Interposition

Interposition implied that the states have a right to interpose their authority to protect their citizens from the unconstitutional measures of the federal government. In 1798 Virginia proposed interposition to resist the Sedition Act. In the 1830s South Carolina asserted its rights to nullify a federal tariff but backed down when threatened with military force by President Andrew Jackson. Later Senator John C. Calhoun argued for interposition to prevent the delivery of mail in the South containing abolitionist propaganda.

In the 1850s many Northerners urged interposition, in the form of personal liberty laws and court actions, to prevent enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (see Fugitive Slaves). In 1854 the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the 1850 law unconstitutional and released the abolitionist Sherman Booth from federal custody. In overturning this decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared, in *Ableman v. Booth (1859), that such “propositions are new in the jurisprudence of the United States” and that the Supreme Court had the final authority to interpret the meaning of the Constitution (p. 514). Secession was the most dramatic form of interposition, and it was met with an equally dramatic and forceful response by President Abraham Lincoln.

After Brown v. Board of Education (1954), some southern states fought school desegregation with “massive resistance,” a form of interposition. In Cooper v. Aaron (1958), which involved the integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, the federal courts cited Ableman v. Booth to reaffirm the principle that the Supreme Court had final authority to interpret the meaning of the Constitution. Interposition is now a relic of constitutional theory that died in the Civil War but was briefly and futilely resurrected in the 1950s and 1960s by diehard segregationists.

See also Nullification; State Sovereignty and States' Rights.

Paul Finkelman