Comments on: Who wants to be Flanders http://owensrhetoric.com/2008/06/07/who-wants-to-be-flanders/ Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:52:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Lily http://owensrhetoric.com/2008/06/07/who-wants-to-be-flanders/#comment-145 Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:53:43 +0000 http://owensrhetoric.wordpress.com/?p=809#comment-145 I couldn’t make heads or tails of F13 until I got out a map of the colonies. It helped to get a visual on the different possible alliances of colonies in Ham’s confederacy calculus. He says, “The ideas of men who speculate upon the dismemberment of the empire, seem generally turned towards three confederacies: one consisting of the four northern, another of the four middle, and a third of the five southern States.” Then he tries to prove that this is unrealistic because of geopolitical concerns, and the most we would probably end up with would be two confederacies.

My original calculations as to Ham’s orginal three alliances didn’t work out too well, so I had to go to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_colonies), which enlightened me as follows:

North: NH, MA, RI, CT
Middle: NY, DE, PA, NJ
Southern: MD, GA, SC, NC, VA

Ham says, Naw, that won’t work. NY’s border along NH, MA, RI, etc. is too weak to defend, so NY will want to join the North, not the Middle. NJ is way too small to be a frontier colony, and PA’s culture and commerce mesh more easily with the north than with the south (plus, as Andrew notes, PA doesn’t want to be Flanders — i.e. the border country where all the wars happen). So NJ, NY, and PA will all throw their lot in with the North. DE wasn’t specifically discussed — presumably b/c Ham thought it was too small to matter? (Poor DE).

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