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The Republic Of San Marino

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In 2011, the Republic of San Marino awarded citizenship to the then President of the United States, Barack Obama. The letter that this often-overlooked alpine nation addressed to President Obama was thoroughly ignored by the news media, and to any onlookers the fact that Europe’s third smallest country was offering citizenship to the President of one of the world’s leading powers must have seemed quite peculiar. San Marino’s extension of citizenship to President Obama, however, was not a delusional act, but rather, was the renewal of the Apennine republic’s congratulatory gesture to Abraham Lincoln 150 years earlier. Following the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, “the Most Serene Republic of San Marino” had communicated to President…show more content…
This being the case to North, the war represented the culmination of an age long struggle between monarchial aristocracy and despotism and democracy that any liberal republican leader overseas would want to support. On the other hand, though the South did seek to promote hierarchical, aristocratic, and nondemocratic regimes, the Confederacy saw the international importance of the conflict primarily in the textile mills of Manchester and the rest of industrialized Europe.
Though the military battles of the Civil War may have been exclusively waged on United States’ soil, the outcome of the war was heavily dependent on the diplomatic battles waged in foreign capitals. Because of the proliferation of new technologies and the harnessing of steam power to operate everything from the printing press to ships, the United States had finally become the “City on the Hill” that John Winthrop had predicted it would be. As the Civil War tore America apart, “the eyes of all people [were] upon” the country, marking the conflict as an international crisis that the leadership of all nations, from England with its vast empire to San Marino with its 24 square miles of territory, inherently had a stake in. In the end, the South’s overestimation of the power of cotton on the world stage and the North’s successful, though delayed, narrative of freedom and free labor led to Union victory.
In the years leading up to secession both cotton prices and
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