After Shay’s Rebellion, the nation’s leaders realized that the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, needed improvement. They felt that the federal government had been made too weak to deal with the country’s problems. So, in 1787, each state sent representatives to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where they began drafting a new constitution. And on everybody’s mind there was one issue that was most important: states rights.
The question of how power should be divided between the federal government and the states is really what American politics has been all about for well over two centuries. Should individual states retain their sovereignty (the power to make one’s own decisions) or should the federal government be allowed to issue laws that every state must follow.
It is a question debated by delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 when they met to revise the then failing Articles of Confederation. It was then debated by Federalists and Anti-Federalists during the ratification period. Our nation’s first two political parties were formed out of this debate, and the Civil War was in large part a war over this question. Even today, between Republicans and Democrats, this debate still rages on.
The Constitutional Convention’s purpose was to broaden the powers of the federal government as they existed under hopelessly ineffective Articles of Confederation. Yet, there was considerable disagreement among the delegates as to how extensive the powers of the federal government should be.
The document produced in Philadelphia in September of 1787 reflects numerous compromises on the question of the rights of states and the powers of the new federal government. While the sovereignty of states was preserved in most respects, specific portions of the Constitution were included which limited their powers. Most significantly, however, the Constitution in Article VI (“The Supremacy Clause”) made any valid exercise of federal law (and the Constitution enumerated a long list of federal powers, including the broad power to regulate commerce) superior to any state law “to the contrary.”
In other words, Article VI stated that whatever laws are made within the Constitution or by the federal government from the Constitution must be followed by all states. On the other side, the 10th Amendment protected states’ rights by claiming that any power not specifically given to the federal government was reserved for the states (known as the “Reserved Clause”).
The Anti-Federalists opposed ratification of the Constitution. Their principal argument was that the Constitution gave too much power to the federal government and took away too many powers of the states. They complained about the Supremacy Clause, about the powers of the President, about the six-year terms of Senators, and about the many new powers granted to Congress. Arguing for ratification were the Federalists, including such prominent figures as Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison (authors of The Federalist Papers).
The Federalists saw the states as impeding the development of commerce (through imposition of state tariffs and other laws) and threatening private property (Rhode Island, for example, had enacted a law cancelling all debts). The Federalists saw a stronger federal government as critical to the United States taking its place as a leader on the world’s stage.
The cause of the rights of states had its champions in the first decades of the nineteenth century, including Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, among many others. So did the cause of building a strong national government, with its champions including John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Chief Justice John Marshall.
The Civil War, of course, was fought over the question of whether states should have the right to protect the institution of slavery. After that war, the ratification of the 14th Amendment imposed important restrictions on the rights of states to regulate the lives of persons within its jurisdiction. During the course of the twentieth and on into the twenty-first centuries, the Court turned again and again to the 14th Amendment (largely through its doctrine that applied–or “incorporated”–the Bill of Rights to the states) to overturn state laws restricting the rights of speakers, criminal defendants, private property owners, gun owners, members of racial and ethnic minorities, and others.
The cause of states’ rights has risen and fallen over the years. Generally, in eras of conservative Courts states have been given wide latitude to exercise their choices (see Dred Scott v Sandford, for an extreme example). Recently, the Court has recognized limits on the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause, given fresh meaning to the 10th Amendment, and expanded the doctrine of state sovereign immunity under the 11th Amendment. Typically today, cases that pit the rights of states against the power of the federal government will be decided by a closely divided Supreme Court, and most citizens are equally divided over states vs federal power.
