Slavery may have been ended in those countries, but it didn’t become completely nonviable until it was ended in the U.S. It ultimately did come down to a war, even if some countries saw the inevitability of such a war and were smart enough to prevent it via democracy.
From the Constitution Act, 1867:
Ey?
I’ve always just assumed that the assertion made in the thread title is just one of those “fun facts” that people throw around to make themselves sound smart but doesn’t actually mean anything, like “Virginia is a COMMONWEALTH, not a state!”, or “People only use 10% of their brains!”
As stated, these are both simply incorrect. The one about Virginia is a bit closer to being accurate, but it’s still not really factual.
As for the rest of your post, I think there’s usually more of a political ideology behind it, as opposed to it being a politically-neutral factoid.
No, the first one is true – Virginia does call itself the XCommonwealth of Virginia, not the state of Virginia. So, for that matter, to Massachusetts, kenrucky, and Pennsylvania. It means as much as Rhode Island calling itself “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”. For practical purposes, as even the commonwealths agree, they are the same as those lowly states.
Ah, but a reasonably democratic empire, with elections, and rule of law, and all that good stuff.
It said that Virginia is not a state. Virginia damned well is a state, as we’ve demonstrated multiple times over this exact issue.
I think you’re not really in any disagreement on this issue. No-one in this thread thinks Virginia is a state, just as no-one thinks that the US does not qualify as a democracy (at least in the binary formation given in the thread title or when compared to other countries accepted to be democracies).
Another thing to note is that “crowned republic” sounds utterly foreign to me as a UK resident. I suppose it’s a term of art like “unentrenched Constitution” that doesn’t really translate across the Atlantic.
I think you left out a “not” in that statement.
The whole argument about “Virginia is not a state it’s a Commonwealth” is like that one about the hunter and the squirrel both going around a tree – pretty pointless. Everyone understands what the other one is sying, but the argument stems from a pretty insignificant choice of definition.