http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110ap_governors_bill_clinton.html?source=mypi
President Clinton warns of growing polarization
By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
PHILADELPHIA -- Former President Bill Clinton warned Saturday that the country is becoming increasingly polarized despite the historic nature of the Democratic primary.
Speaking at the National Governors Association's semiannual meeting, Clinton noted that on the one hand, following the early stages of the Democratic primary, "the surviving candidates were an African-American man and a woman."
Clinton's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, battled for the Democratic nomination into June with fellow Democrat Barack Obama, son of a white mother and black father.
But this achievement was overshadowed by a growing distance between Americans, said Clinton.
"Underneath this apparent accommodation to our diversity, we are in fact hunkering down in communities of like-mindedness, and it affects our ability to manage difference," Clinton said.
Clinton developed his 44-minute speech from themes he said he drew from a new book, "The Big Sort," by Bill Bishop.
He cited statistics compiled by Bishop that found that in the 1976 presidential election, only 20 percent of the nation's counties voted for Jimmy Carter or President Ford by more than a 20 percent margin.
By contrast, 48 percent of the nation's counties in 2004 voted for John Kerry or President Bush by more than 20 points, Clinton said.
"We were sorting ourselves out by choosing to live with people that we agree with," Clinton said.
Clinton has often meshed big picture admonitions with new books whose ideas he admires. He drew similar conclusions in 2000 following the publication of Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone," on the decline of civic engagement in the United States.
Among the approximately two dozen active governors in attendance Saturday were some of the 11 who backed Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Gov. Timothy Kaine of Virginia said he wasn't worried about how President Clinton might view his support for Obama.
"We're human beings, too, so there are feelings, but we understand this is a team sport, and we come back together as a team," Kaine said.
After weeks of not speaking to each other, Obama last month reached out to President Clinton and asked him for help winning the White House. Clinton had portrayed Obama as too inexperienced to be president.
Clinton concluded his speech by reminding governors, who are marking the association's centennial, that the issues they face today are similar to problems President Teddy Roosevelt grappled with a century ago.
Those include inequality among rich and poor, immigration and energy policy.
If those issues are dealt with, "We're about to go into the most exciting period of human history," Clinton said.
"If we don't, in the words of President Roosevelt, dark will be the future," he said. "I'm betting on light - I hope you are, too."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
The American Civil War (1861–1865), also known as the War Between the States and several other names, was a civil war in the United States of America. Eleven Southern slave states declared their secession from the U.S. and formed the Confederate States of America (the Confederacy). Led by Jefferson Davis, they fought against the U.S. federal government (the "Union"), which was supported by all the free states and the five slaveholding border states.
In the presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, had campaigned against the expansion of slavery beyond the states in which it already existed. The Republican victory in that election resulted in seven Southern states declaring their secession from the Union even before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861.[1] Both the outgoing and incoming U.S. administrations rejected secession, regarding it as rebellion.
Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln responded by calling for a volunteer army from each state, leading to declarations of secession by four more Southern slave states. In the war's first year, the Union assumed control of the border states and established a naval blockade as both sides massed armies and resources. In 1862, battles such as Shiloh and Antietam caused massive casualties unprecedented in U.S. military history. In September 1862, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made ending slavery in the South a war goal, which complicated the Confederacy's manpower shortages.
In the East, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee won a series of victories over Union armies, but Lee's loss at Gettysburg in early July, 1863 proved the turning point. The capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson by Ulysses S. Grant completed Union control of the Mississippi River. Grant fought bloody battles of attrition with Lee in 1864, forcing Lee to defend the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. Union general William Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia, and began his famous March to the Sea, devastating a hundred-mile-wide swath of Georgia. Confederate resistance collapsed after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
The war, the deadliest in American history, caused 620,000 soldier deaths[2] and an undetermined number of civilian casualties, ended slavery in the United States, restored the Union by settling the issues of nullification and secession and strengthened the role of the federal government. The social, political, economic and racial issues of the war continue to shape contemporary American thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America (also called the Confederacy, the Confederate States, and CSA) was the government formed by eleven southern states of the United States of America between 1861 and 1865. However, since the CSA was never recognized by other countries, it was never a de jure independent country according to international law and custom.[citation needed] Its de facto control over its claimed territory varied during the war, and was linked to the fortunes of its military in battle.
Seven states declared their independence from the United States before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President; four more did so after the Civil War began at the Battle of Fort Sumter. The United States of America ("The Union") held secession illegal and refused recognition of the Confederacy. Although British and French commercial interests sold the Confederacy warships and materials, no European nation officially recognized the CSA as an independent country.
The CSA effectively collapsed when Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston surrendered their armies in April 1865. The last meeting of its Cabinet took place in Georgia in May. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured by Union troops near Irwinsville, Georgia on May 10, 1865. Nearly all remaining Confederate forces surrendered by the end of June. A decade-long process known as Reconstruction temporarily gave civil rights and the right to vote to the freedmen, expelled ex-Confederate leaders from office, and re-admitted the states to representation in Congress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War
The main explanation for the origins of the American Civil War was slavery, especially the issue of the expansion of slavery into the territories. States' rights and the tariff issue became entangled in the slavery issue, and were intensified by it. Other important factors were party politics, expansionism, sectionalism, economics and modernization in the Antebellum Period.
In 1860, the election of Abraham Lincoln, who won the national election without receiving a single electoral vote from any of the Southern states, triggered the secession of the cotton states of the Deep South from the union and their formation of the Confederate States of America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America (also called the Confederacy, the Confederate States, and CSA) was the government formed by eleven southern states of the United States of America
The Confederate Congress responded to the hostilities by formally declaring war on the United States in May 1861 — calling it "The War between the Confederate States of America and the United States of America." The Union government never declared war but conducted its war efforts under a proclamation of blockade and rebellion. After the war the states were readmitted to representation in the US Congress.
