Thread by @homemadeguitars

Before I go out and get the donks up for work, some thoughts about American history.
Specifically, half slave and half free, the original Constitution, the Federation built from a Confederation.

2. This will not reach a conclusion. After 40+ years of pondering this, I myself still have not reached one.

3. Historically "state" and "nation" were more or less synonyms.
After the Revolutionary War, we did not become one nation by any stretch of anybody's imagination. We became, literally, 13 separate, loosely affiliated, free-ish countries, that is to say, free as in not colonies.

4. Some of the 13 separate nations had chattel slavery, primarily but not exclusively enslaving black people captured in Africa and sold into slavery.
Some of the 13 separate nations did not permit the owning and enslavement of human beings regardless of skin color or origin.

5. Overall the 13 newly independent nations did not get along for shit, and were not able to do much of anything as a group.
It is a historic fact that they were not even able to reach agreement to pay the back wages to the soldiers who had won their independence.

6. They had no authority of any sort over one another. Their sole "nationwide" "government" was a Congress, but that Congress had no power of taxation over the separate nations. Without taxes, they were unable to pay their joint debts, to other nations or to their own troops.

7. In fact, Congress did not even have the power to compel attendance. Whole states just blew the whole process off, didn't show up, didn't discuss, didn't vote.
It was a mess. One year, disgruntled combat veterans ran the whole Congress out of Philadelphia over back pay.

8. Congress demanded that the governor of Pennsylvania establish control over the veteran mob, and the governor told them (paraphrased) "So pay your fucking debts. Not my problem."
They had to leave town.
This is how we came to have DC, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

9. Anyway, one thing led to another, and the original conspiracy which had led the revolution (yes, Virginia, there is a Conspiracy) all got together and said, "This ain't working."

10. They gathered, again in Philly, starting in May of 1787. In the eleven years (almost) since the original Declaration of Independence, they had won their independence but had nothing approaching a resultant independent nation. Near anarchy. Some approved. Jefferson, for one.

11. They wrote up the current document. But they had a problem. They were half slave, half free. How to make of that, one nation?
The slave "states" (independent slaveholding nations, remember) weren't going to sign up to be ruled by a group which demanded they halt their economy

12. Slavery provided essentially the exact same economic support structure which fossil fuels provides today. Just like most people today have no moral misgivings about killing the global ecosystem because we make money doing it, those slave nations had no qualms about slavery.

13. Our cars, our air conditioners, our vacuum cleaners - all do for us what slaves did for them. And we like them. And they liked them.
So - well, you know. 3/5 of a person. An absolute guarantee that slavery couldn't be stopped for *at least* 20 years. Other compromises.

14. They wanted to create one nation, not two. They could see Europe. Every place where two nations sat side by side, war was inevitable and recurring. They didn't want to create the conditions for endless recurring wars.

15. So they set a level of buy-in, a minimum level of acceptance necessary to create "one nation" (which actually never was, quite. It was to be a federation of independent self-governing "states" or nations.)
That's why the Senate. Each independent nation-state had an equal say.

16. The level of buy-in they decided they would have to get was 9 of the 13.
9 to ratify, those 9 would become a federated nation.
I guess they figured if the other 4 made a competing nation, the big one could whip the little one in the inevitable wars, but I don't know.

17. Neither team, not the slave nations nor the non-slave nations, had 9 members. To create this federation they had to get some buy-in from each group.
To abolish slavery was to abolish the functioning economies of all the slave nations. Once again, like if we outlawed fossil 🔥

18. So they made the choices they made. And everybody knows what came after. The Civil War was as inevitable as sunrise, and came, and was ugly, and the economies of the slave states collapsed, and sharecropping and Jim Crow and all the crap, and 1965, and 2021.

19. And I have tried to figure out, for much of my adult life, how they could have done it better. And I don't know.
If they had formed two competing nations - probably the most likely other outcome - would we, like Europe, have finally made peace, mostly? I don't know.

20. It's pretty obvious that under the two nation scenario, the free nation would have always been a magnet for slaves escaping the slave nation. It appears obvious to me that that one running sore, by itself, would have led to wars.

22. I don't see any circumstances under which they could have written a Constitution which banned slavery outright and gotten 9 of these squabbling independent nations to sign on. I mean, look at what happened ~75 years later when they tried.

23. To me the original stumbling block was laid hundreds of years earlier, when white settlers grabbed more land than they could work or manage with their own strength and the strength of their animal partners. Slavery became "necessary."
Just like cars, trucks, tractors. Today.

24. We know our economies are killing the whole world we live on. We know the collapse is close. We won't give up our mechanical slaves because we'd have to figure out a way to provide for ourselves, and we don't wanna.
So - what about 1787?

25. I can't see any road out of where they were the very day the British surrendered, to get to one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
We're still not there. I don't know if it would have been possible.
I don't know if it is yet.
That's all.