State Rights was About Federalism, not Slavery

I just finished reading From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters by James Rutledge Roesch. It’s a new book (2018) on an old subject, but it’s an excellent, entertaining, and both an enjoyable and easy read considering the complexity of the subject and the brilliant minds of the Southern political theorists whose works Mr. Roesch has compiled and edited into a succinct outline of the state rights doctrine of the Old South. [Take that in conjunction with Alcorn’s comment in his 1870 inaugural speech about how Southerners should quit political theorizing and jump in and wallow in the trough with the Yankees.]

The doctrine did not begin with the abolitionists or the Missouri Compromise or even the Constitutional Convention, and it was never about slavery. As Mr. Roesch shows to any reasonably intelligent person with only a modicum of knowledge regarding this nation’s history, the doctrine was there at the beginning, inherent in the colonial charters, the oldest of which was Virginia’s. I highly recommend anyone interested in truth regarding the state rights doctrine vis-a-vis the post-republic egalitarian/centralization doctrine get the book, devour it, and share it.

The nationalists (centralizers) have been part of our government from the start, much like the serpent was integral to the Garden of Eden. They were the Tories who reluctantly joined the Patriot cause after the short-sighted British Parliament refused to stop interfering with home rule, undermining their influence at home. [This is me talking here. Mr. Roesch is kinder to all the founders.] Embracing the cause of independence, these self-aggrandizers embarked on the quest to build a new economic empire. To realize their goal, they needed a supreme, centralized government and a national “democracy,” served by said government.

Patriots to the republic managed to forestall them for the bulk of the next century, first with the Articles of Confederation, then with federalism, hallmarked by the state rights doctrine woven into the Constitution. Nevertheless, with the ratification of said Constitution, the states had sown the seeds of their demise. The destruction of the Southern Confederacy ended the federal republic and gave the ghosts of those old Tories their long-coveted crown. Hopefully they celebrated their victory in…, well, never mind where.

Today, some neo-cons still give lip service to the republic, or the Lincolnites’ perverse take on it, but with the Left picking up their banner of egalitarianism/pure democracy and exploding it, the neo-cons should be rethinking their position [Lincoln’s on the chopping block, too, and it’s not us Southerners putting him there]. Instead, they appease. Truth is the nationalists and the Left are both statists. Both need all references to state rights (true federalism) gone.

The nationalists have hidden behind the holy crusade to end slavery to justify their egregious violations of the Constitution since halfway through the “Civil War.” [They had other unifying causes before the abolitionists gave them slavery]. The farther time moves from those long-ago events, the more clouded the historical memory of everyday folk, and lack of education on the subject of both that War and the founding of the republic hastens the encroaching shadows. That is by design. There is no difference in the goal of modern Democrats and Republicans in regards to the republic.

Today’s attacks on the South not only go unchallenged by “so-called” conservatives, who by default the South supports, but are actually echoed by these same people, who mollify their treachery by stating something to the effect that we need to keep the history, but annotate it to remember our mistakes (sins). Pittance, I guess, is what these curs are trying to foster. Problem is slavery isn’t the operative mistake here, and what really needs to be remembered is being buried deeper and deeper beneath their obfuscation. The gutless wonders fear the PC crowd and believe they are protecting themselves from the Left’s onslaught by tossing such bones. Believers in the republic, or perhaps those who simply respect its memory, whether Southern or not, have no champion. Granted the republic is dead. The majority of Americans rejected it long ago. Today most don’t even know what it was, its having been perverted by self-aggrandizing politicians into something it wasn’t. But we Southerners being told to piss on our ancestors’ graves, all too often now by other Southerners, in order to further the ambitions of one statist group over those of another, is going too far.

One can pinpoint a number of places in our antebellum history highlighting the states’ and the peoples’ rejection of our federal republic. The states’ failure to support Kentucky's and Virginia's resolutions against Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts and later South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis; the application of the Constitution to the states by the Supreme court under Marshall; and the Northern states’ answering Lincoln’s call for troops to invade the South. The Missouri Crisis was a biggie. That’s when the South should have left the Union. It was clear then that sectional interests were simply too conflicting.

Reconstruction itself abounds with violations, but those violations may not have been so pervasive had the Northern populace not given Congress to the Radicals in the fall of 1866. But what did it matter at that point? The South was in shambles, and Northerners as a block had already shown how little they cared about our founders’ republic. They had, in fact, rejected it. They wanted a centralized Union, and they created one by force of arms. Today the old republic is only a memory being twisted into something evil, the final step before the statists feel comfortable in eradicating it altogether.

We need to keep that history untarnished, y’all. It’s what our Confederate ancestors fought for. In another time and another place, Patriots will need a foundation on which to build again. 

Thanks for reading,

Charlsie

The Nullification Crisis: Sowing the Soil That Produced the Whig Party

This is post number four related to Southern Whiggery and constitutes an overview of the Nullification Crisis, an unexpected distraction (contradictory in substance) intricately woven into Jackson’s war on the American System. The Nullification Crisis was intimately related to the ongoing battle between the principles of strict construction and nationalism. See the sidebar for earlier posts.

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What discontent Jackson engendered among adherents to the American System when he vetoed re-charter of the Second National Bank, he soothed by tacitly supporting the protective Tariff of 1832, a modification of the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. The National Bank had friends among Southern planters, too, but the tariff had far fewer. Jackson’s acceptance of a “protective” tariff frustrated predominately strict-constructionist/state rights Southrons weary of carrying the load for what they considered an unconstitutional measure. These had hoped by electing the nominally state-rights Jackson to the presidency that he would do something about the tariff—beyond mere modification of a monstrosity they’d dubbed abominable. Jackson, however, did support a protective tariff to protect “American labor,” and he was actually a Southern nationalist for whom the “Union,” not federalism, was sacrosanct. Such creatures did exist, I guess. His adherence to the state-rights doctrine was “qualified” by (this is me talking) how important the issue was to the Federal government, or in his case, the man leading it. With such a leader, state rights becomes arbitrary—sorta like directing who of what sex can use the other gender’s restrooms and school showers. See the problem?

[Granted, contemporary abuse has become ridiculous, but the point is, and as our current situation proves, one cannot “qualify” such a doctrine, which is why strict constructionists are...well, “strict constructionists” to prevent such foolishness.]

As far as South Carolina was concerned, the protective tariff was unconstitutional, and in November of that year, she challenged the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 by passing an Ordinance of Nullification—the same tactic Virginia and Kentucky had used in response to President John Adams’ unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts back in 1798. South Carolina had put the Federal government (as well as the rest of the nation) on notice that she would not allow collection of the Federal tariff within her boundaries after 1 February 1833. The state’s intermediary with the Jackson Administration was her senator, John C. Calhoun. Man and state were challenging what in less than fifty years into the new Republic had become standard procedure: sovereign states subverting themselves to an overreaching Federal government in support of “private interests.” Jackson considered nullification tantamount to treason against the “Union.” 

Outside the Federal government, the primary benefactors of the protective tariff were the Northeast and its spawn in the Midwest where the measure guarded America’s fledging industries. Well, they had been “fledging” twenty years earlier, but were holding their own by 1832, and the self-serving “protection of American labor” had displaced the euphemistic “protection of fledgling industries.” 

Except for some pockets of protection, a good example being Louisiana’s sugar industry, the protective tariff was unpopular across the South, but not enough so to outweigh Jackson’s popularity. Though lip service was given in support of Calhoun, the South outside of South Carolina wished he’d stand down. He didn’t. Neither did Jackson, and on this matter, Jackson had plenty of support in the Northeast. In December, Jackson issued his Proclamation to the people of South Carolina, menacing in tone and condescending in manner. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, whose interests were centered in the protectionist stronghold of New England, applauded the proclamation. His praise did not go unnoticed by the White House. One month later in January 1833, when it became apparent Jackson might require additional powers to subdue the recalcitrant Carolinians and collect his revenues, the president requested Webster’s support in framing the Force Bill which authorized the use of military force against South Carolina.  

The Nullification Crisis was the iconic event that ultimately gave birth to the Whig Party. South Carolina responded to Jackson’s threat of force by denouncing Jackson as King Andrew, and it was the nullifiers and state righters of South Carolina who revived the term Whig, not in reference to the English opposition party, but rather to the Southern Patriots who had assumed the name during the American Revolution, highlighting their opposition to King George and distinguishing themselves from their Tory/Loyalist neighbors. Laying out the crisis’ play-by-play in tandem with the values and principles that drove the state righters from the Jackson camp, one ascertains that the basic principles of the Southern Whig did not falter throughout the remainder of the Party’s twenty-some-odd-years existence as a national entity. That is why during Reconstruction one reads statements by old-line Southern Whigs (by then identified as independents, born-again Democrats, and even treacherous Scalawags) referring to state rights and “constitutionality” when denouncing the tyranny exercised by the Radical Republicans in the North. Such comments, which keep popping up in my research on Reconstruction, are what set me on this Whig junket. To a Southern Whig, state rights and strict construction were the principles that gave birth to the Party. Not so for their Northern counterparts where the future “Whig-Party principles” would focus on the protective tariff, the Bank, protection, and the allocation of the resulting Federal largesse for internal improvements. Those people’s  platform represented nothing more than the original National Republican agenda warmed over. It was Clay, in sore need of Southern support given his disastrous showing in the election of 1832, who (metaphorically speaking) rode in on his white charger and saved the Republic from civil war. But the South had more than electoral support to offer Henry Clay, something he desperately needed: the core of a new party with Southern support already built in.  

Next time I will hit the highpoints driving the compromise that ended the Nullification Crisis.

Thanks for reading,

Charlsie