cornelius, it is Jesus, the Son of Man. As a George Washington Theist practicing process theology, Jesus is Adam, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, a Holy trinity. In process theology (which is a system of inquiry based on the mathematics of Kurt Lewin’s Topology and the dynamics of reverse osmosis as an metaphor for epistemology: B = f[P,E]). There are six aspects of The One: the One as described in Revelation 4:2, Jehovah the Patriarch; Jesus, Son of Man; God the Holy Ghost (who is male and specific to each person’s experience): the Spirit of God introduced in Genesis 1:2; and Yaweh, Queen of Battle, She Who Must Be Obeyed. It is Yaweh who orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and it is Yaweh who provides the blood substitue, a ram with its head stuck in thorns. Yaweh is the feminine aspect of God and it is the experience of Yaweh Cornelius shares with Jesus.And this experience is based on his investment in the profession of arms as a Roman soldier, This video from 12:20 to 13:46 describes exactly the basis of that faith.I went to Vietnam on exactly these terms. Like Cornelius, I was raised to be a professional soldier by a centurion and his consort, Uriah’ wife but the great American Penolpe, faithful unto death. The first moment I can recall in reflection of being prepared for a military career was around Thanksgiving in 1952. My dad was on leave from the Command and General Staff College and we were on a road trip to Valley Forge. General Baron von Stubin is the Patron Saint of the US Army General Staff. The Pentagon is a memorial to him and is perfectly symbolic, numerologically and geometrically of the Prussian character of the US Army traditions and practices. More important, the US Army General Staff is the Praetorian Guard of the Republic of the United States of America.The significance of this section of this video featues heavily in my conviction that Cornelius is the author of the Gospel of Mark and that it is an intelligence report from him to the functional equivalent of M in MI6, who seems to be Theophilus. This is the second intelligence report initiated by the resurrection of Jesus that compelled Tiberius to propose elevating Jesus to the status of legal deity to the Senate, who rejected the proposal. This event occured before Tiberius’ death in 37 and the execution of Sejanus, which means that Jesus was crucified in 33 and may actually been as old as 38. Numerologically, the year 33 is the most logical, based on the numerology of the destruction of the Temple in 70.In terms of the Book of Acts, the clock starts in 33 and, according to Gary Habermas, basic Christian doctrine, what will become the Apostle’s Creed, is established within 18 months of the Cross and I say, coming out of Pentacost. The resurrection is the event horizon of the Christian Big Bang and the Word explodes through the Roman empire and transforms it in less than 300 years at Milvian Bridge, another military bench mark. Christianity, today, exists because of the Roman Army, but it was politic at the time to let Paul take the credit after what happened to Tiberius’ proposal and Roman attitudes towards Christians as a subset of Jews without legal protections compelled Theophilus to obscure the extent of the Christian penetration of the Roman legions. But the essential marker of the early spread of Christianity is the label “Christians”, which, like “Jews” is an invention of the Roman soldiers. “Christians” is conveyed from Palestine to Rome in the same intelligence package Tiberius receives and introduces to the Roman Senate and archives (according to Tertullian) and my sense is that there was already an identifiable Jewish Christian community emerging in Rome by 37. We know there were Jews from Rome at Pentacost. Within 4 years, they had returned to Rome and begun to spread the Word and Tiberius saw them as a possible answer to the rising social instability throughout the empire. . In any event, “Christian” as a sound bite, migrates to Antioch, which is the Tel Aviv of the period in terms of the Israeli presence in the region, by 41 a year after Claudius replaces Caligula and Cornelius delivers the Gospel of Mark to Theophilus probably in person.Through Cornelius, Theophilus, who considers Christianity as a military techonogy, is able to monitor the proliferation of Christianity and begins to assemble Paul’s writings describing this technology and, at some point, arranges for Paul to compose Romans in 52 or so and for Luke to expand the amicus brief he is preparing for Paul’s defense of Romans in Rome to include revisiting the Gospel of Mark. Cornelius is the Q source, or, at least, the supervisor of the Jesus file that had been opened when Jesus appeared above the Roman military horizon as a confederate to John the Baptist and a potential insurgent, plus the material from Herod’s spies (which probably included Matthew-Levi as a mole and the stenographer for all the red verses in the Gospels). Eventually, Paul comes to town and successfully defends Romans before Theophilus, as reflected in Phillipians 1:13.The Gospel of Matthew is an outlier and a polemic prepared to support the Judaizers opposing Paul. Luke 1:3 >>Therefore, having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus<< is a rebuke of Matthew’s version of events. Luke writes Acts 10 after sitting down with Peter and Cornelius and getting the story straight from them. Paul doesn’t need access to the Gospels because he’s working directly with the epistemology N.T. Wright discusses. Theophilus, on the other hand, needs to get a handle on this whole Christian business.Hebrews is written by Theophilus and is the staff finding that endorses Christianity as a viable ethical construct for Rome and passes it on, eventually, to Constantine after the Milvian Bridge leading to the Council of Nicea. The Praetorian Guard comes out in support of Maxentius, but the XP symbolism proved to tip the moral balance in favor of Constantine. There were probably as many covert Christians on either side of the TIber as reflected their numbers, but the appearance of XP was a negative force multiplier for the Christians opposing Constantine, while the moral cohesion created by painting their shields before battle was the ultimate pep talk. Constantine was irresistable. The legend doesn’t matter: the reality of the hand of God is existentially anchored in history.And, once Constantine arrives in Rome, the Praetorian Guard would have passed on these intelligence archives before they were dismantled and replaced by theocracy and the resulting systemic decadence of a finite, subordinate, construct misapplied to an infinite, superior, function, replacing a dynamic with mechanics, the republic with confederation.The same thing happened to the American academe after the take over of Columbia by the SDS in 1968 and dialogue was replaced by dialectic. It’s how Trump got elected, but that’s another story.But for any of this to make sense, you have to make the connection between the justication by faith of Abram and Cornelius and this video from 12:20 to 1346.__________________The praetorian guard in the political and social life of Julio-Claudian RomeCOMMENTARYMy interest in this subject is to support my claim that Cornelius, the centurion featured in Acts 10, is the author of The Gospel of Mark, and was prepared as a progessive intelligence assessment to the original intelligence report of the Resurrection of Jesus that compelled Tiberius to propose to the Senate the elevation of Jesus as a legal deity. As this thesis has developed since 1990, it has recently occurred to me that Theophilus is the spy master in the Praetorian Guard that receives the initial intelligence from Corneliusm, who is PIlate's intelligence chief, and probably debriefs both Pilate and Cornelius in Rome when Pilate is recalled in 36 and manages the Christian desk in ways very similar to George Smiley, the Praetorian Prefect being M, the direct report to the Emperor.Cornelius is the Q source, an assembly of intelligence reports initiated when Jesus appears above the Roman military horizon, as well material from Herod's spies, which probably included Matthew-Levi as a mole and the recorder of the majority of the RED verses in the Gospels, Peter's confession, and, of course, Cornelius' own interaction with Jesus described in Matthew 8/Luke 7.The Praetorian Guard, under the reforms of Sejanus, becomes a precursor to various executive functions in America's constitutional construct, especially the General Staff functions symbolized by the modern Pentagon. The centurions represent a novel horizontal structure in the legions which included functions of the modern republican Non-Commissioned Officer, Warrant Officer and company grade officers. In particular, the centurions represented an important Inspector General function, ensuring uniform doctrine, training and practice throughout the legions. It is this function that allows the legions to be put together like Lego blocks in contrast to the ad hoc tribal confederations of their opponents, such as Israel. While Alexander's Companions anticipate these capacities, they are organized horizontally and ranked by proximity to Alexander, while the Praetorian Guard is a verticle structure again anticipating the Prussian staff system of the US Army General Staff.After he receives The Gospel of Mark (so-called because John Mark becomes the publisher of Christian literature in Alexandria after he abandoned Paul and Barnabus), Theophilus begins to manage acquistion of additional intelligence regarding the Christian movement as an important military technology. He may have indirectly encouraged Paul to construct his apology, Romans, in 52 (approximately) and commissioned Luke directly in 59 to expand on Mark in addition to the amicus brief (Acts) that Luke was preparing for Paul's defense of Romans in Rome. Theophilus received Paul's defense in Rome, which can be inferred from Philippians 1:13.Hebrews was composed by Theophilus and represents a staff finding that endorses the Christian construct and eventually informs Constantine's decision to convene the Council of Nicea. Theophilus was totally indifferent to the entire hocus-pocus of the Exodus that N.T. Wright properly indentifies as the world view of 1st Century, 2nd Temple Israelis, but totally embrace the structues of Jesus' ethic captured in Romans 11:22 and its divine origin as captures in Romans 3:21. Like Socrates, Jesus endorses the secular rule of law of Rome by submitting to His duty as a citizen while, at the same time, validating the God Hypothesis, something Socrates' example lacked.. By his reference to Genesis 14:18 And Melchizedek king of Salem, Theophilus returns to the source of covenant membership before Israel to derive the authority for Hebrews as a staff finding which lies fallow until Constantine and his mother, Helena, who may represent a similar psychological media that Khadijah did for Mohammad.The disbanding of the horizontal gyroscopic fly-wheel dynamics of the Praetorian Guard in favor of the vertical mechanics of the theocracy that emerged to replace it, Constantine accelerated, if not initiated, the decadence of the Roman empire. Like the structures of the confederacy adopted by the states of the southern American rebellion, Constantine adopted the one form of government that made sustained cohesion and political viability impossible.

Living in the south back in the dayI come from the 1950s / 60s Milwaukee, which was a heavy manufacturing town, population 800,000, second to Detroit, and was labeled the Great American City year after year. I lived in the German section of town and many families at home spoke the language while English was spoken outside at work. In fact my dad spoke both low and high German fluently at the family gatherings out in Pewaukee. He would curse in German and French to spare the ears of us kids. After WW II the Holocaust work and extermination camps refugees came to Milwaukee, I had a Catholic woman forced into prostitution in a work camp living next door to me. Most refugees were Jewish survivor from the death camps and we heard their stories in the media, public forums and in school. It was horrible hearing about the death camps, the torture, the families sent into the gas chamber and then ovens. During the war everyone knew the Nazi were putting the Jews in concentration camps but we didn't know about the extermination of six million in the death camps and millions more being shot down into mass graves in Polish and Russian fields. Milwaukee back then was a totally white city made up from immigrants from Germany, Poland, Britain with a few hundred thousand of crazy Irish . . . Smile that was me, 1/3 Irish and 3/4 German - what a great combination to develop a compassionate strong militaristic worldly view. I need too toss in the Jewish population that came from Germany was huge, it seemed like in the hundreds of thousands. There were Temples, Catholic and Congregational churches everywhereIn 1957 I was a US Navy sailor stationed in Norfolk VA serving on a WW II Destroyer. I found the south segregated, confederate, evangelical, mean and nasty and capable of extreme violence to keep segregation, as the Civil rights movement was starting trying to desegregate the south. When I entered Virginia they had just closed their public schools and established the 'Southern Manifesto', which created a massive resistance program defying racial integration. The south to me seemed not part of the USA I was used too, there was a church on every corner all preaching that the Bible supported white superiority, sanctioned slavery, Jim Crow and with religion inserted into the public sphere. There was no such thing as separation of church and state and democracy as I understood it. I felt like I entered a different country living back in the 17th century from another world. The week I arrived in Norfolk, the State of Virginia closed down most of its public schools to avoid racial integration, and they remained closed for the next two years. Based on Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that the South had to integrate its schools. Virginia refused to comply; instead, they set up private schools for whites across the state and established "Massive Resistance" to any integration plans from the Federal Government whom they hated. As a northerner I could never understand this racist biblically oriented culture, that one of disenfranchisement of a whole race of people. But then I came from a different world too, in 1950s Milwaukee there maybe a few thousand blacks in the city, at least that was my impression, whereas the southern cities had up to half their population being black. Maybe Milwaukee would be different too if half its population were uneducated black field hands vs. highly educated and skilled European whites.Aboard ship, I had made friends with many sailors, including Blacks, and when we went to Norfolk, we would experience a totally segregated society. On the ship regardless of race we all got along fine but we could not hang together on shore. There were many Blacks living in Norfolk, and they were cordoned off into very poor areas of town. Norfolk’s main downtown, ‘Granby Street’ and the entire city, with all of its parks and beaches, were available only for Whites. Blacks were allowed only in designated ‘Colored’ - run down - sections and a downtown area called ‘Church Street’ which actually had the character of a New York City street, colorful and full of itself. Even the rowdy East Main Street sailor Bars, known infamously throughout the world, were for Whites only. Bus stations, water fountains, hotels, taxi cabs, movie theaters, restaurants, city parks, swimming beaches, everything and everything were separated by race. The whites had all the best, the blacks - by law - all the worst. What fool invented this madness? What a sick bunch of idiots thought this one up. This can't be the USA! But it was and I would have to learn to deal with it!I was in high tech weapons and did well rising in rank quickly and just pass the E6 test. I spent 3 years at sea on my Destroyer and wanted to ship over on a cruiser but the navy said I had to stay on my destroyer for 6 more years. I was interviewing with IBM in Norfolk and took a job as a Main Frame Engineer albeit it was in the south. I spent 3 1/2 tears in Upstate NY in school and served in Product Support foe the East Coast. In other words, I lived in the south but traveled around the USA with lots of TAD assignments in NYC, Washington DC, and Cape Canaveral. So I got around to experience what he was happening in America. OK, here is my take on the Civil Rights Movement. First I hung around with a bunch of red neck good ole boys hunting and fishing in the south aand had a vast gun collection, which is perquisite for redneckery.I hunted in the swamp every week for five years, got to know it well, and told stories to my IBM friends at the Naval base. Like using a Jeep to get five miles in and set up base camp, wading in thigh deep in muddy water, wearing Levis and waterproof waders while bears watch me squatting taking a shit. Being covered in head to protective clothing and sprayed with Deet to keep the big biting bugs off, carrying my guns at the ready for bear attacks. With my good-ole-boy neck companions, I shot a lot of deer and ran into huge water moccasins and rattlesnakes as thick around as my thigh. Swamp life is all about scrapes, bug bites, getting lost and losing equipment in the muck, it's standard fare. Then there is meeting people living in the swamp on small islands all in tin roofed shacks raising pigs and using small boats or horses to get out of the swamp. Their shacks all had outhouses, tables for cutting meat, smoking sheds with hanging on hooks curing the meat, with white lightening stills keeping them watchful for revenuers. They survived by hunting and fishing, raising pigs and cattle, having small fields for planting crops, and using the General Store out on the Suffolk highway for their medical cure all, Camphor Phenique, kerosene, magazines and canned goods. Rule number one in the swamp was "Be Polite" - no nigger talk allowed and respect the people living there - that will get you killed and bodies disappear within one week, bones en all, in the hot swamp infested with flesh eating critters.Many people live in the swamp on farms and with their permission, we could hunt on their land. Moses was a Black man who had a small farm near Suffolk, Virginia, which were several miles back in the swamp and only reachable by a tractor built dirt road using a four-wheel drive truck. His wife would walk the 2-½ miles to the main highway every day and get picked up by a Trailways Bus that took her into town and her house-cleaning job. Moses was 85 years old and in great shape except he limped from a broken leg that didn’t mend well after a tree fell on him when he was clearing land last year. Moses was a typical swamp dweller, he ran a still, had some animals and a few cultivated acres where he planted food to sustain him, but Moses also had five hundred acres of raw swamp and timber land that he allowed us to hunt on and all we had to do was leave him a few deer.The Southern men I knew didn’t discuss politics, race or religion; nevertheless they were family oriented, religious and very patriotic. Most had military backgrounds and served in either World War II or Korea. They were matter of fact, down to earth realists who lived close to the land and spent most of their life fishing, hunting and drinking, typically working in low paid blue-collar jobs. They didn’t try to live fancy, appreciated hard work and perseverance and loathed the welfare culture prevalent in the North. The South was racially segregated and they supported this separation of the races, but on the other hand, they never personally treated Blacks poorly. I could never understand this racial thing in the South and didn’t believe in racial segregation, thinking it was UN Christ like and morally wrong and kept the South from acceptance in the modern world keeping away industry, modern technology and good jobs. I like Black people and their culture and I worked for integration within my Jr. Chamber of Commerce Chapter and Sweet Haven Baptist Church and was ostracized and sometimes hated for the effort. My hunting partners knew of my sympathies and kidded me about being a Nigger lover, but it stopped there otherwise I would have gotten angry and taken them to task. I felt that many Southerners didn’t like mixing with things that were different from them, and that included any religious, ethnic, and cultural aspects of modern day life in the United States.Moses lived better than most because his shack had a wooden floor with window glass and a great front porch that looked out over his land right into the setting Sun, otherwise it was a typical tin roofed swamp dwelling with no electric, water, or indoor plumbing. Because he had access to town using his old rusted out Chevy pickup and his wife made daily trips to Suffolk, he purchased civilized things like newspapers, magazines, canned food, tooth brushes and paste, real bandages, kerosene and of course the proverbial Camphor-Phenique. Moses also had a barn where he stored his twenty-year-old John Deere tractor that he used to work his fields and keep his road clear from the creeping swamp underbrush. We would usually stay at Moses for a weekend and after the day’s hunt sit around a camp fire, cook our food, drink white lightening whiskey, which I never developed a taste for but I would sip it anyway through my teeth to strain out small particles, and tell outrageous stories about experiences with women, hunting or war. The white lightening whiskey was more than one hundred proofs so you had to sip it slowly otherwise you could get you roaring drunk in no time, heave your guts out and really hung over the next morning. The guys brought their own musical instruments when we went to Moses places, Doc his harmonica, Bill and Red their guitars and Moses himself played a wicked violin whereupon really good country music and singing rang around the campfire. I learned the words to lots of country songs and loved every minute the campfire singing with these men. Around mid night, when everyone was either played out or drunk, we would get out our sleeping bags and spend the night sleeping on Moses front porch. After an early morning campfire breakfast of country sausage, eggs and biscuits, and then getting the dogs ready, we were off into the deep swamp again. I have to say, however, they treated Moses with the greatest respect as they did all the other Blacks we encountered in the swamp. I think this friendly assimilation was because they had a lot in common, all were strong men who shared survival abilities, ate the same foods, spoke poor English and talked the same southern slang, loved to play and sing country music and drink white lightening whisky - and they all had lots of guns and weren’t afraid to stand up for their rights! Besides, call someone a Nigger and how did you expect to get out of the swamp alive where bodies disintegrate into nothing in less than a week, bones en all, in the hot, humid, critter invested swamp where people go missing all the time. I think my friends held segregationist views because they never knew any Black people really well and didn’t try to understand them, even though the races were remarkable alike in life styles. Slavery and then Jim Crow segregation had been part of Southern life for hundreds of years and it was difficult for many southern people to see life any differently. My friends weren’t great abstract thinkers and preferred the way things were, their views on segregation were not based on hate or feelings of superiority but more on being afraid of social change.As for me, I had a great time in the swamp, for five years I hunted every week, I was a dead shot and killed more than a hundred deer. But gutting a deer so you could more easily drag its carcass to base camp for skinning, and doing the honors was not a chore I relished, but I did it so may times. The dogs ate the heads and entrails of the deer while we cut the meat up. I gave my deer away to the residents of the swamp - all kinds of reclusive Indians, blacks, whites, criminals hiding out and religious hermits like the Mennonites. The Great Dismal Swamp, as you can probably guess from its name, is not an easy place to traverse, but I got very comfortable being in the swamp. I ran into huge water moccasins and rattlesnakes as thick around as my thigh. But nothing worse happened than scrapes, bugs bites and losing equipment in the muck. I was a natural red neck good old boy swamp hinter and I loved it. I say all this about southern life and you can see there were many dynamics associated with it; some good some bad, but ingrained into their culture as well as their Confederate history, white supremacy and churchyness which justified segregation. They didn't know any better but most southerners were good people cut from a different cloth, just like my German family from the Jews and Scots / Irish in my Milwaukee neighborhood.I was in the Civil Rights movement, threatened by the KKK for it, and moved to NYC to teach Grad School in Greenwich Village but I missed my southern red neck friends. As it turned out, the south accepted racial integration and moved forward quickly without more trouble. But if you want some good knock your socks off White Lightening go to Dismal Swamp or the boot that is in every southern neighborhood. And I will say this that most blacks will like the south better than the north today and they are moving back south by the millions . . .

The state-creation process in the Manifest Destiny period was built on the “admission of states” process in the U.S. Constitution: Article IV, section 3, clause 1:“New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”The next section, 4, of Article IV mandates in its clause 1 that“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”The typical process was that the federal government set boundary-lines upon territorial lands - which it would often adjust - and established an appointed territorial governor and appointed territorial courts, and the beginning of an elected territorial legislature. Congress then waited as more and more settlers arrived into the new territory.Eventually the population of the territory reached a minimum number (Congress would set this, and adjust it) and the territorial governor reported the population number to Congress.The elected members of the territorial legislature, or a special convention of the people of the territory, would then ask Congress for permission to write a constitution and, once written and adopted, apply to be a state. Typically a special convention would be elected to write the constitution.After the territorial constitutional convention adopted a constitution, that convention would send it to Congress and Congress would consider whether the constitution guaranteed a “republican form of government.”The “free state” or “slave state” issue would come up in the proposed constitution: the constitution would either ban slavery, or approve it. I won’t get into more detail about that, because it would divert this answer into a history of slavery and the lead-up to the Civil War.Congress has, as a matter of policy, declared that each new state shall be admitted “on an equal footing” with the existing states. This does deserve a brief legal note, in the civil War context.In the lead-up to the Civil War, 5 seceding states had been independent prior to joining (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Texas) but the rest, 6, had been federal territories never independent (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas). It has not been examined whether Congress, by its policy of “equal footing,” had the power to authorize the people on a land that had never been independent to “secede” and take the land out of federal sovereignty, when the theory of secession was that a previously-independent state had a right, founded on its independent status, to revoke its decision to join and to return to independence. Tennessee alone recognized this legal problem, and founded its departure from the Union on the right of a people to revolution, and not on a “secession” right that was founded on a previous status of independence.Since the federals denied any reserved “secession” right even in the 5 previously-independent states, no legal case arose as to whether the 5 previously-territorial states that relied on “secession” (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas) had, in fact, and inadvertently, thrown themselves back into territorial status, by purporting to “secede.”America’s lengthy experience in government creation is a subject I examined in detail between 2009 and 2014, among many other subjects, and America’s expertise in developing, framing, and putting-into-operation so many democratic, republican governments is a major reason why I titled my work “America the Great” when I posted it to amazon kindle in 2014.This appears as Chapter 7, titled “America, Maker of Governments.”A great defect of that chapter, indeed of the entire book, is that it meanders into different subjects; an editor was needed. But the research is sound, and so too the writing in making the points. It comes in handy for me when specific questions such as this one come up on Quora.In order for America to reach the 57 governments it has today – the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the federal government, and 5 organized territories – Americans had to form more than 100 governments during 400 years - 113 governments, to be precise. (And by this I do not mean the word “government” in the British sense of a change in Prime Minister, but in the establishment of the framework of institutions.)No people in the world has ever tried to accomplish this. The 1700s-1900s empires of Britain, France, and Spain did not establish governments, but administrative regions under the complete command of the central government, except in a few case at the very end of the decolonialization process.Creating states that have democratic governments under republican written constitutions is something that Americans know better than any other people in the world.The first two governments made by Americans were for the Jamestown and for the Plymouth colonies, the latter comprised in the Mayflower Pact. These were but governments for little settlements, begun in 1607 and 1620.Passing over the details of turbulent colonial histories (such as that New Jersey was for a time divided into West Jersey and East Jersey, and that Delaware was not de jure a separate colony, but was de facto), we then made 13 more governments, comprising each of the well-established thirteen colonies.At the time of the Revolution, each colony remade itself as an independent State, so here were 13 more governments made, replacing the colonial governments; and we made a Continental government, via the Articles of Confederation, to unite the 13. Some of the former colonies, now states, transferred to the sovereignty of the confederated union vast unsettled lands formerly a part of their original colonial claims. In 1787, under the Articles of Confederation, we formed a federal territorial government over the “Northwest Territory.”Thus, prior to the adoption of our present Constitution, we had already made 30 governments over a period of some 180 years: Jamestown, Plymouth, 13 colonies, 13 states, a union government under the Articles of Confederation, and the government of the Northwest Territories.Our current federal Constitution was thus the 31st government we Americans had made; and the wisdom reflected in its framing derived from the experience gained in forming and operating the preceding 30 governments over the preceding 180 years.The people in Vermont, having formed their own government, sorted out their differences with New York and New Hampshire, and on Vermont’s application, the federal congress for the first time reviewed and accepted the application of a new state to join the Union (1791); our total of governments formed now climbed to 32. Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796) followed, each formed out of territory that had been part of the thirteen original states - although Tennessee first passed into territorial status, until it had sufficient population to apply, as a territory, for admission. 34 governments.In 1800, the federal government formed a second territorial government, Indiana Territory, for what had been part of the Northwest Territory.In 1801, the federal government formed a government for the District of Columbia, the national capital city.In 1803, the state of Ohio joined the Union, formed from part of the Northwest Territory.In 1804, following the Louisiana Purchase, we formed another federal territorial government, Orleans Territory (essentially what became the state of Louisiana), while the rest of the vast region was allocated to the Indiana Territorial government.In 1805, we established a new territorial government, Louisiana Territory, over the portion of the Purchase that had been allocated to Indiana Territory.Orleans (what we know today as the State of Louisiana) was the first territorial authorization that was entirely on land that had never been part of the colonial-era United States – as had been Vermont, and Kentucky, and Tennessee, and Ohio (Ohio being part of the Northwest Territory, which had been a colonial possession). It was the first territorial authorization for a people that were predominantly not Anglo – the people were predominantly French.Congress then entertained the idea that the people of Orleans ought to be authorized to apply for admission as a new state of the Union - which began the process that this question asks about: the process of creating states during the time of Manifest Destiny.On January 14, 1811, Massachusetts congressman Josiah Quincy stood up on the floor of the House and announced that it was unconstitutional, it was outside the power of the federal House and Senate and President, to authorize the creation of any state outside the lands of the original colonies. Representative Quincy said that if the House and Senate did it anyway, it would change the status and power of the original states in a fundamental way. Representative Quincy also said that because this change would diminish the stature of the states so greatly that the people of the states would find it so unacceptable that they would withdraw from the federal government.We find Rep. Quincy’s words at pages 327 to 334 of the January 1811 Abridgement of the Debates of Congress, on google books in the 1858 reprint compilation, volume IV, published by Appleton. I give probably more of his speech than most readers will want, but which needs to be included in a complete answer:“The friends of this bill [to enable the people of Orleans Territory to form a state government] seem to consider it as the exercise of a common power; as an ordinary affair; a mere municipal regulation which they expect to see pass without other questions than those concerning details. But, sir, the principle of this bill materially affects the liberties and rights of the whole people of the United States. To me, it appears that it would justify a revolution in this country; and that, in no great length of time, may produce it. …“It is to preserve, to guard the constitution of my country, that I denounce this attempt. …“The bill, which is now proposed to be passed, has assumed this principle for its basis – that the three branches of this National Government, without recurrence to the conventions of the people in the States, or to the legislatures of the States, are authorized to admit new partners to a share of the political power, in countries out of the original limits of the United States. Now, this assumed principle I maintain to be altogether without any sanction in the constitution. I declare it to be a manifest and atrocious usurpation of power; of a nature, dissolving, according to undeniable principles of moral law, the obligations of our national compact ….“[T]he introduction of a new associate in political power implies, necessarily, a new division of power, and consequent diminution of the relative proportion of the former proprietors of it ….“Sir, the question concerns the proportion of power, reserved by this constitution, to every State in the Union. Have the three branches of this Government a right, at will, to weaken and outweigh the influence, respectively secured to each State, in this compact, by introducing, at pleasure, new partners, situate beyond the old limits of the United States? The question has not relation merely to New Orleans.“The great objection is to the principle of the bill. If this bill be admitted, the whole space of [the] Louisiana [Purchase], greater, it is said, than the entire extent of the old United States, will be a mighty theatre, in which this Government assumes the right of exercising this unparalleled power. And it will be; there is no concealment, it is intended to be exercised. …“There are ways in which this [admission of Orleans Territory as a State] may constitutionally be effected – by an amendment of the constitution, or by reference to conventions of the people in the States. …“But this would not answer all the projects to which the principle of this bill, when once admitted, leads, and is intended to be applied. The whole extent of [the] Louisiana [Purchase] is to be cut up into independent States, to counterbalance and to paralyze whatever there is of influence in other quarters of the Union. …“Do you suppose the people of the Northern and Atlantic States will, or ought to, look on with patience and see Representatives and Senators from the Red River and Missouri pouring themselves upon this and the other floor [meaning: taking seats on the floor of the House and on the floor of the Senate; Quincy insultingly describes them as “pouring” themselves, like a flood of dumb matter, not walking as thinking and reasoning human beings], managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles at least from their residence, and having a preponderancy in councils, into which, constitutionally, they could never have been admitted? I have no hesitation upon this point. They neither will see it, nor ought to see it, with content. …“New States are intended to be formed beyond the Mississippi. There is no limit to men’s imaginations, on this subject, short of California and Columbia river. …“The bill, if it passes, is a death-blow to the constitution. It may, afterwards, linger; but lingering, its fate will, at no very distant period, be consummated.”Representative Quincy’s dire prediction did not sway the House. We learn on page 335 that the next day, January 15, 1811, the House passed the bill enabling the people of Orleans Territory to form the State of Louisiana, 77 in favor, 36 against. We find the roll-call of the votes in the Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, at the First Session of the Eleventh Congress, volume VII, published in 1826, at pages 483-485; my own 3rd great-grandfather Joseph Pearson, Federalist from North Carolina, voted “no” along with Quincy.The Senate also rejected Quincy’s concerns, receiving the House bill and approving it with minor amendments. We find at pages 537, 540-541, 547, and 549-550, that the House on February 9 and February 13 agreed to Senate amendments, passing the bill on a final vote of 69 to 45. Congress presented the act to President Madison on February 19, and Madison signed the act on February 20 (Journal pages 563-564).The people of the United States found it completely acceptable that the House and Senate and President admitted new states constructed upon former foreign lands, as being within constitutional authority.Contrary to Rep. Quincy, the people of the United States found it completely acceptable to “see Representatives and Senators from the Red River and Missouri pouring themselves upon this and the other floor, managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles at least from their residence, and having a preponderancy in councils.”The former “ownership” status of a territory meant absolutely nothing to the American people; whether formerly part of the colonies, in part former-colony and former-foreign, or entirely former-foreign, made no difference.The fact that it did not bother the American people shows us that the American people themselves were developing a greater attitude that they were federal as well as state citizens.Quincy’s observations that admission of new states, not on lands that had been colonial, would dilute and change the power of the existing states, was plainly true. The relative power of the states that had been part of the colonial lands would necessarily become diluted, because opening the vast western lands to eventual statehood necessarily would increase the total number of states far beyond the total number that could be made out of the remaining “un-statified” part of the Northwest Territory.Under Quincy’s vision that the United States was limited to the lands of the “old” colonial lands, the United States would soon reach its maximum number of states. Under the principle of the Orleans Territory authorization act, there was no limit to the amount of and that the United States might one day encompass and thus no limit to the number of States.This indicates that the people in general had less emotional attachment to the power of the states than did the elected officials.Elected officials focused on the states because it was only via the states that they obtained prestigious offices.But private citizens could move, leaving one state for another, or for the territories; and if to the territories, they would expect in due course to re-acquire their right to vote for federal officials, by making the territories into states. The truth of this observation is proven by the fact, noted above, that the first elected governor of the State of Mississippi, David Holmes, had in earlier life been a resident of Virginia, and not only a resident of Virginia, but an elected Virginia Representative to the U.S. House, serving twelve years, 1797 to 1809. The same was true of Louisiana’s first state governor, William Charles Cole Claiborne. He too, like Holmes, was originally a Virginian; like Holmes, he served in Congress as a Representative – from Tennessee, 1797 to 1801. Then he was federal territorial governor of Mississippi Territory; then of Orleans Territory.When we compare this process to the British, French, Spanish, Belgian, Dutch, and, later, German territorial expansionism in the form of colonialism, we see a fundamental difference.A British colonial governor went out to a colony to rule it and exploit it, always with the expectation of going home; his prominence was always dependent upon his status within England or Scotland.These European powers had no element in their conception of government for these colonies to become member-states of the original government that sent them out. As British political leader Alfred Duff Cooper said at page 306 in his 1953 memoir, Old Men Forget, about a trip he made in the Asian colonies in 1941:“Our next stop was at Calcutta, where the Governor of Bengal … was another House of Commons friend. It seemed to be British policy at that time to govern the great provinces of India through former members of the Whips' office.”In America, the job of territorial governor was a young man’s job, in a place where he would settle, and turn into a full-equal state.In Europe, the job of colonial governor was an old man’s job, a prestigious and profitable title to take back with you when you went back home.What Josiah Quincy asserted in January 1811 was the attitude that the British House of Commons and House of Lords held in 1773 and after: that distant acquired lands must not be accorded equal share in the central government, because that would dilute the power of the existing office-holders from the existing states.Had Quincy prevailed, the Louisiana Purchase lands, and the Spanish lands of Florida and the future Mississippi and Alabama, would have been in the same perpetually subordinate and dependent status that the British parliament intended for the thirteen colonies of North America – and that it intended and applied for what is today Canada, and that it intended and actually applied in all the later colonies of the Empire.The American people rejected Quincy’s attitude. We did not rebel from Britain merely to re-adopt Britain’s arrogant self-centered power attitude, which would have led to a rebellion of such oppressed colonies west of the Mississippi and south of Georgia against us, as we had rebelled from Britain. We had a new vision and we applied it.This is shown not merely by the vote in 1811 to authorize Orleans Territory to become a state, but more fundamentally, by the course of conduct by the American people for decades thereafter.In April 1812, the former Orleans Territory, now as the new state of Louisiana, entered the Union (to avoid name confusion, the then-named Louisiana Territory was renamed Missouri Territory). 40 governments.This process of forming territorial governments, and then state governments, continued for another 100 years, until the admission of Arizona in February 1912 (Hawaii and Alaska would be admitted in 1959).In the period between the Constitution and the end of the Civil War in 1865, the federal government succeeded to sovereignty over the territories formerly governed by the pre-Constitution Confederation; and received transferred title from some of the original 13 states to unsettled claims to their west; and bought land claims of other countries (such as the Louisiana Purchase), and won land claims in various wars (such as the Mexican War), all of which became federal land.By means of these wars, purchases, and treaties, the federal government became sovereign over all the land now comprising the continental United States. The task of fostering governments over all this land provided the perfect opportunity to take the expertise in government-formation that we developed in the colonial and revolutionary times, and apply that expertise to a whole continent. No other nation has had such an opportunity; no other nation ever will again.The task, and the opportunity, facing us is well-described by President Lincoln in his Annual Message to Congress of December 1, 1862 (the equivalent of today’s State of the Union address, but in those days merely written and sent by messenger, not read aloud). Again, I give more than most readers will want, also because necessary to a complete answer:“That portion of the earth’s surface that is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family; and it is not well adapted for two, or more. …“There is no line, straight or crooked, suitable for a national boundary upon which to divide. … The great interior region, bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by the British dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets … already has above ten millions of people, and will have 50 millions within 50 years, if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more than one third of the country owned by the United States – certainly more than 1 million square miles. … [I]t is the great body of the Republic. … In the production of provisions, grains, grasses, and all which proceed from them, this great interior region is naturally one of the most important in the world.“And yet this region has no sea-coast, touches no ocean anywhere. As part of one nation, its people now find [] their way to Europe by New York, to South America and Africa by New Orleans, and to Asia by San Francisco. But separate our country into two nations, as designed by the present rebellion, and every man of this great interior region is thereby cut off from some one or more of these outlets … by embarrassing and onerous trade regulations.“And this is true, wherever a dividing line or boundary line may be fixed. … [T]he people inhabiting, or to inhabit, this vast interior region … will vow, rather, that there shall be no such line. …“There is no possible severing of this [region], but would multiply, and not mitigate, evils among us. In all [this region’s] adaptations and aptitudes, it demands union, and abhors separation. In fact, it would, ere long, force reunion, however much of blood and treasure the separation might cost.”Almost a year after submitting the above-quoted Message to Congress, Lincoln summed up in the Gettysburg Address that the Civil War was, indeed, a test of whether any nation “so conceived and dedicated” as ours was conceived and dedicated by the authors of the Declaration of Independence “can long endure.”There is a mode of thinking and understanding revealed by Lincoln’s words that is important to take a moment to recognize. Lawyers and other writers, such as journalists and academics, and legislators who write statutes, and judges who write opinions, are trained to think it terms of words and sentences and paragraphs on paper.But a statesman learns to think also in terms of people upon land. It is a matter of developing a sense of what people need, and what they want to do, and what they will try to do, given the opportunities and limitations they see before them. It is a mode of thinking that feels instinctive, because it cannot be put into words – or to be more accurate, it is a kind of thinking where people, not words, and the fundamental elements, and land, not paper, is what they are placed on. One can use words to describe what one has been thinking, kind of like the way a translator can take a text in one language, and prepare a representation of it in a different language.Lincoln looked at his own people, and he looked at the geography of the land before them, and he knew what the people would do upon that land, as generation succeeded generation. He was able to do this because he was thinking in terms of people, not of words.The special aptitude of America is that we, more so than any other nation, have developed the aptitude in thinking in terms of people and of land – in assessing accurately what people want, what they feel, what they will do or not do; in assessing the opportunities presented by the land, the effects of plains, rivers, mountains, and minerals; and in assessing how the people are likely to want to develop the land, enhancing its opportunities and reducing its limitations.Our development of our portion of the North American continent, both economically and governmentally, was a kind of advanced graduate-school in the art of fostering popular advancement and self-government: a graduate-school to which America alone, and no other nation, has been admitted, and from which only America has attained an advanced degree. As I will outline below, we began to apply the fruits of our advanced degree, first to the lands obtained as a result of the Spanish-American War, and then to the lands defeated in World War II, and then to other lands during the Cold War, and most recently, in the Middle East.Our graduate-schooling began with the vast federal acquisitions beginning in the late 1700s, through the early 1900s. We defined political subdivisions for this land, calling those subdivisions the territories, whose boundaries we sometimes changed, as circumstances on the ground, or in economics, or in population flow made advisable. We formed federal territorial governments, such that for every state government that eventually came into the Union on these lands, there had been prior to that government a federal territorial government.The total number of these federal territorial governments we formed, prior to the end of the Civil War, comes to 26 governments (perhaps 28, but I ignore whether we formed territorial governments over the Pacific Northwest obtained by treaty from Britain, and over the land obtained by war and purchase over the Southwest and California from Mexico), formed by the Union government over a period of 75 years.These 26 governments, managed over the span of 75 years, were of a kind unique in history: their purpose was to provide a basic legal framework under which the people, as they grew in numbers and matured in the skills of self-government, would establish their own self-governments. This concept was different than the original British plan of the 1760s, in which permanent governments would be designed in London and imposed, and the people would then move in underneath governments that drew their legitimacy from the central planners’ maps and charters in London.These 26 territorial governments eventually became 29 state governments (many formed and admitted after the Civil War). Each of these had to submit itself to review and acceptance by the federal Union government, which had to assure itself that the new government offered was one that both would well-govern its own people, and integrate harmoniously, peacefully, and productively with the other states of the Union and as part of the Union government itself. (I ignore the argument that California was a sovereign republic between the time of the Mexican War and its admission as a state.).Before the Civil War, Texas established itself as an independent government, which remained the same government when it became a state.The Confederate “central” government was also an American exercise in government-making - but built as it was on the principle of secession, it was inherently unstable. It counts in the list of American experiences in government-making, though not as a government formed in the process of leading to our existing governments.At the end of the war, the Confederacy defeated, the federal government then began the process of reconstructing new governments in each of the seceded states. Whatever the arguments over legal history may be, and ignoring interim military governments, these were in substance the formation of 11 new governments. (The next section of this chapter discusses some interesting governmental implications of the Civil War.)After the Civil War, we formed 4 new federal territorial governments (I ignore earlier federal forms of governing Alaska), bringing our total of territorial governments to 30. These then became 4 new states, the last of which is Hawaii.Including various U.S.-affiliated, but non-state, governments, such as Puerto Rico, the present United States includes 57 governments, including the present 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government itself. The number of governments necessary to bring about the present United States was 113 governments, counted as follows:13 colonial governments50 state governments11 “reconstruction” southern state governments30 territorial governments that have been superseded by state governments5 territorial governments still operating (Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, Marianas, American Samoa.)3 union governments (Articles of Confederation, U.S. Constitution, Confederacy)1 District of Columbia governmentI omit from this list other governments we founded in order to foster governments that are now independent, such as the Philippines.Thirty of these governments – the territorial governments – were formed by the federal Union government specifically for the purpose of fostering the development of functional, peaceful, productive states, and were intended to go out of existence when their work was done.From the establishment of the first of these territorial governments in 1787 over the lands of Ohio and points west, to the admission of the state of Hawaii in 1959 – a period of 172 unbroken years – the federal government had in its portfolio of duties the superintending of federal territorial temporary governments whose purpose was to foster the development of permanent democratic governments that, in the words of President Lincoln, were governments “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”The American experience and competence in forming republican, democratic government has largely been in abeyance since 1959, due to an attitude that the United States is essentially “finished” or, perhaps, on a downward slope. The press and the academic community seem to think that talking about American decline gets more “eyeballs before the ads” than anything else. My own view is that Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand ought to be thinking about forming themselves into several non-monarchical democratic and republican states, with an eye towards applying to join the Union. I develop this concept in Chapter 12 of “America the Great” - but that is outside the scope of this answer.