Organized Crime

Americans—and much of the rest of the world—have been deprived of one of the most important means of establishing and maintaining a free society, namely, federalism or states’ rights. It is not just an accident that states’ rights have either been relegated to the memory hole or denigrated as a tool of racists. The Jeffersonian states’-rights tradition was (and is) the key to understanding why Thomas Jefferson believed that the best government is that which governs least, and that a limited constitutional government was indeed possible. The enemies of freedom have always and everywhere been opposed to political decentralization and in favor of political monopoly.

What Are States’ Rights?

The idea of states’ rights is most closely associated with the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and his political heirs. Jefferson himself never entertained the idea that “states have rights,” which has always been a straw-man argument. Of course “states” don’t have rights; only individuals do. The essence of Jefferson’s idea is that if the people are to be the masters rather than the servants of their own government, then they must have some vehicle with which to control the government. That vehicle, in the Jeffersonian tradition, is political communities organized at the state and local levels. That is how the people were to monitor, control, discipline, and even abolish, if need be, their own government.

It was Jefferson, after all, who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that government’s just powers arise only from the consent of the people, and that whenever the government becomes abusive of the peoples’ rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the peoples’ duty to abolish that government and replace it with another one. The people would achieve this just as they did when they adopted the Constitution, through political conventions organized by the states. The states, after all, were considered by the founding generation to be independent nations in the same sense that Great Britain and France were independent nations. The Declaration of Independence referred to them specifically as “free and independent,” independent enough to raise taxes and wage war, just like any other state.

That is why the political heirs of Thomas Jefferson, mid-nineteenth-century Southern Democrats, held statewide political conventions (and popular votes) to decide whether or not they would continue to remain in the voluntary union of the founding fathers. It is also why the New England Federalists held a political convention in Hartford, Connecticut in 1814 when they were considering seceding from the union, ultimately deciding against it. Article 7 of the U.S. Constitution explained that the states could join or not join the union according to votes taken at state political conventions by representatives of the various communities within each state (not by state legislatures) and, in keeping with the words of the Declaration, they also had a right to vote to secede from the government and create a new one if they wished to do so.

Jefferson was not only the author of America’s declaration of secession from the British empire; he championed the idea of state nullification of laws deemed to be unconstitutional with his Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, and also believed that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution (“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”) was the cornerstone of the entire document. He was a “strict constructionist” who believed that every effort should be made to force the central government to possess only those powers delegated to it by the states in Article 1, Section 8.

States’ rights or federalism never meant that state government politicians were somehow more moral, wise, or less corrupt than national politicians are. The idea was always that: (1) It is easier for the people to keep an eye on and control government the closer it is to them; and (2) a decentralized system of government consisting of numerous competing states provided citizens with an escape route from tyranny by a more centralized or monopolistic state. If say, Massachusetts created a state theocracy, those who did not want to live under that theocracy (or any theocracy) could escape to Virginia, Pennsylvania, or some other state. The idea of states’ rights was never meant by the Jeffersonians to create a “laboratory of experimentation” with government policies, as contemporary political scientists have asserted. That would be treating people like so many experimental rats in a cage, and that is not likely how Jefferson liked to think of himself.

Secession or the threat of secession was always intended as a possible means of maintaining both the American union and constitutional government. The idea was that the central government would likely only propose constitutional laws if it understood that unconstitutional laws could lead to secession or nullification. Nullification and the threat thereof was intended to have the same effect. That is why the great British historian of liberty, Lord Acton, wrote the following to General Robert E. Lee on November 4, 1866, seventeen months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox:

I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic [referring to the Confederate Constitution] have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.

In addition to viewing the right of secession as the “only” means by which the people could effectively stop a tyrannical government, Lord Acton was also referring to such things as the Confederate Constitution’s elimination of the “General Welfare Clause” of the U.S. Constitution; a single six-year term for president; the prohibition of protective tariffs and corporate welfare (with the exception of money for the dredging of harbors); and a generally more decentralized system of government. Of course, that system was never allowed to become a reality since the Confederate states were being invaded by the largest army in the history of the world up to that point and did what states always do in such situations, namely, confiscate resources and centralize power to wage defensive war.

General Lee understood what Lord Acton was saying, and agreed with him. In a return letter on December 15, 1866, General Lee wrote the following:

While I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only are essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it. (Emphasis added)

Acton and Lee were prescient in their exchange of letters: the centralization of government power that was the hallmark of the world’s political systems in the late nineteenth and all throughout the twentieth century was a plague on humanity as it was the prerequisite for the adoption of fascism and all other forms of socialism, including communism.