the tindog coffeehouse

I’ve been reading an excellent book about the 1860 presidential election, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War by Douglas Egerton. In the book, Egerton explains the political forces that led to the birth of the Republican Party and the eventual secession of the South. Honestly, it’s one of the best explanations I’ve ever read for why the Civil War happened. Yes, it was about slavery. But it didn’t just happen overnight. It was a long process that had been building since the end of the American Revolution. What’s even more interesting, however, is how those same forces are at work in today’s political climate.

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With only a week to go before the 2012 election, the race is effectively a toss-up between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, with the deciding votes likely coming down to a handful of so-called “battleground states”: Ohio, Nevada, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The winner, of course, will be whoever collects a majority of the 538 available electoral votes according to Article II of the Constitution.

The electoral college was devised by the framers of the Constitution as a way to prevent an unpredictable general population from directly voting for the president. Instead, their vote would count as a preference for how their state’s appointed electors should vote (although the electors are not legally bound to abide by those preferences). Such a system seems completely antiquated today, however. We have a much more organized electoral system and better technology, which should in theory reduce fraud. Besides, with many states strongly trending Republican or Democrat, many votes don’t seem to really matter. If you’re a Republican in California or a Democrat in Texas, for example, it seems pointless to vote since the outcome for your state is all but guaranteed. It’s no surprise, then, that in recent years there’s been a greater call to eliminate the electoral college, allowing the winner of the popular vote to be the winner of the election.

But I think you could actually make an argument for keeping the electoral college. Let me explain.

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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, probably the greatest holiday dedicated to the mass consumption of food ever. Except of course that it’s not really about the food, per se, but a time of, well, giving thanks. We all know that the holiday dates back to the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, which celebrated the Pilgrims’ first successful growing season since arriving in America a year earlier. (And actually the tradition dates back to the Pilgrims’ days in Leiden, Holland, when the Dutch held a Thanksgiving feast every October.) But what’s cool — to me, at least — is that my ancestor was one of those early pilgrims.

From everything I’ve researched and read (and admittedly I’m not a genealogist, so I could be completely wrong), the first Spooners to arrive in America landed at Plymouth in 1637. Ann Spooner (born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1598) arrived with her young sons William (my ancestor, age 16 at the time) and Thomas (age 14).

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I feel like I need to clarify my post from a couple of days ago in which I said that there was no logical reason for why the American Revolution occurred. Obviously, there are multiple reasons. (And yes, this is going to be another boring history post, so feel free to skip it; I won’t hold it against you. This time.)

Anyway, my argument was that because the northern and southern colonies were so incredibly different, on paper it doesn’t make sense that the two regions would unite against the British, particularly over such a prolonged period. That they did, I concluded, “is simply a miracle.”

So does that mean that the Revolution was avoidable? Is there something England could’ve done to keep the American colonies from breaking away from the British Empire? In short, no. Independence was inevitable. And here’s why.

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In honor of Independence Day, I’ve been watching the 13-part History Channel series The Revolution, a documentary on America’s war for independence. And over the past couple of days, I’ve kept coming back to the same single thought: The American Revolution should never have happened.

I don’t mean that it was wrong that it happened but rather that there’s no logical reason for why it happened and for why it was successful. Let me explain.

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Source.

Previously:
It’s the end of the Internet as we know it (and I feel fine)
Welcome to the future
Can you hear me now?
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet