States' Rights

I

Introduction

States' Rights, in United States history, political doctrine advocating the strict limitation of the prerogatives of the federal government to those powers explicitly assigned to it in the Constitution of the United States, and reserving to the several states all other powers not explicitly forbidden them. The doctrine of states' rights has been the cause of bitter controversy at several periods in US history. Before the American Civil War, supporters of the doctrine generally held that the federal government was only a voluntary compact of the states, and that the latter could legally refuse to carry out federal enactments that they regarded as unconstitutional encroachments on their sovereignty. Since 1865, states'-rights advocates have generally limited themselves to an insistence on a “strict construction” of the terms of the Constitution, whereby the federal government would be kept from such encroachment. Opponents of states' rights have supported a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, asserting that the federal government may legally exercise “implied” powers that, while not explicitly stated, are in accord with the general powers that are enunciated in the Constitution.

II

Kentucky Resolutions

The doctrine of states' rights, discussed at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, was advanced in 1798 by Thomas Jefferson, later the third president of the United States, against the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts by the federal government. Holding these enactments to be unconstitutional infringements of the rights of free speech and press, Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions and secured their passage by the Kentucky legislature. The resolutions advanced the thesis that the states had the power to determine the constitutionality of a federal law, and to declare null and void a law that they regarded as unconstitutional. This controversy was resolved, after the inauguration of Jefferson as president in 1801, by the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Several actions subsequently carried out by Jefferson and by his successor, James Madison, aroused the active opposition of the New England states. Notable among these actions were the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, the passage of the Embargo Act of 1807, and the declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812. The resulting hostility of the New England states found its expression in 1814 in the convocation of the abortive Hartford Convention, at which the leaders of these states drew up a series of resolutions embodying states'-rights doctrines.

III

Regional Conflict

One of the numerous controversies centring around the states'-rights issue was caused by the enactment of the federal tariff laws of 1828 and 1832. Several southern states, led by South Carolina and its eloquent spokesman John Calhoun, regarded these acts as inimical to their interests, and in 1832 South Carolina passed an ordinance nullifying the tariff acts. The threat to the unity of the nation posed by this action was allayed shortly thereafter when Congress enacted a compromise tariff law, and the nullification ordinance was then repealed by the South Carolina legislature. During the two decades following the nullification controversy, the question of states' rights became a paramount issue, inextricably interwoven with the conflict over the issue of slavery. The election to the presidency in 1860 of Abraham Lincoln, an avowed opponent of the extension of slavery, was viewed by the southern slaveholders as a direct threat to their constitutional rights, and in the following year they carried the states'-rights doctrine to the extreme of secession. The defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War marked the final collapse of attempts to arrogate to the states the power to veto or otherwise contravene enactments and policies of the federal government.

The latter half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century were marked by an almost continuous struggle between the Republican and Democratic parties. The Republican party was in power in the federal government during most of this period and therefore favoured a strong central government. The Democratic party, on the other hand, supported states' rights both as a means of curbing the power of the Republicans and as a way of safeguarding the traditional Democratic control over the southern states. This situation was reversed, however, after the election to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, in 1932. In attempting to deal with the prevailing economic depression, Roosevelt extended federal powers far beyond those explicitly granted the federal government under the Constitution. Many of the policies carried out by the federal government under his sponsorship were denounced by conservative opponents of social legislation, including Republicans and southern Democrats, as abridgements of states' rights.

IV

Political Influence

Conflict in the Democratic party developed into a full-fledged schism in the years following World War II, when Roosevelt's Democratic successor, Harry S. Truman, continued the policy of expanding the prerogatives of the central government. The actual schism occurred at the Democratic party convention of 1948, when the northern majority got an extensive programme of civil rights incorporated into the election platform. Opponents of these measures, chiefly political leaders of the southern states, declared the programme an outright abrogation of states' rights and withdrew from the Democratic party to form a new political party known as the “States' Rights Democrats”, often referred to as the “Dixiecrats”. The new party nominated the governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond for the presidency; in the 1948 election he received slightly more than 1 million popular and 38 electoral votes.

The southern states'-rights movement gained new momentum in 1954 after the US Supreme Court ordered the states to end racial segregation in public schools. Although most states'-rights leaders remained within the Democratic party, some, including Thurmond (who became a US senator in 1955), joined the Republican party immediately before the 1964 presidential election. In the election of 1964 five states'-rights strongholds in the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) gave their electoral votes to the conservative Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, who expressed strong support for a strict interpretation of those rights.

In 1968, dissatisfied with the civil rights platform of the Republican party, many states'-rights advocates supported the former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who won the electoral votes of five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi), as the candidate of the American Independent party. The successful Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, employed a “southern strategy”, pledging support for an increased role for state governments and the appointment of conservative judges. He secured approval of a programme that returned a portion of federal taxes to the states. In the late 1970s, the states'-rights issue shifted to the West, where a “sagebrush rebellion” against federal land and resource policies by development-minded business executives and politicians paved the way for the 1980 election of the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, to the presidency. In general, the Reagan administration remained a strong advocate of states' rights.