There is some interesting scholarship suggesting that the concept of a
perpetual union gained widespread acceptance only after the war of 1812 -
Kenneth Stampp did an article on the idea of perpetual union in (I think)
the Journal of American history, and it is the subject of Paul C.
Nagel's  One nation indivisible; the union in American thought, 1776-1861.
 New York, Oxford University Press, 1964.   Lighthorse Harry Lee was one of
the very early voices in its favor as I recall.

By way of contrast, Canada has a confederation in which provinces have more
autonomy than our modern states, and talk of secession is recurrent in its
history, too - and not just Quebec.  Anyway, in grad school I was amused by
the titles in the Toronto Bookstores which included a series of nationalist
essays entitled The Maple Leave Forever next to another collection of essays
entitled The Maple Leaf for Quite a While. Stampp's and Nagel's scholarship
speak to the early national period in which the United States still took a
plural verb. . . .


-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com

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