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States' Rights

The Oxford Companion to United States History

States' Rights. Rooted in the classical republican view that freedom and virtue are incompatible with empire and in antifederalist fears of centralized power, the doctrine of states' rights is enshrined in several parts of the Constitution, including the guarantee of each state's equal standing in the Senate (the only provision permanently unchangeable by amendment). The most often cited guarantee of states' rights is the Tenth Amendment. To states'‐rights supporters, the amendment limits the federal government's powers to those specifically enumerated in the Constitution, and reserves all other powers of government (such as the power to create and tax corporations) to the states.

The first major confrontation between defenders of states' rights and the proponents of centralized power came in response to the Federalist party's Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, declared the acts unconstitutional and asserted that states, as parties to the constitutional “compact,” had the power to protect the liberties of their citizens and “alien friends” from federal acts that violated the compact. Nationalists on the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall restricted states' rights (and protected corporations) in such decisions as Fletcher v. Peck and McCulloch v. Maryland, but the issue remained unsettled.

In the second major confrontation, during the War of 1812, commercially minded New England Federalists convened the 1814 Hartford Convention, which denounced what they considered the dangerous imperialism of the Republicans in Washington and asserted the rights of states to refuse to authorize the conscription and taxation needed to support “Mr. Madison's War.”

In the third major confrontation, the nullification crisis of 1828–1832, involving the federal tariff, the doctrine became associated with John C. Calhoun, who had earlier opposed states' rights. Calhoun's major opponent on nullification, President Andrew Jackson, was also inconsistent: Like many Democratic party leaders, Jackson supported states' rights on most matters. Although states' rights doctrine was increasingly tied to the defense of slavery, some abolitionists invoked it in their efforts to thwart the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (e.g., in Ableman v. Booth, 1859).

While South Carolina had stood alone on nullification, proslavery politicians espoused other versions of states' rights doctrine, eventually taking the ultimate step of secession. Their advocacy of the doctrine returned to haunt them as the Confederate States of America struggled for wartime unity and discipline in the fourth major confrontation, the Civil War. In State Rights in the Confederacy (1925), Frank Lawrence Owsley noted the central irony that in order to defend states' rights effectively, the Confederacy's leaders would have had to crush them.

After the Civil War, opponents of African‐American rights embraced states' rights. Although the Supreme Court again restricted state power to regulate corporations in the 1880s and 1890s, it supported broad state power to enforce racial segregation. The principal twentieth‐century uses of the doctrine were to ward off federal anti‐lynching laws and to defend racial segregation. Opponents of federal economic regulation sometimes invoked the doctrine as well.

After World War II, liberals generally condemned states' rights through a kind of guilt‐by‐association with slavery and segregation. With Brown v. Board of Education and related decisions, the Supreme Court under Earl Warren brought civil rights law into line with broader nationalistic trends. After the 1960s, the doctrine moved to the margins of American political culture, although conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, invoked it occasionally in rhetorical thrusts at “big government” and the massive federal budget. Subsequently, under William Rehnquist's chief justiceship (1986– ) a narrow majority on the Court resuscitated states' rights for some purposes, but it was not clear how durable these decisions would be. Curiously, despite its historical roots in the defense of civil liberties, immigrant rights, and anti‐imperialism, late twentieth century nonconservative opponents of centralized power (governmental and corporate) found little merit in the doctrine.
See also Bill of Rights; Conservatism; Early Republic, Era of the; Federalism; Liberalism; Federalism; Republicanism; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; States' Rights Party.

Bibliography

Alpheus Thomas Mason , The States' Rights Debate: Antifederalism and the Constitution, 1964.
Chester James Antineau , States' Rights under Federal Constitutions, 1984.

David L. Chappell

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© The Oxford Companion to United States History 2001, originally published by Oxford University Press 2001.