Southern Rights Movement

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SOUTHERN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

SOUTHERN RIGHTS MOVEMENT. For the greater part of American history, a disposition to resist federal authority has flourished in the South. Regional leaders have frequently expressed concern that national majorities would overwhelm southern institutions through control of the federal government. Consequently, southern politicians and intellectuals developed theories designed to prevent such interference. Frequently linked to the defense of slavery, these notions evolved over the first half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the secession of eleven southern states in 1860 and 1861. Yet defense of southern rights continued well into the twentieth century, often aiding white political supremacy and the Jim Crow system of state-mandated racial segregation.

The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 were foundational to the southern rights movement. Written respectively by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, they argued that the federal government must not trample on powers reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment, that states could judge the constitutionality of federal laws, and that states should interpose their authority to abrogate unconstitutional federal action. For some two centuries, though often refined and reworked, these ideas provided the core southern case in contesting broad federal authority.

In antebellum days John C. Calhoun built upon the terminology of the resolutions to produce sophisticated defenses of southern rights. In his "Disquisition on Government," published posthumously in 1851, Calhoun maintained that a numerical majority, controlling the levers of government, would inevitably promote its own interests and oppress those of the minority. To prevent this result, he argued that key interest groups must themselves be able to block measures detrimental to their welfare. For true legitimacy, Calhoun argued that government must obtain approval from major interest groups. This step would secure what he called the concurrent majority, thereby minimizing civil discord and violence.

By seceding, southern states endorsed a more drastic means to protect themselves from majority rule. This effort met bloody collapse, but the southern struggle to limit federal authority continued. During Reconstruction, even as the Constitution was amended to provide federal protection of African American rights, southern resistance grew, eventually causing a retreat from federal intervention in the southern states. Decades later, when a reenergized civil rights movement appeared, southern politicians again vigorously opposed extension of federal authority. Echoes of Jefferson and Calhoun appeared in the 1948 platform of the States' Rights Party. The Southern Manifesto of 1956, signed by one hundred southern members of Congress, used similar rhetoric to denounce federally mandated school desegregation.

Defeated in efforts to maintain Jim Crow, many white southerners abandoned their historic ties to the Democratic Party. As Republicans, their criticism of federal authority, expressed in subtler, less racial terms, entered the political mainstream during the 1980s. Within the region only small pockets of support remained for stronger assertions of southern rights. Southern rights arguments were grounded in the region's particular historical circumstances but also involved political and philosophical insights that were more generally applicable. Though presently dormant in its region of origin, the movement had produced a powerful literary legacy. At other times and in other places, forces suspicious of central authority may well draw upon its ideas.