What Would Lincoln Do?

If our 16th president thought it was hard holding 34 states together, what would he have done with 124? This map of the country as it could have looked had it included all the states that have been proposed at one time or another was put together by Andrew Shears, assistant professor of geography at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania. He describes how he came up with it: "... on Wikipedia, I discovered a list that really intrigued me like none other: the List of U.S. State Partition Proposals. For a geographer/cartographer who's a U.S.-specialist and who's interested in alternate history, this was Kryptonite for my productivity. From this list, I stumbled onto listings for U.S. Territories that Failed to Become States and the listing for the hypothetical 51st State. I even came across a nice little book called Lost States, a humorous account from Michael Trinklein that briefly explores a number of random states that never quite happened": http://andrewshears.com/2011/12/08/the-united-states-that-couldve-been/