Tenth Amendment Center

The American Revolution was waged against a highly centralized, nationalistic, governmental tyranny…

A States’ Rights movement is in essence a revolution, an opposition to the urgency of political power to limit choice and compel adjustment to its will and must rest its case on this fact. It is a certainty that any attempt to cut down the power of the central government is a fatuous gesture unless there is some feeling for freedom in the country.

Sam Adams, on the anniversary of his birthday, wisdom on state sovereignty.

If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers it will continue to grow – regardless of elections.

Thomas Jefferson: “the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies”

The battle between Jefferson and Hamilton is of very great significance, and precisely because it represented a clash between two fundamentally contrasting systems of political principle.

Wrote Elbridge Gerry: “the origin of all power is in the people, and that they have an incontestible right to check the creatures of their own creation”

Paine was more than just a pamphleteer for the cause of freedom. He was a serious political philosopher, as the following excerpt from The Rights of Man demonstrates.

Their vision was for the United States to be a union of sovereign states as opposed to a consolidation of the states into “one nation, indivisible” – and this reality is embedded in the very word “federal.”

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States of America, was an architect, a philosopher, a Deist and an impeccable prose stylist. His passionate appeal to dissolve ties with England—the Declaration of Independence—led the early colonies to war and ultimately freedom. As president, he earned respect for his sound principles and industrious nature, though his private life has been subjected to intense scrutiny.