Intellectually of course we know that before the transportation revolution Americans did not travel. Did you ever pause to really digest the implications of that? I had not. Not until I read a book on the Civil War called “Red Tape and Pigeon Hole Generals,” written by a Pennsylvanian. The author, who was pseudonymous until recently, wrote that U.S. soldiers were shocked at how C.S. residents lived. We had never been in the South, he wrote.  💡 I’ll be damned, I thought. Of COURSE! But I had never thought about it! Until the U.S. invaded the C.S. I’ll bet 99% of the common soldiers of both sides had never been to their next neighbor state.

When I read in McPherson’s book on the war Lincoln saying, “I want to see Richmond,” I didn’t get it. I bet he had never been to Richmond before. Imagine! The president of the United States never having been to the capitol of Virginia, 109 miles south of Washington, D.C. North America is so vast that until the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950's residents had the choices of the rail system or staying home.

This is one subsidiary part of the constellation of reasons I insist on calling the two sides in the Civil War the "United States" and the "Confederate States." We were two separate nations, two separate societies: differently based economies, one far wealthier than the other, one much more literate than the other, distinct speech dialects, each composed of a contiguous bloc of sub-states.

So different that McPherson wrote that not until after the Civil War was "the United States" used as a a singular noun.