If you have any intellectual honesty the company you are presently keeping would concern you greatly. Capitan has committed enough fraud on threads such as this one to get him kicked out of even a bottom tier community college a dozen times over. I'm not talking about simple differences of opinion either, which I can and do recognize that both he and you have - i'm talking about acts of fraud. In our previous discussion over the Bollman case he posted a lengthy excerpt from the dissent and attempted to pass it off as the majority ruling. A few days later he did the exact same thing with Hamdi, and that after being thoroughly exposed for his previous fraud. Not long after that he was doing it with another case. And another. I pinged NC, who has copies of the links if you desire to see it all for yourself.
I mention this because you appear relatively new to threads of this nature and, despite uncalled for comments such as the above, you seem to have a willingness to contribute to the discussion. That said, you are also drifting dangerously close to the path chosen by El Capitan, who has no interest in any honest or substantive discussion (as most recently evidenced by his downright incorrigible refusal to acknowledge the commonly accepted fact that Virginia "totally dissolved" its ties with the british crown in June of 1776) and only posts here for the purpose of flaming, insulting, and obstructing any discussion that would otherwise take place.
What do you know about intellectual honesty? You are nothing more than a cheap shot artist.
Gopcrapulist is also an inveterate liar - but that can been seen from his posts on this thread. Getting a morality lecture from GOPcrap is sort of like bing warned about vd by a whore.
One could debate the issue of the formation of the States vs the Union.
However, the fact is that the states did join the union either as states or colonies (and then becoming states in that relationship) and never were apart from that union.
Virgina never made a foreign pact with another nation.
Each state from 1774 on was seen in relationship to one another as a state.
Yes, they had a great deal of local control, due to the absence of a Federal gov't, but that did not mean they were ever separate nations or ever acted in that capacity.
Article 7 states that the States agreed unanimously as the Independent United States of America,
The Confederate States did not call themselves that, but listed each state individually, showing that they were signing as independent states.
The U.S. Constitution was ratified by the States United