States' Rights and No Truer Warning

Federal Overreach was and now, more than ever, really is the problem. m/r

The Truth About States' Rights by Adam Freedman, City Journal Autumn 2014

It was federal power, championed by the South, that protected slavery.

Autumn 2014

  On March 24, 1859, a leading statesman who would soon find himself fighting in the Civil War gave a speech titled “State Rights.” In it, he warned of federal “usurpation” of state sovereignty on the issue of slavery, and he urged states to nullify national laws that threatened their autonomy. Urging his listeners to stand firm against an overbearing Washington, he declared: “Here is the battlefield, every man to his gun!”

The speaker was not Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, or some other Confederate statesman, but Carl Schurz, a leading abolitionist of the nineteenth century. Schurz would go on to serve as a Union officer during the Civil War, after which he enjoyed a distinguished career as a journalist, U.S. senator, and secretary of the interior. Manhattan’s Upper East Side is home to a park named after him.

The fact that Schurz was passionately devoted to both abolition and states’ rights flies in the face of most everything we’re taught about the causes of the Civil War. According to the standard version of history, states’ rights was a doctrine invented by Southern politicians to perpetuate slavery. One high school textbook, for example, describes the term “states’ rights” as an antebellum euphemism for “the right of the states to maintain slavery and the right of individuals to hold property in slaves.” In a 2011 interview on NPR, Adam Goodhart, author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening, asserted that “the only significant state right that people were arguing about in 1860 was the right to own what was known as slave property.” A 2013 New York Times op-ed declared that “since the nation’s founding, ‘states’ rights’ has been a rallying cry for those who wished to systematically disenfranchise and exploit large segments of their population.” A plaque at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery describes states’ rights as a doctrine that “protected the institution of slavery.”

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