The Confederate dead died for states rights guaranteed under the Constitution

The Confederate dead died for states rights guaranteed under the Constitution

Michael T. Griffith

2006

@All Rights Reserved

Fourth Edition 

States rights are in fact guaranteed under the Constitution. They are expressly guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

The whole purpose of this amendment was to prevent the federal government from usurping powers that were not assigned to it, including powers that were reserved for the states. Constitutional scholar Bruce Findlay said the following:

Because of widespread fear that the new government might try to employ powers that were not granted, this amendment was added. It makes clear that the federal government was to have only those powers assigned to it, and no more. Some other powers were left to the states. (Your Rugged Constitution, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1950, pp. 216-217)

The main reason for opposition to the ratification of the Constitution was the fear that the federal government would eventually grow so large that it would destroy the states. Historians John Garraty and Robert McCaughey point out that most of the opposition to ratification only subsided after backers of the Constitution agreed to add amendments that would prevent the federal government from usurping civil liberties and states rights:

Aside from a few doctrinaires, most were ready to give the new government a chance if they could be convinced that it would not destroy the states. When backers agreed to add amendments guaranteeing the civil liberties of the people against challenge by the national government and reserving all unmentioned power to the states, much of the opposition disappeared. (Garraty and McCaughey, The American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1987, p. 159)

Even Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, a notorious "South-hater," said in 1855 that if the states were not the ones who could ultimately decide if a law violated the Constitution, then the states would be deprived of their right to defend their citizens and the general government would become a "miserable despotism":

Who is the judge in the last resort of the violation of the Constitution of the United States by the enactment of a law? Who is the final arbiter, the General Government or the States in their sovereignty? Why, sir, to yield that point is to yield up all the rights of the States to protect their own citizens, and to consolidate this government into a miserable despotism. (As quoted in Mildred Rutherford, Truths of History, Dahlonega, Georgia: Crown Rights Book Company, reprint of original 1920 edition, p. 4)

James Madison, one of our founding fathers, an author of the Federalist Papers, and our fourth president, said the federal government's powers were delegated, defined, and few in number, and that the powers that were to remain with the states were "numerous and indefinite":

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. (Federalist Paper Number 45)

Of course, one of the states rights for which the South fought was the right of a state or a group of states to voluntarily and peacefully leave the Union. Thomas Jefferson tacitly recognized this right in his first inaugural address in 1801:

If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

In 1816 Jefferson gave a stronger endorsement of the principle that a state should be able to peacefully leave the Union:

If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation . . . to a continuance in the union. . . . I have no hesitation in saying, "Let us separate." (Letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Crawford, June 20, 1816)

In 1839 President John Quincy Adams said that if sectional differences between the states became too severe it would be better for the states to go their own way in peace than to be constrained to remain together:

The indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right, but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, the bonds of political association will not long hold together parties no longer attached by the magnetism of consolidated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint. (Speech given at a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington, April 30, 1839, as quoted in the Hon. Joseph Wheeler, "Slavery and States Rights," reprinted in Richmond Dispatch, July 31, 1894, emphasis added)

None other than Horace Greeley, a leading Republican and abolitionist and the owner of the then-influential New York Tribune, said the South had the right to leave the Union in peace:

We hold, with Jefferson, to the inalienable right of communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or injurious; and, if the Cotton States [the Deep South states] shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. . . .  And, whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep her in.  We hope never to live in a republic where one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets. (New York Tribune, November 9, 1860)

Numerous other Northern newspapers voiced the view that the Southern states had the right to secede and that it would be wrong to use force against them to compel them to return. The Detroit Free Press editorialized as follows:

An attempt to subjugate the seceded States, even if successful could produce nothing but evil -- evil unmitigated in character and appalling in content. (Detroit Free Press, February 19, 1861)

Congressman Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland echoed this view shortly before the war broke out:

Any attempt to preserve the Union between the States of this Confederacy by force would be impractical, and destructive of republican liberty. (As quoted in Walter Williams, "Do States Have A Right of Secession?", Capitalism Magazine, April 19, 2002; NOTE: Prior to the Civil War, many leaders and writers occasionally referred to the U.S. as a "confederacy.")

In his final regular message to Congress, given a few months before Lincoln was inaugurated, President James Buchanan said the government had no right to use force against a state that had seceded, and he cited founding father James Madison in support of his point:

The question fairly stated is: Has the Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from the confederacy? If answered in the affirmative, it must be on the principle that the power has been conferred upon Congress to declare and to make war against a State. After much serious reflection, I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the federal government. It is manifest, upon an inspection of the Constitution, that this is not among the specific and enumerated powers granted to Congress; and it is equally apparent that its exercise is not "necessary and proper for carrying into execution" any one of these powers. So far from this power having been delegated to Congress, it was expressly refused by the convention which framed the Constitution.

It appears from the proceedings of that body that on the 31st May, 1787, the clause "authorizing an exertion of the force of the whole against a delinquent State" came up for consideration. Mr. [James] Madison opposed it in a brief but powerful speech, from which I shall extract but a single sentence. He observed: "The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound." Upon his motion the clause was unanimously postponed, and was never, I believe, again presented. Soon afterwards, on the 8th June, 1787, when incidentally adverting to the subject, he said: "Any government for the United States, formed on the supposed practicability of using force against the unconstitutional proceedings of the States, would prove as visionary and fallacious as the government of Congress," evidently meaning the then existing Congress of the old confederation.

Without descending to particulars, it may be safely asserted that the power to make war against a State is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution. . . .

The fact is, that our union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish. Congress may possess many means of preserving it by conciliation, but the sword was not placed in their hand to preserve it by force. (President James Buchanan, Presidential Message, read in the U.S. House of Representatives, December 4, 1860, Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 1860-1861, pp. 19-20)

Conservative scholar Joseph Sobran observes that the right of secession is implied in the Tenth Amendment:

The Tenth Amendment implies the right of secession, since it reserves to the states and the people "the powers not delegated to the United States [i.e., the federal government] by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states." The Constitution doesn’t prohibit the states from seceding, so that power remains with them. . . .

During the debate over ratification of the Constitution, opponents of ratification made many dark predictions: the Constitution would enable the federal government to impose tyranny, it would lead to "consolidated" – centralized and monolithic – government, and so forth. But nobody complained that the Constitution would prevent the states from reclaiming their independence, as they certainly would have done if the Constitution had been understood to rule out secession. (Sobran, "Slavery, No; Secession, Yes," Sobran's, January 16, 2001, p. 1)