Revolutions are an inseparable and integral part of American history. We were poured as a molten hot liquid into the ingot of nationhood from the white-hot furnace of revolution in 1776. Our rough edges were hammered smooth in the most terrible of revolutions in 1865. It was a civil war - literally, brother against brother, father against sons - in which American soldiers killed their neighbors and their fellow citizens wholesale. Where Americans burned American homes and towns and destroyed American factories and families. It was a war in which 3 million men fought and 600,000 died - 2 per cent of the population. And, with all the death and destruction, we became what we had not truly been before: no longer a collection of distinct and individual "state-countries" but a true nation. Once and forever, inseparable and indivisible and with a true sense of destiny.

Some would say the Civil War was an inevitable result of the one glaring flaw in the will and courage of the Founding Fathers. Their failure to deal, decisively, with the issue of slavery in the colonies brought about the unavoidable conflict a century hence. But, while they (at least Jefferson and Adams) may have had a genuine sense of foreboding about the end results of their omission, they really had no other choice. And, in truth, just as the Founding Fathers had hoped, slavery was slowly and surely dying a natural death in the United States as the 19^th century progressed. However, a fateful confluence of events - which no one could have predicted or prevented - brought the issue to its dreadful conclusion in 1861. It was, as so many things have been throughout our history, a vacuum of national leadership that lead us, inexorably, down the path to catastrophe.

The United States had, despite their misleading moniker, never been what could truly be thought of as a "nation" for the 80 years that past after the Constitutional Convention. It was, in truth, more similar to the modern day European Union - a collection of small geographic areas which were held together with the bailing wire of common interests: defense against foreign encroachment and commerce. Even George Washington was cautious in the use of the term "nation" in his 1796 Farewell Address when he spoke of "the Community of Interest in One Nation." John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to matter, had declared "American has chosen to be, in many respects and for many purposes, a nation." Te people had "chosen" to be a nation. Did that, in fact, mean that the people could "un-chose" to be a nation? America was, for all practical purposes, bound only by parchment and candle wax: both easily flammable and just as easily consumable.

When speaking of one’s "country" in the mid-1800s, one was most commonly referring to one’s state rather than America. One was not an American: one was a "Virginian" or a "New Yorker." Except when the threat of external force was brought to bear, the concept of America was a vague notion to most. The people had little interaction with anything related to a national government - except for the Post Office - and thought little of it. As James Murrin has noted: "In the architecture of nationhood...Americans erected their constitutional roof before they put up their national walls...and the Constitution became a substitute for a deeper kind of national identity." We were a nation of paper documents and a distant, vague sense of historical unity. By the mid-19th century, we began to unravel.

It is this climate of allegiance to state, that succession was constantly bantered about in national politics. As early as 1807, when Jefferson passed the Embargo Acts, the New England states virtually ignored the national law and threatened to succeed from the "union." Again, in 1812, when James Madison foolishly declared war on Great Britain, New England Federalists raised the flag of secession yet again. The idea that succession was a viable alternative for states had a long history in the affairs of the ragtag collection of sovereign states that comprised America.

Fortunately for the country, in the first half of the 1800s, there were strong Presidents (Jefferson through Andrew Jackson), most with links to the Constitutional Convention. Based on a national reverence for that singular event or, in Jackson’s case, sheer force of will, they could cling to that hallowed time when we were as "one nation, under God, indivisible" and expect the people and their states to dutifully pay homage. When James Madison died in 1836, the last of the signatories of The Constitution passed forever from the American scene. Fortunately, at least for a time, there were three men of completely divergent beliefs and national vision that arose - not in Presidential politics but in the Senate - that could lead. And all, fortunately, had the one gift that would keep America together - at least for another quarter century: the gift was compromise.

Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun could not have been any more different in appearance, beliefs or temperament. Yet, despite their epic battles of words, they (most) always thought of their nation first. They have been called "The Great Triumvirate" in the "Golden Age" of the Senate. [N.B. Two of the three (Calhoun and Clay) were named in 1959 by a Senate Panel - which included John F. Kennedy - among the 5 greatest Senators in history] It was they and not the line of weak Presidents that followed Andrew Jackson (Martin van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James Polk, Zachery Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan) that held their regional constituencies together and in the Union. Webster of the North, Clay of the West and Calhoun of the South tugged and pulled their increasing polarized states together through a rising storm that was destined to swamp the listing ship of the rudderless nation.

The nation - not a word that would be used in these times - was dramatically changing. The census of 1850 showed that the northern states had increased their population by 20% in a decade. Seven-eighths of all immigrants to America settled in the North. The South and its "Peculiar Institution" was stagnant and rotting. The North was becoming an industrial powerhouse and magnet for mass immigration. The Southern plantation elite were simply bent on preserving their wealth - both their land and chattel "property." The had no interest in profit or industry. They only wanted to hold onto their aristocratic lives of leisure.

But only 5% of of the eight million southern whites owned slaves. What of the other 6 million whites? These mostly poor, small land owning farmers feared they would be overrun by the 3 million enslaved blacks if they were to be freed. If that were to happen, competition for land and jobs would be fierce. Likewise, the Denmark Vesey rebellion in South Carolina of 1820 and the Nat Turner revolt in Virginia of 1831 were constantly on the minds of wary southern whites, rich and poor. As Thomas Jefferson himself had remarked: "Slavery was like holding onto a wolf by the ears: you didn’t like it but you didn’t dare let go." Whites of the South were driven by the dual fears of economic failure and slave-led retribution to maintain slavery even as the sheer weight of it drug them further and further into the suffocating depths of stagnation.

But, with the strength of the Democratic Party’s stranglehold on the Presidency and, with it, the Taney-led Supreme Court, the South - more politically organized and cohesive born of the instinct for survival - had fought and won most skirmishes against the growing popular and political assaults on slavery. They had forced the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and, through the efforts of Henry Clay, again averted succession in 1850 with another compromise. Though Calhoun and The South didn’t particularly like it, they had to compromise. President Zachery Taylor, "Old Rough and Ready," though a Southerner, would have quashed any threat of succession before it ever materialized. In February 1850, President Taylor held a stormy conference with Southern leaders who threatened secession. He told them that if necessary to enforce the laws, he personally would lead the Army. Further, he said persons "taken in rebellion against the Union, would be hung ... with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters and spies in Mexico." He never wavered - but, alas, he did die in office shortly after that very real threat.

But, by the time the Kansas-Nebraska Act came in 1854, all of the "Great Triumvirate" were dead. And the Presidency was occupied by weak-kneed non-leaders. With the vacuum created for leadership in both the North and the South, and in both the Executive and Legislative branches, those who rose to fill the void were fire-eaters - not of the skills and logic of Clay, Webster and Calhoun. In the North, the demands for an immediate end to slavery - or at the very least, a ban on its spread - were championed by a new political party, the Republican Party. It’s first candidate was an obscure former Congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. With 4 viable candidates in the 1860 election, Lincoln won entirely through the Northern vote (he was not even on the ballot in 9 Southern states) and with only 40% of the popular votes cast. The die was cast. Succession - and war - was inevitable.

The sad and tragic saga of the Civil War, however, did not begin to satisfactorily end the issue of what to do with the black slave. Again, fate would play a tragic hand. The only man who had clear thoughts on what would be done after emancipation, Abraham Lincoln, would be assassinated 4 months into his second term - a mere 5 days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. The peaceful and swift unification of the country that Lincoln had so clearly outlined with his second inaugural speech - "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." - was not to be.

When the Radical Reconstruction phase and President Grant replaced the woefully inadequate Andrew Johnson, progress was slowly made toward assimilating the freed blacks and suppressing violent Southern white backlash. But, when Grant’s two terms expired, Ru therford Hayes’ backroom deal in 1876 with Southern Democrats (the so-called Compromise of 1877), further efforts toward Reconstruction came to an ignominious end. The hope blacks held for equality were buried, thereafter, by 75 years of Jim Crow laws.

The second revolution of our nation - like the first - was, when weighed on the scales of history, an overall success. It succeeded in convincing the citizens of the disparate states that there was a common national entity worth preserving. Instead of thinking on a small "colonial" scale, Americans began to think "big" thoughts. Thoughts of "Manifest Destiny" and "the World Stage" began to enter into the thinking of Americans. We, as a nation, grew out of out painful adolescence and became, figuratively of course, young adults. Our nation had survived a calamity that no nation had ever been faced with before and grew stronger from the experience. We did not, as we very well might have, fly apart to form another Europe with its distinct nations and languages with small, localized interests. We entered this second revolution as a "parchment union" and emerged from it a true United States both in name and in character.

On the other hand, much work remained to be done. We did not fully assimilate the freedmen so cruelly brought to our shores for centuries. At the end of the 19^th century, black citizens (at least, on paper) were still not allowed to drink from the fountain of the "American Dream." For this, we carried into the next century a debt demanding to be paid. We defaulted on the overdue balance and the interest and penalties would continue to grow, decade after decade. We became distracted by our brief illusions of world empire and, still later, by two World Wars and we neglected (or, more accurately, ignored) what we owed to our own minority citizens.

But, as with all overdue bills, the collectors eventually began to start demanding payment. And, almost a century after the Civil War, a third revolution would rattle the nation from its comfortable complacency. Citizens, long neglected, segregated and ignored, would petition to be heard. A third century and a third revolution would come to the United States. Again, violence would play a part but, for the first time, this new revolution would be a call not so much to arms but to conscience. And, as the first two rebellions would recast the national character, so would the third. And it is still in evolution to this day.