“Sometimes I think this
country would be better off if we could just saw off the eastern
seaboard and let it float out to sea.”

• Barry
  Goldwater, 1964 Republican Candidate for President

  
  

Forgive me for doing a follow-up on your previous post, Uncle
Mike, but I could not help but notice that the wingnut you
highlighted seemed remarkably eager to throw out all of New England
along with the New York and California bathwater. In fact, it occurs
to me that the wingnuts who currently run this country have a
remarkable hostility towards that region.

It's also ironic that the topic of jettisoning them comes up from
that side, considering that the New England states practically
invented the concept of secession.

And I should point out that yes, lurking trolls, we understand
that this
guy isn't serious. We know this because he calls his idea a
modest proposal; and injecting the phrase “modest proposal”
into any piece of literature is universal pseudo-intellectualese for
“ha ha!
Just poking fun!”

Although I must say — Irish
baby, properly steamed in a broth of stem cells, and with a
little bearnaise
sauce on the side ...

Oops ... sorry. I should never write these things so close to
lunch. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah: New England Secession.

It's hardly known at all today, but New Englanders started talking
about ditching the Union practically from the moment it was born.
Right from the first few sessions of Congress it became painfully
obvious to them that those annoying, patrician Southern states were
going to steal the limelight from the humble burghers of the upper
North. And they didn't like it; not one bit.

The rumblings
first began in earnest after Thomas Jefferson — a
Southerner — negotiated
the purchase of Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. Expansion was
an unpopular concept in the tiny, tidy polities of the coastal
northeast.

What really set them off though, and almost got them storming out
of the Union in earnest, was the ill-fated War
of 1812. A convention of extremely grumpy (and influential) New
Englanders even gathered at Hartford,
Connecticut, during which the body came perilously close to
recommending full independence for the region. Cooler heads
prevailed, however, and attending states resolved merely to send a
delegation to Washington with a
list of constitutional demands.

What follows below is an excerpt from an editorial in the Columbia
Sentinel, dated January 13, 1813. It's from the height of the
secessionist frenzy, and does explain quite a bit. Does any of this
griping sound
familiar to y'all?

The sentiment is hourly extending,
and in these Northern States will soon be universal, that we are in a
condition no better in relation to the South than that of a conquered
people. We have been compelled without the least necessity or
occasion to renounce our habits, occupations, means of happiness, and
subsistence. We are plunged into a war, without a sense of enmity,
or a perception of sufficient provocation; and obliged to fight the
battles of a Cabal which, under the sickening affectation of
republican equality, aims at trampling into the dust the weight,
influence, and power of Commerce and her dependencies.

[...]

The Cabinet has no confidence in
those who enjoy the confidence of this people, and on the other hand
the solid mass of the talents and property of this community is
wholly unsusceptible of any favorable impressions or dispositions
towards an Executive in whose choice they had no part, and by whom
they feel that they shall be, as they always have been, degraded and
marked as objects of oppression and resentment. The consequence of
this state of things must then be, either that the Southern States
must drag the Northern States farther into the war, or we must drag
them out of it; or the chain will break.

Believe it or not, the author of this missive is actually arguing
against secession! Amazingly, after spending the entire first
90% of his editorial frothing about what a miserable mess the
Southern states had gotten everybody else into (the US was losing
the war, and badly),
the author signed off on the piece with a line or two about how
secession was a pandora's
box too risky to open.

Something which, apparently, never
occurred to Jeff
Davis and his cronies.