To be sure, Sam Adams would approve of your picture, and maybe Patrick Henry, but not Washington, Hamilton or Madison. One can already see a national consciousness developing then. Washington certainly allowed states a free hand in the areas reserved to them, but I think the idea of a state as a tribe or city-state or absolute sovereign was something he disapproved of and wanted to get beyond.
I used to think Madison was wrong, and regretted the loss of smaller communities with their own traditions and culture. It certainly must have been more colorful when the different states had their own distinctive memories and practices and nice to actually meet people who worked in the distinctive industries we learned about as kids, rather than just people who worked at the same sort of jobs from one end of the country to the other. But looking at what's happened in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East, and remembering what's happened throughout history makes me think that greater standardization wasn't the worst thing to happen.
The ancient city could be a terrifying place, as Platonists and anti-Platonists could both tell you. The weight of the city's cult and civic solidarity fell very hard on outsiders and non-conformists. A larger union allowed individuals greater freedom to live and work without having completely to accept the views of the local authorities on every question. This does open the door to greater power for the federal or union government, but I hope it's not an either-or exclusive choice between federal or state tyranny.
I don't have time to respond to the rest of your posts now, but I will make two comments. First, Rockwellites want us to believe that had the nation fragmented into smaller countries committed to laissez-faire policies it would have developed economically pretty much as it did in our reality. But it's not clear that such new countries would have been committed to laissez-faire, or that laissez-faire would have spurred development as fast as protectionism did. In the back of their minds the Rockwellites presume that the free trade conditions of the late 20th century would have prevailed in the 19th. In fact, dog-eat-dog was much more the rule in the late 19th century. One could expect trade wars, and those that weren't prepared to engage in them might sink into subordinate, neo-colonial status.
Secondly, the Republican party was in many ways a faction. But that was also true of the Breckenridge party and the secessionists. Factionalism was the essence of the age politically, and the Republican saw themselves, with good reason, as responding to the factionalism of the slaveholders and organizing to defend free soil. I suppose one could say something similar about Southern radicals who saw themselves as organizing to defend their own "institutions." Curiously, it was the moderate Douglas who did most to create such a heated atmosphere with his Kansas-Nebraska act.
I use these terms because they are the language of political science, which would have been understood by the Founders in similar language and with similar concepts. The concepts came down from classical usage for the most part -- Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero would have been familiar to the educated men among them, and likewise the dark musings of Tacitus on the subject of how tyranny grew up in a great republic, and how the morally and politically downfallen condition of his own countrymen contrasted bleakly with the vigor and virtue of the free Germans, whom he professed to admire. These lessons will absolutely not have been lost on the Framers, who were very conscious of the Aristotelian life-cycle of societies, and who were educated in the received vocabulary of political science.
Madison was famously concerned with faction, from his knowledge of the English parliamentary system and from Polybius, who particularly condemned the bad influence on Athenian policy of the demagogues. Of course, Pericles was a demagogue, too, but Polybius likes to overlook that when currying favor with his Roman masters by comparing them to Pericles and deprecating the Athenian model in favor of the Roman.
Madison believed very much as the Bush family do, that politics ought to be a hobby of the idle (but educated) rich. I don't agree with him all that much, except in this, that a republic dominated by combinations of schemers is a Bad Thing. I catalog Faction among the diseases of Republic (along with straight-ticket voting and The Lobby, among others). But I'm enough of a Jacksonian to think that the country was better off when ordinary men paid close attention to politics, and made strong demands on the ethics of their politicians. The memoir of Davy Crockett that someone posted to the Internet -- I think here on FR -- was a small classic, and the kind of thing I want to see more of, in which an honest farmer gave his congressman a stern lesson in ethics and showed him why he shouldn't have voted for a pork appropriation. Madison never contemplated such a scene: he was above correction by mere yeomen. So I take many of his lessons, but I reject his classism and country-squire comfort with the idea that "people like us" would run the country, and all the rest of us fall down with gratitude at their transactions on our behalf.
The larger nation allowed more free play for groups to combine and work for common goals.
But that's Faction!
It also allows greater stability as divisive issues, powerful interests and the political ambitions of politicians and their followings are diluted in the larger sea of national life. The result is more freedom for the individual from those who would dragoon him or her into this or that local army or party.
I don't know whether I agree. Sure, Boss Tweed and Joe Pendergast and corporate actors like the Central (Southern) Pacific Railroad in California and the Mellon Bank in Pennsylvania suborned and seduced people's officeholders to their own agenda. But now we see the same thing happening at the national level, and we hear of similar initiatives being transacted across national borders by conspiracies of corporations, NGO's, and semi-governmental groups from terrorist groups to transnational bureaucracies and secretariats.
One can already see a national consciousness developing then.
Well, sure -- among people who thought they were going to drive the train and ring the bell, and among people who wanted to. But saying so doesn't tell us whether a national consciousness is better than a local one. It is the prejudice of history that wider is better, but then historians are toadies to power who'd like to have been players themselves, so I think we should regard their point of view as treacherous, and not a good indicator of where the best interests of the people lie, but only the enthusiasms of students of Machiavelli.
I think you are referring to the Roman Empire; I can't think of another state in antiquity that took such a latitudinarian view of other people's belief systems. But I think you confuse mere broadness or size of the polity with the consequences of conscious policy. The Romans were systematic in their acceptance of extant cults where they found them (even importing them; a large temple of Isis stood near the Pantheon), but they were not indiscriminate in their acceptance, as the Christians found out to their sorrow. Paul of Tarsus was tried for spreading the beliefs of Christianity, and the complaint of the Jews against him was in part that he was spreading mere superstitions and cultic practices that were not accepted, or acceptable (enter here several canards about Christian practice), within the broad guidlines of Roman policy.
Notwithstanding the prejudice of modern historians and students of politics against "particularisms", I don't think you can correlate the size or multiethnicity (imperial spread) of a state with toleration. The Soviet state extended through what, eleven time zones? And yet it was an intolerant state with regards to belief and opinion.
Yes, that's a good point. I've been a little surprised at how the Democrats splintered into three big pieces, none of which were able individually to compete nationally. Of course, Lincoln wasn't competitive nationally either. Why the Democrats failed to cooperate maximally among themselves in the face of the threat of Black Republicanism, but instead tried to blackmail one another and ended up falling out, is a good book by itself. What I said earlier about political perspicuousness applies here.
....and the Republican saw themselves, with good reason, as responding to the factionalism of the slaveholders and organizing to defend free soil.
Yes, I agree. Donald and other biographers have always agreed, that Lincoln struck his position on containing slavery in sympathy and common cause with Illinois freeholders who anticipated migrating west some day, and who were reasonably concerned that, if slavery were allowed in the Kansas Territory, they would be shut out of the best lands. That's just what happened when Texas was settled, and T. R. Fehrenbach, in Lone Star, describes how slaveholders like Jared Groce (one of the Old Three Hundred who came in the first wave of Texian settlers) were able to use their slaves to multiply the mercedes and labores they could receive from the Spanish Crown, by applying to the empresario (usually Austin) in the name of each and every slave in his household. The "peach bottoms", the good black river-bottoms, of the Brazos River valley and other coastal rivers were preoccupied in this way. Freehold farmers were generally located much farther inland, or on the second-quality land on the Pleistocene terraces on either side of the rivers (which still wasn't bad -- and they didn't have to put up with fire ants!).
Over the longer term, the freeholders still had to deal with the force that drove them off the land eventually -- the effects of economies of scale, and of selling into oligopsonous "free markets" in Chicago and elsewhere. It's ironic: Lincoln won the issue, but the farmers he espoused lost their war to stay on the land.
Curiously, it was the moderate Douglas who did most to create such a heated atmosphere with his Kansas-Nebraska act.
Despite his historic failure to bridge the widening divide, Stephen Douglas deserves credit, like Clay, for having tried to split the differences and come up with something everyone could come up with. Actually, if you think about it, his "popular sovereignty" idea subtly favored the freesoilers, since the slaveholders couldn't do under popular sovereignty what they'd done under the Spanish land-grant program in Texas in 1821. If only the Redlegs hadn't held the Lecompton Convention, and packed it with Missourians (I'm accepting the freesoilers' accusations at face on that point without corroboration), and put the fat into the fire.