A hypothetical map presenting a vision of the United States if it were divided into four regional parts has sparked heated debate.
‘Can we agree that, without dividing the States, this is the best way to divide the United States into four?’ wrote a Reddit user on the Geography subreddit alongside the graph, whose reply has been reproduced by DailyMail.com below.
Evidently, “we” couldn’t, as responses revealed there was little agreement on the proposal (the image was removed by the subreddit’s moderators, but was seen by this publication).
In fact, the rejected post garnered nearly 5,000 comments, all arguing about the theoretical prospect of cordoning off specific states into four categories: Northeast, Midwest, West, or South.
A hypothetical map presenting a vision of the United States if it were divided into four regional parts has sparked heated debate.
A major point of contention among Redditors was including the state of Missouri in the south.
‘I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah!’ declared a man whose comments the story suggests he lives in Alabama, also referencing a mocking simpsons quote how some people in Missouri pronounce the state’s name.
‘I feel like Missouri was just handed over to the South here to generate interaction and feedback. Missouri is definitely the Midwest, and the government classifies it as the Midwest,’ a second argued.
‘Geographically it’s the Midwest, culturally it’s further south. “Kansas also approved the surrender of Missouri to the south,” a third stated.
“We Southerners recognize that Missouri has Southern tendencies, but we do not grant it the status of part of the ‘South,'” a fourth added.
‘Maybe it needs to be divided into 5 sections. West, South, Midwest, Northwest and Missouri,” proposed an armchair diplomat.
‘The South is right. Not sure about Missouri, I’ve always considered it the Midwest,” one wrote, to which a second responded, “The South considers it the Midwest and the Midwest considers it the South.” As a Midwesterner, I would say Let the South keep it.
Others chimed in with references to Missouri history, which also doesn’t fit neatly with the history of the South or the history of the Midwest.
Across nearly 5,000 comments, Redditors took particular issue with Missouri being grouped with the South rather than the Midwest, although Midwesterners weren’t interested in saying so.
“If we split Missouri in half, I’d say that’s pretty good,” someone else suggested, and another responded, “We’ll call it the Missouri Compromise.”
‘The Missouri Compromise 2: The Recommitment,’ a third wag chimed in.
In truth, the Missouri Compromise was the name of the 1820 legislation that approved the region’s request to become a slave-owning state.
At the same time, he admitted Maine as a free state, to maintain a balance between slave and non-slave states.
The Missouri Compromise further mandated that, with the state’s sole exception, slavery would not be permitted north of the 36th latitude line, which ran along its southern border.
During the Civil War, the Missouri state legislature voted 98-1 to remain in the Union. However, militias loyal to the Confederates soon also emerged throughout the state, fighting to retain the right to own slaves.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared that slaves in successful states were freed, which, again, did not affect Missouri, since it had not been successful.
Two years later, in January 1865, delegates to the Missouri state convention voted 60-4 to approve the state’s Emancipation Ordinance, just weeks before the federal government passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery. Nacional level.
Missouri’s not-so-clear history surrounding its stance on slavery influenced the charged comments from contemporary regional loyalists on the Reddit thread discussing the map.
Some went to the trouble of resolving controversies over states that seemed divided between two regions, including Missouri.
Another commenter decided to take it upon himself to tear down much of the ambiguity surrounding Missouri, as well as similar intermediate states.
“People confuse these states,” they began.
‘Colorado: Definitely a Western state with a Midwest influence.
‘Oklahoma, Kentucky: Definitely southern states with a Midwest influence.
‘Missouri: Definitely a Midwestern state with southern influence.
‘Virginia: A southern state with a huge northeastern influence growing by the day, perhaps it will become northeastern in the near future or arguably it already is.’
Someone else confirmed that case-by-case breakdown: “Best shot I’ve seen in this entire thread.”
The feeling of a divided America is not unprecedented.
At the end of 2020, in his first speech as president-elect, Joe Biden ‘made clear his intention to bridge the deep and bitter divisions in American society. “He pledged to look beyond the red and blue and discard the harsh rhetoric that characterizes our political debates,” as Gallup put it.
In the run-up to the 2020 elections, Gallup found that Nine in 10 Americans on both sides of the political spectrum felt that if the other side won, the United States would suffer “lasting damage.”
In March 2023, Axios reported that about one in five Americans would favor a “national divorce,” in which states dominated by Republicans and Democrats would split into two separate nations.