States Rights: A Sordid History
Learn more about Amazon Prime. Please try your request again later. Are you an author?
States' rights
Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography. Learn more at Author Central. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Available for download now. A Sordid History Jun 16, Later, the question of slavery became paramount, with the issue being whether states had the right to maintain slavery within their borders and whether new territories had the right to choose between being free or slave without interference from the federal government. In the 20th century, "states' rights" were generally a code for segregation.
Quotes regarding States' Rights. By George Mason Whatever power may be necessary for the National Government a certain portion must necessarily be left in the States. It is impossible for one power to pervade the extreme parts of the U. Debate at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, What Kind of Nation: Lincoln's Constitution by Daniel A.
The Civil War brought pressure on the Constitution that had never been seen before and hasn't been seen since, testing the document in much the same w A gripping account of the Founding Fathers' dramatic-and often violent- struggle to ratify the Constitution and give birth to the nation America's S In their own words, the Supreme Court has become "a national theology board," "a super board of education," and amateur psychologists on a "psycho-jou Supporters of slavery often argued that one of the rights of the states was the protection of slave property wherever it went, a position endorsed by the U.
Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision. In contrast, opponents of slavery argued that the non-slave-states' rights were violated both by that decision and by the Fugitive Slave Law of Exactly which —and whose —states' rights were the casus belli in the Civil War remain in controversy. A major Southern argument in the s was that banning slavery in the territories discriminated against states that allowed slavery, making them second-class states. In the Supreme Court sided with the states' rights supporters, declaring in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories.
Similar authors to follow
Jefferson Davis used the following argument in favor of the equal rights of states:. Resolved, That the union of these States rests on the equality of rights and privileges among its members, and that it is especially the duty of the Senate, which represents the States in their sovereign capacity, to resist all attempts to discriminate either in relation to person or property, so as, in the Territories—which are the common possession of the United States—to give advantages to the citizens of one State which are not equally secured to those of every other State.
Southern states sometimes argued against 'states rights'. For example, Texas challenged some northern states having the right to protect fugitive slaves. Economists such as Thomas DiLorenzo and Charles Adams argue that the Southern secession and the ensuing conflict was much more of a fiscal quarrel than a war over slavery. Northern-inspired tariffs benefited Northern interests but were detrimental to Southern interests and were destroying the economy in the South.
The historian James McPherson [15] noted that Southerners were inconsistent on the states' rights issue, and that Northern states tried to protect the rights of their states against the South during the Gag Rule and fugitive slave law controversies. The historian William H.
Freehling [16] noted that the South's argument for a state's right to secede was different from Thomas Jefferson's, in that Jefferson based such a right on the unalienable equal rights of man. The South's version of such a right was modified to be consistent with slavery, and with the South's blend of democracy and authoritarianism. Between the slave power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts.
The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of ; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico , declared by the mere announcement of President Polk ; the Fugitive Slave Law ; the Dred Scott decision —all triumphs of the slave power —did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy.
Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.
Sinha [18] and Richards [19] both argue that the south only used states' rights when they disagreed with a policy. Examples given are a states' right to engage in slavery or to suppress freedom of speech.
They argue that it was instead the result of the increasing cognitive dissonance in the minds of Northerners and some Southern non-slaveowners between the ideals that the United States was founded upon and identified itself as standing for, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, and the reality that the slave-power represented, as what they describe as an anti-democratic, counter-republican, oligarchic, despotic, authoritarian, if not totalitarian, movement for ownership of human beings as the personal chattels of the slaver.
As this cognitive dissonance increased, the people of the Northern states, and the Northern states themselves, became increasingly inclined to resist the encroachments of the slave power upon their states' rights and encroachments of the slave power by and upon the federal government of the United States. The slave power, having failed to maintain its dominance of the federal government through democratic means, sought other means of maintaining its dominance of the federal government, by means of military aggression, by right of force and coercion, and thus, the Civil War occurred. White , 74 U.
A series of Supreme Court decisions developed the state action constraint on the Equal Protection Clause. The state action theory weakened the effect of the Equal Protection Clause against state governments, in that the clause was held not to apply to unequal protection of the laws caused in part by complete lack of state action in specific cases, even if state actions in other instances form an overall pattern of segregation and other discrimination. The separate but equal theory further weakened the effect of the Equal Protection Clause against state governments.
With United States v. Cruikshank , a case which arose out of the Colfax Massacre of blacks contesting the results of a Reconstruction era election, the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to the First Amendment or Second Amendment to state governments in respect to their own citizens, only to acts of the federal government. City of Chicago , the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment right of an individual to "keep and bear arms" is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and therefore fully applicable to states and local governments.
Furthermore, United States v. Harris held that the Equal Protection Clause did not apply to an prison lynching on the basis that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to state acts, not to individual criminal actions. In the Civil Rights Cases , the Supreme Court allowed segregation by striking down the Civil Rights Act of , a statute that prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodation. It again held that the Equal Protection Clause applied only to acts done by states, not to those done by private individuals, and as the Civil Rights Act of applied to private establishments, the Court said, it exceeded congressional enforcement power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
By the beginning of the 20th century, greater cooperation began to develop between the state and federal governments and the federal government began to accumulate more power. Early in this period, a federal income tax was imposed, first during the Civil War as a war measure and then permanently with the Sixteenth Amendment in Before this, the states played a larger role in government.
States' rights were affected by the fundamental alteration of the federal government resulting from the Seventeenth Amendment , depriving state governments of an avenue of control over the federal government via the representation of each state's legislature in the U.
Navigation menu
This change has been described by legal critics as the loss of a check and balance on the federal government by the states. Following the Great Depression , the New Deal and then World War II saw further growth in the authority and responsibilities of the federal government. The case of Wickard v. Filburn allowed the federal government to enforce the Agricultural Adjustment Act , providing subsidies to farmers for limiting their crop yields, arguing agriculture affected interstate commerce and came under the jurisdiction of the Commerce Clause even when a farmer grew his crops not to be sold, but for his own private use.
The reaction was a split in the Democratic Party that led to the formation of the "States' Rights Democratic Party"—better known as the Dixiecrats —led by Strom Thurmond. Thurmond ran as the States' Rights candidate for President in the election , losing to Truman. During the s and s, the Civil Rights Movement was confronted by the proponents in the Southern states of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws who denounced federal interference in these state-level laws as an assault on states' rights.
Board of Education overruled the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were largely inactive in the South until the Civil Rights Act of 42 U. Several states passed Interposition Resolutions to declare that the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown usurped states' rights. There was also opposition by states' rights advocates to voting rights at Edmund Pettus Bridge , which was part of the Selma to Montgomery marches , that resulted in the Voting Rights Act of In , the issue of fair housing in California involved the boundary between state laws and federalism.
California Proposition 14 overturned the Rumsford Fair Housing Act in California and allowed discrimination in any type of housing sale or rental. Actor Ronald Reagan gained popularity by supporting Proposition 14, and was later elected governor of California. Supreme Court's Reitman v. Mulkey decision overturned Proposition 14 in in favor of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Conservative historians Thomas E.
Gutzman argue that when politicians come to power they exercise all the power they can get, in the process trampling states' rights. Another concern is the fact that on more than one occasion, the federal government has threatened to withhold highway funds from states which did not pass certain articles of legislation. Any state which lost highway funding for any extended period would face financial impoverishment, infrastructure collapse or both.
Although the first such action the enactment of a national speed limit was directly related to highways and done in the face of a fuel shortage, most subsequent actions have had little or nothing to do with highways and have not been done in the face of any compelling national crisis. An example of this would be the federally mandated drinking age of 21, upheld in South Dakota v. Critics of such actions feel that when the federal government does this they upset the traditional balance between the states and the federal government.
More recently, the issue of states' rights has come to a head when the Base Realignment and Closure Commission BRAC recommended that Congress and the Department of Defense implement sweeping changes to the National Guard by consolidating some Guard installations and closing others. These recommendations in drew strong criticism from many states, and several states sued the federal government on the basis that Congress and the Pentagon would be violating states' rights should they force the realignment and closure of Guard bases without the prior approval of the governors from the affected states.
After Pennsylvania won a federal lawsuit to block the deactivation of the th Fighter Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard , defense and Congressional leaders chose to try to settle the remaining BRAC lawsuits out of court, reaching compromises with the plaintiff states.