In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, the author of the Declaration of Independence asserted: "Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact under the style and a title of a Constitution of the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party; that this government, created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress...."
Jefferson concluded with these thoughts: "Resolved, lastly ... that, therefore, this Commonwealth is determined, as it doubts not its co-States are, tamely to submit to undelegated and consequently unlimited powers in no man or body of men on earth .... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution ...."
James Madison, writing the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, asserted the same concept: "... in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the States, who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties, appertaining to them."
At a later date, John C. Calhoun explained the basic rationale behind the doctrine of interposition and nullification: "The utmost extent, then, of the power is, that a State acting in its sovereign capacity, as one of the parties to the constitutional compact, may compel the government, created by that compact, to submit a question touching its infraction to the parties who created it."
In other words, should the Federal Government assume undelegated power, a sovereign State may interpose its authority and nullify the unlawful act as it applies to itself. In such a case of contested power, the States -- not the Federal Government -- should be the final judge as to the extent of the general government's powers by deciding for themselves if an amendment should be incorporated into the Constitution to delegate the power in question. This is in complete accord with the proper concept of master and servant within our political system.
Repugnant Alternative
Eminent persons have disputed the constitutionality of interposition and nullification. Yet, even they have agreed that there must be a final judge somewhere to determine the limits of the Federal Government's powers. The alternative to State interposition and nullification, however, is quite repugnant and subversive of the entire master-servant relationship.
Professor C. Herman Pritchett, in his book, The American Constitutional System, has summarized the alternative to interposition and nullification very concisely: "The umpire for deciding conflicts between State and Nation over the constitutional division of functions is ... the Supreme Court." Thus, the alternative to State interposition and nullification is to allow the Federal Government itself to determine the limits of its powers!
Even Chief Justice John Marshall, who was no friend of States' Rights, acknowledged that "the Constitution had never been understood to confer on that department [the Supreme Court] any political power whatever," for the Supreme Court is under the Constitution, not over it. According to Marshall, "the judicial power cannot extend to political compacts."
If any further doubt could remain on this subject, the following observation should conclusively settle the matter. The States, acting in their sovereign capacities and through the amendment process, may lawfully abolish the U.S. Supreme Court. Can the Supreme Court lawfully abolish a State? Which of these two entities, then, is superior to the other and which one should be the final judge as to the limits of power to be exercised by the Federal Government?
Destruction of our Federal Republic began with the War Between the States, when the Federal Government -- asserting a bold, new, revolutionary theory of government -- waged war against State sovereignty and ultimately conquered those states that dared to act upon the principle that the people of the States, not their constitutionally created servant, are the master of our political system.
Although it is true that slavery as an issue had something to do with that great War, just as taxes as an issue had something to do with the American Revolution, it was not really the main issue. In fact, it served to cloud the key issue of who is master and who is servant within our political system.
In 1860, there were approximately three and a half million slaves in the Southern States, each being worth approximately $750. The total property value in the slaves was thus about $2 billion. Had the sole objective been merely to free the slaves, this could have been realized peacefully with that sum of money. The War Between the States, however, cost each side in the conflict more than that amount.
From 1861 to 1865, the Federal Government spent an average of $2 million a day to prosecute the war. By 1880, the Secretary of the Treasury reported that the war had cost the Northern States $6.19 billion. Pensions and other benefits for veterans continued to add to the cost, and by 1910 the total cost to the Northern States had climbed to $11.5 billion, or more than five times the value of all the slaves in 1860.
The financial burden of prosecuting the war for the Confederate States of America was approximately $4 billion, or twice the value of all the slaves. Such figures, of course, do not take into consideration the destruction of the South's economy, the hundreds of thousands of Americans who were killed, the countless soldiers who were maimed, the women who were left widows, or the children who were orphaned.
As a consequence of the War Between the States, our political system was transformed into one "of the people, by the people, for the people," in which the people were no longer regarded as synonymous with the States. In his message to Congress in special session on July 4, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln asserted an entirely new concept of American government, claiming that the Union created the States and that none of the States, except Texas, had ever been sovereign.
According to Lincoln, "no one of our States except Texas ever was a sovereignty," and the "Union is older than any of the States, and, in fact, it created them as States." To force this new theory of government on the States, the Federal Government waged war on the Southern Confederacy.
The Real Reason for Secession
In his speech before the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861, Jefferson Davis candidly summarized the real reason for Southern secession and the ensuing War Between the States: "By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National [sic] Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as majority to govern the minority. Without control, they learn to listen with impatience to the suggestion of any constitutional impediment to the exercise of their will, and so utterly have the principles of the Constitution been corrupted in the Northern mind that, in the inaugural address delivered by President Lincoln in March last, he asserts a maxim which he plainly deems to be undeniable, that the theory of the Constitution requires, in all cases, that the majority shall govern. And in another memorable instance the same Chief Magistrate did not hesitate to liken the relations between States and the United States to those which exist between the county and the State in which it is situated, and by which it was created."
"This is the lamentable and fundamental error in which rests the policy that has culminated in his declaration of war against these Confederate States."
In a vein similar to this, an editorial had appeared in the January 15, 1861 issue of The Daily Picayune that brilliantly revealed that a war to save the Federal Union could only serve to destroy it. This key segment of that editorial deserves careful attention: "The favorite form of expression in which these resolves are clothed is, that it is the first and highest duty 'to maintain the Union.' But a Union upheld by a war, which is made necessary by the revolting of many large and powerful States from an unfriendly and oppressive Government is condemned at once by the act. When armies and fleets are employed to keep a confederation of States together, it is a mockery to send them forth as messengers of union. It is for the subjugation of the minority section to the will of the majority, and every element which makes it a circle of consenting States in a harmonious Union disappears under the crushing process. To talk of war, therefore, as the means of perpetuating a Union is a mockery. It might perpetuate a Government, but that Government will cease to be a federative one, and will contain within itself essential traits of a military despotism -- the retention, by superior force, of an unwilling people in political bondage, to a Government which they had unanimously risen to throw off. The Government so established, if such a monstrous thing could ever be established, would have no principles remaining in common with those which make the true theory of the constitution of the present Government, a departure from which has brought on the present convulsion. A war to 'maintain the Union' is simply, therefore, a war to extinguish the Union, and to maintain a Government such as was never contemplated by any of the States which compose it, and which would not be tolerated by any State now, if there were a question of creating or restoring a Government."
The Consequences of Defeat
Following the Federal Government's victory in the War Between the States, the proponents of government supremacy asserted that the war conclusively demonstrated the superiority of their theory of government, basing such an assertion on the law of brute force that might is right. Jefferson Davis, who had served as the leading statesman of the Lost Cause, was arrested and charged with treason. But Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase warned the Radical Republicans who were so eager to hang Davis: "If Jefferson Davis is ever brought to trial it will convict the North and exonerate the South." Consequently, the trial never occurred, although the accused constantly demanded one for the remaining 24 years of his life.
Denied his right to trial, the leader of the Lost Cause took his case before the bar of public opinion in a brilliantly written masterpiece published in 1881 under the title of The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. That book, like the one written earlier by Alexander H. Stephens, entitled A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, has never been answered. Since their sound constitutional principles cannot be answered, they have both been ignored.
In his book, Jefferson Davis summarized the consequences of the Federal Government's victory in the War Between the States as follows: "It has been shown in previous pages that the State governments were instituted to be the special guardians of these inalienable rights of man; but henceforth they must be the sworn defenders of the Government of the United States, not of the Constitution and laws enacted in pursuance thereof, but of such interpolations and perversions of them as, in cases of necessity, that Government should find it convenient to make. Whenever it pleases, it can set them aside; and, whenever it wills, it can destroy them. Unalienable rights are unknown in this war-begotten theory of the Constitution. The day has come in which mankind beholds this Government founding its highest claims to greatness and glory upon deeds done in utter violation of those rights which belonged to its own citizens in every State, North and South. The palladium of the freeman, the Bill of Rights, the limitations of power, the written Constitutions, have all lost their sacred authority, and not a man or a State dare, single-handed, gainsay the will of the agency which, feeling power, has forgotten right. It has put its hand on the ballot box, and the declaration is made that it is not safe to trust the people to vote, except under the inspection of its authority, after the example set by the Roman emperors. When the cause was lost, what cause was it? Not that of the South only, but the cause of constitutional government, of the supremacy of law, of the natural rights of man."
During the War Between the States, a nearly fatal blow was struck against our Federal Republic. States' Rights, State sovereignty, and strictly limited government were crushed beneath the feet of centralized power. It was boldly proclaimed that the United States had become a national Democracy. These developments paved the way for the nightmare we know today as Big Government, with its corresponding Welfare State, enormous public debt, and massive controls and regulations over the lives of the American people.
The damage, however, is not irremediable. Constitutionally speaking, we still are a Federal Republic, and the supreme law of the land still rests upon the foundation of State sovereignty. The contest to decide who is master and who is servant, therefore, continues unabated. As Jefferson Davis prophesied in 1865, shortly before his capture and imprisonment: "The principle for which we contended is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form." Years later he reiterated this assertion: "The contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered on a new and enlarged arena. The champions of constitutional liberty must spring to the struggle, like the armed men from the seminated dragon's teeth, until the Government of the United States is brought back to its constitutional limits ...."
The key to restoring constitutionally limited government is contained in that time honored phrase: "States' Rights. From every quarter of the Union -- North, South, East, and West -- the people of every State should demand that the Federal Government surrender "national" sovereignty as our internationalists insist -- but not to a World Government. Such sovereignty must be surrendered to the people of the States, who are rightfully and constitutionally entitled to possess it."
Should the American people fail in this great contest, they are destined to live a life of servitude and to call their government by this name:
