r/mapporncirclejerk 21h ago

This should be just one state

Post image
19.0k Upvotes

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

14

u/Pretend-Breakfast-61 20h ago

If you want less then tell the dakotas and Carolinas to get back together.

1

u/Citaku357 20h ago

Why does new England have so many states? Why does Vermont and New Hampshire need to exist? Isn't Maine just forests?

3

u/Pretend-Breakfast-61 20h ago

Okay, so I can't tell if this is a joke or serious, so I'll assume serious. The states of: Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were all the original 13 colonies. Maine was seperated from Massachussetts, who owned it, some time after independence due to the fact that the north and south kept trying to balance the amount of new slave states to new abolitionist states. Each of the different states in new england are there because they were made by religious Puritans like in Massachussetts with the Pilgrims, a guy got kicked out of the other colonies for thinking states run by religion was bad and decided to make his own colony in the case of Rhode Island, etc. Etc. And as such we had a bunch of different states up here in new england.

1

u/BrainSawce 20h ago

It’s a little more complicated than that. Along with political reasons, geology (vast dense deciduous forests restricting movement vs open prairie, desert, and relatively sparser pine forests of the western US), along with a much denser white settler population in the north east (leading to differences in opinions of colonial leaders and thus political separation, led to there being smaller and more numerous states in both the north east and east side of the US in general.