WHAT IF THE UNION HAD DISSOLVED?

WHAT IF THE UNION HAD DISSOLVED? Before the Civil War, there was talk of secession from time to time by other regions as well as the South. What if the Union had dissolved? In the essay I linked to yesterday, Jay Cost points out that there is some historical precedent from the period of the Articles of Confederation. During that period, “foreign powers played state governments off one another,… no state had the power or authority to stabilize the economy, … the territorial integrity of our nation was under threat, …[and]… it appeared as though civil unrest would destroy America’s experiment in self-government shortly after it had begun.” One can imagine an America consisting of two or more countries with territorial wars and foreign countries playing the American countries against each other. Of course, another historical precedent would be Canada.