[RWWATCH] Myth: Civil War Fought to Preserve States Rights

Mon, 15 Jan 2001 06:03:11 -0800

RWWATCH -- 1/15/00

[A very interesting angle from Nathan, showing the hypocrisy
of the "states rights" movement!  So all these southern heritage
groups that Ashcroft, Norton are connected to are using a form of
populism that is based on false history.  Very useful for a
future "13 myths about southern heritage" piece!
-rich]

January 12, 2001

How Southern Violations of States Rights Caused the Civil War

By Nathan Newman <nathan@newman.org>

The comments of Interior Secretary nominee Gale Norton
talking about the "loss" of states rights due to the Civil
War just once more highlights the lie that the Civil War was
fought over states rights, rather than fought to preserve
slavery.

In fact, if anything, the Civil War was caused by Southern
States using their control of the Congress and the Supreme
Court to use federal law against Northern states which
resisted slavery within their own territory.

The primary example of this was the Fugitive Slave Law used
by the federal government to force free states to return
runaway slaves to their masters in the South.

In fact, Southerners took this law and assumed the right not
only to go to court to force the return of slaves but would
go into Northern states and kidnap blacks, often not even
slaves, while claiming that they had the right of "self-help"
in recovering their "property."

In 1842, the US Supreme Court in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41
U.S. 536, made this right of southerners to defy Northern
laws against self-help kidnappings IN NORTHERN STATES a
constitutional right. The decision explicitly repudiated
Northern states' rights to regulate their own affairs in
regard to kidnapping in their own borders. This repudiation
of states rights is clear, as Justice Story wrote: "It is
scarely conceivable, that the slave-holding states would
have been satisfied with leaving to the legislation of the
non-slave holding states, a power of regulation, in the
abscense of that of Congress." Where Southern interests in
slavery mattered, they were all for extinguishing local
state power in favor of that of the federal government.

The next blow to Northern states rights was of course the
much more famous 1857 Dred Scott decision which declared
that Southerns were free to bring slaves to free states,
and yet keep those slaves as slaves in defiance of Northern
anti-slavery laws. The Court declared that no state had the
right to grant freedom and citizenship to such slaves or
prevent them from being brought in to their states. The
case makes a big deal how such control is vested solely
in the federal government.

It was the South that declared war on states rights in the
North, using the Congress and the US Supreme Court to de
facto extend slavery into Northern states. It was the
reaction in the North that three years after Dred Scott
elected Abraham Lincoln into office, not on a platform of
abolishing slavery in the South, but of refusing to allow
the South to extend it anymore to the North.

And the South reacted to this threat to slavery, NOT TO ANY
THREAT TO STATES RIGHTS, by seceding. It was the South that
had abused states rights to support slavery and when it
looked like they could no longer do so, they protected
slavery by seceding.

It was all about slavery and racism. Nothing more, except
possibly the North being the ones asserting their states
rights against the abusive power of the federal government
that had been controlled by the slave states.

In a similar manner, those who talk about "states rights"
are the ones who are the first to support a rightwing US
Supreme court intervening in the Florida election, the first
to support federal government in interfering in state tort
claims, the first to support the federal government in
overturning laws like the Massachusetts Burma law to
resist buying goods from that country.

Conservatives talk about states rights, but when local
governments do anything they don't like, they are the first
to invoke federal power to overturn those state laws. This
is usually done for the sake of property rights, and that
is the real tradition of the Confederacy - the supremacy
of property rights over human rights.

Organizers' Collaborative      PO Box 400897, Cambridge MA  02140
org-c at organizenow.net                        www.organizenow.net

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