““A year earlier, representatives of thirteen states had assembled in Philadelphia and declared their intention to form a more perfect union, but what had come of their declaration was a long way from being a union, let alone a perfect one, and Schuyler, along with all his other problems, was caught up in one of the regional rivalries that would surface as long as the republic endured. Describing the colonies, Benjamin Franklin once noted that each had “peculiar expressions, familiar to its own people, but strange and unintelligible to others.” An early traveler observed, “Fire and Water are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies,” and it was said before the Revolution that the disjointed collection of settlements would come to no good, that they would soon engage in civil war. So””