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Conventional wisdom is yes. The other things you mention are the fodder, the Am-Rev the spark.The third estate was supported by the fact that there were many in the 1st that were the sons of the third… getting into the Church was a way out of the peasantry; the 2nd had many of the “failed nobility”… noble in name only; no money or land, just title which made the Oath of the Tennis Court all the more likely.Atl east that's what it seems to me.
… our revolution predated our civil war. So, it seems to me the Confederacy fits the parameters of this discussion; it came into being rather quickly. ….
Quite right, and I'll agree with most of your statements. However the fact that the CSA governmental structure was a virtual mirror of the USA structure seems to negate the extrodinariness of it's creation in time of war or not. My take only.
Sorry to take so long to do this; I'd missed seeing your question.What I mean is that in the construction of our new nation the formation and execution of a governmental plan wasn't seamless or quick… we labored through the Articles of Confederation which left much to be desired. When we tried to fix them we ended up creating an entirely new document; the Constitution was far better but still didn't satisfy all the parties involved.Then we got the whole Federalist / Anti-federalist thing in motion (thankfully) which led to the Bill of Rights. To most this is hitting the ground running but in reality at every step we could have imploded… something the British, French, and Spanish all rather expected and hoped for. In the big picture we appea[r] effective but at the time we were (IMHO) something of a cluster *uc*. Thank goodness we had the best and the brightest of the time to get us through rather than the pols of today, eh?
I voted for Geo III and loss of the colonies here… my bias as a Am. History teacher.The poll results are interesting 😮
My bet is our Civil War… the full quote from his essay The Contest in America…”But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice ? a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice ? is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”[from Wikipedia article on JSM]Edit: Right as rain. Citizens are armed; slaves or subjects not.
