by Thomas E. Woods

Jefferson once wrote, “When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” To resist this centralizing trend, the sage of Monticello was convinced, the states needed some kind of corporate defense mechanism.

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by Timothy Baldwin, Esq.

From Chuck Baldwin: My son, Tim, writes today’s column. He is an attorney who received his Juris Doctor degree from Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a former prosecutor for the Florida State Attorney’s Office and now owns his own private law practice. He is married to the former Miss Jennifer Hanssen.

On July 10, 2009, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin became the second governor in these States United (Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee is the other one) to sign into effect a State Sovereignty Resolution. These Sovereignty-type bills, resolutions and laws are an obvious and rightful response that the super-majority of the States in the Union are expressing to and against the usurping powers of the federal government. While the effects of federal tyranny are being felt more seriously than ever, history and human nature prove that the people of a society do not respond or revolt immediately against tyranny–though they have a right to. America’s resistance is no different. Fortunately, the sleeping giant is being awakened, to the dismay of our Centralist-worshipers today.

An observer of history and these current events cannot help but draw strikingly similar comparisons to America’s political struggles during the early to mid-1800s, where there was a serious threat to our original form of constitutional government by the Centralists of that day. During the presidency of John Adams, the people of the States realized and rejected the pro-centralist view of Adams and his ilk (e.g., Alexander Hamilton), and a battle between the ideology of centralism and federalism thrust itself into the forefront of political concern. Continue Reading

by Murray N. Rothbard, Mises.org

This article was originally published as “Jefferson’s Philosophy” in Faith & Freedom, March 1951.

Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian? Every college student, indeed every literate person, is expected to choose up sides and pin a label on himself in the Great Debate. Most people today consider themselves as Jeffersonians. Groups as diverse as the States’ Rights (or Dixiecrat) movement and the Communists consider themselves heirs to the Jeffersonian mantle. Continue Reading

by Thomas Woods, LewRockwell.com

To the casual eye, Kevin Gutzman has written a scholarly book about Virginian political thought and practice from revolutionary times through 1840. But its scholarly merits do not exhaust the merits of Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840. Readers are also treated to the incidental pleasure of watching the Straussian rendering of American history dismantled piece by piece.

As that version would have it, the United States was formed by a single American people in the aggregate and is not and never was a compact among sovereign states. The states are necessarily subordinate in their relationship with the federal government, never having enjoyed independent existences of their own. They possess no corporate mechanism by which to resist federal usurpation, and they are bound to accept the federal government’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation.

Gutzman begins his story in the 1760s, as the controversy with the mother country is growing more and more intense. Richard Bland, who served in the House of Burgesses, began his 1766 pamphlet An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies by revisiting his colony’s early history. In coming to these shores, he said, Virginia’s settlers had availed themselves of the natural right to emigrate. They had come to a new land at their own expense, and were no longer subject to English law, having fallen under the “Law of Nature” instead.

That meant Virginians had been in a position to enter, of their own free will, into a mutually binding relationship with the Crown, which they subsequently did. They expected future kings to abide by James I’s promise that Virginia’s form of government would never be altered. Virginia could be taxed only by its representatives, and possessed “such Freedoms and Privileges as belong to the Free People of England.” The Crown had repeated this guarantee numerous times, said Bland, in its commissions to Virginia’s royal governors.

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Thomas Jefferson lent his own support to this narrative in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, but as Gutzman observes, there is “virtually nothing in Jefferson’s Summary View that Mason, Bland, Carter, or the Burgesses had not said before.”

The preamble to Virginia’s republican constitution of 1776 spelled out Virginia’s understanding of its legal status before the world, as it had been explicated by Bland and Jefferson. Virginia had the exclusive authority to govern for Virginia. The king, meanwhile, had unjustly refused to accept a position as head of a great commonwealth of dominions tied together by a common loyalty to his dynasty.

The grievances listed in the preamble revolve almost entirely around the issue of self-government – economics barely appears; religion, not at all. That self-government was later reaffirmed in the Articles of Confederation, Article II of which described the states as having maintained their “sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” Virginians were persuaded to adopt the federal Constitution in 1788 on the grounds that that sovereignty would hardly be affected by the proposed confederation.

With all the emphasis that is normally placed on the Constitution’s Framers, we are apt to neglect the importance of the ratifiers, for it is they whose interpretation of the Constitution – and in particular, the precise nature of what they believed they were getting into – is of ultimate importance. And here is the heart of Gutzman’s argument.

At Virginia’s ratifying convention, the concern was raised that phrases like “general welfare” could be cited by ambitious politicians who wanted to exercise powers beyond those outlined in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Federalist Edmund Randolph, who had been Virginia’s attorney general for the past decade, assured everyone that his fears were unfounded, for all rights were declared in the Constitution to be “completely vested in the people, unless expressly given away. Can there be a more pointed or positive reservation?”

In other words, this was a strictly limited and federal government.

George Nicholas, who would become Kentucky’s first attorney general, explained:

If thirteen individuals are about to make a contract, and one agrees to it, but at the same time declares that he understands its meaning, signification and intent, to be, what the words of the contract plainly and obviously denote; that it is not to be construed so as to impose any supplementary condition upon him, and that he is to be exonerated from it, whensoever any such imposition shall be attempted – I ask whether in this case, these conditions on which he assented to it, would not be binding on the other twelve? In like manner these conditions will be binding on Congress. They can exercise no power that is not expressly granted them.

Randolph and Nicholas belonged to the five-man committee that was to draw up Virginia’s ratification instrument. They were in a unique position to articulate the understanding that would govern Virginia’s ratification.

Virginians kept this limited view of the Constitution and the federal Union very much in mind into the 1790s. Disturbed by Alexander Hamilton’s financial program, particularly the federal assumption of state debts, Patrick Henry drafted a resolution for the Virginia legislature in which he borrowed from the language of the assurances of Randolph and Nicholas that the federal government would have only those powers expressly delegated to it. The House passed it that day, the Senate six weeks later.

Shortly after Henry drafted his resolution, a General Assembly committee issued a report about the Washington Administration’s policies, which it found alarming. It declared (borrowing from Randolph and Nicholas) that the states were “contracting parties” whose rights were “sacred.” It insisted, echoing Randolph, that “every power not granted [to the federal government] was retained” by Virginia.

What this means, Gutzman explains, is that

Nicholas and Randolph’s explanation of the Constitution, and thus of the significance of Virginia’s ratification, had come to be seen as completely authoritative by the overwhelming majority of Virginia’s political leadership. As in the Imperial Crisis and the Confederation period, Virginians conceived of their interstate union as precisely a federal union, a union among parties that were somehow on an equal footing (as Nicholas had put it, thirteen contracting parties). Virginia, not America, remained the primary political unit, the United States Government a convenience.

Virginians continued to draw out the implications of these views over the course of the 1790s. According to John Taylor of Caroline, the great Virginian political pamphleteer, “The confederation is not a compact of individuals; it is a compact of states.” It was therefore the responsibility of the state legislatures to monitor the federal government and, if necessary, to prevent the enforcement of laws that violated the Constitution.

Constitutions are violated, Taylor said, and it would be absurd to expect the federal government to enforce the Constitution against itself. If the very federal judges the Constitution was partly intended to restrain were the ones exclusively charged with enforcing it, then “America possesses only the effigy of a Constitution.” The states, the very constituents of the Union, had to do the enforcing.

So by the time of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, whose doctrines of interposition and nullification held that the states could refuse to enforce any federal law they considered unconstitutional, there was nothing new or unusual about such a view. It was merely the logical implication of assurances by Federalists at the ratifying convention, assurances that had dominated Virginia’s constitutional thought in the ensuing decade.

Those resolutions, in other words, “floated like leaves on the stream of the Virginia constitutional tradition of Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Richard Bland’s An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, John Taylor’s pamphlets of the 1790s, and the Richmond Convention’s instrument of ratification (as explicated by George Nicholas and Edmund Randolph).” In form and content they belonged to the tradition of Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Resolves and his General Assembly Resolution of 1790.

Historians had sometimes claimed that Jefferson, the anonymous author of the Kentucky Resolutions, hastily devised nullification as an ad hoc response to the Alien and Sedition Acts’ assaults on civil liberties. But as Gutzman shows, nullification, Jefferson’s proposed remedy, was in fact the culmination of a decade’s worth of Virginian political thought traceable to the ratifying convention. There was nothing ad hoc about it.

The principle of local self-government and against interference from distant central authorities was central to Virginian political thought both before and after the War for Independence. This is a key point of continuity between late colonial Virginia and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. “As during the Imperial Crisis, so after the enactment of the federal Constitution, Virginians put their state first and the distant authority they had erected for their state’s convenience – formerly in Great Britain, now in the federal capital – somewhere down the list.”

Now if someone were to try to use this history as an argument in support of states’ rights today, or more generally on behalf of the compact theory of the Union, one can imagine a predictable response: Virginia was only one state, and its ratification debates do not authoritatively bind others in their own interpretations of the Constitution and the nature of the Union.

Gutzman has anticipated this reply, and has elsewhere answered it – persuasively, to my mind. Since Article II of the Articles of Confederation declared the states (including Virginia) to be sovereign, and since the delegates to Virginia’s ratifying convention explained to the people of Virginia that their state was one of thirteen parties to a compact from which they would be exonerated if it exceeded its delegated powers, then how could other states lack such a status themselves? If we accept the co-equality of the states as a constitutional principle – that is, some states cannot have more or different rights than others – then no other conclusion seems to follow, even if other states may have understood the nature of the Union differently at the time they entered.

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In light of all this, one can imagine Gutzman’s opinion of the centralizing John Marshall, but Marshall figures little in this book, which focuses primarily on Virginia’s experience rather than on the Union as a whole. For Gutzman on Marshall, see his excellent book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution.

In short, Virginia’s American Revolution is not only an invaluable contribution to the scholarly literature, but it is also a treasure trove for those who would recapture the original American republic.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [visit his website; send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers: Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Read Congressman Ron Paul’s foreword to Meltdown.

Copyright © 2008 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

The following is an excerpt from the new book, Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America, by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano. The excerpt is drawn from Chapter Five, entitled “The Civil War,” published here with permission from the publisher, Thomas-Nelson:

One of the greatest misconceptions of American history is that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Those who subscribe to this belief see President Abraham Lincoln as the benevolent leader who made unimaginable sacrifices in human blood to wipe out America’s greatest sin. While the human sacrifice is indisputable and the sin was monumental, the war’s purpose was not to free blacks from the shackles of bondage. Rather, the Civil War was fought with one purpose in mind: To preserve the Union at all costs. And, to put it in Lincoln’s terms, with no ifs, ands, or buts. You’d better agree with the president, or else. Continue Reading

by Robert Hawes

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” - James Madison, Federalist 45

Recent debates over sweeping new federal laws have re-ignited old quarrels concerning the proper constitutional role of the federal government and the rights and reserved powers of the states. As a case-in-point, on February 1, 2007, the Montana State House of Representatives unanimously passed two bills condemning the federal REAL ID Act as an improper use of federal legislative power. Both bills were designed to exempt Montana from the Act; however, the bill introduced by Representative Diane Rice of Harrison, Montana, went a step further, stipulating that, “the legislature of the state of Montana hereby nullifies the REAL ID Act of 2005, as it would apply in this state”.

Read that again: “The legislature of the state of Montana hereby nullifies the REAL ID Act”. Nullifies. Hmmm, there’s a word we haven’t seen in awhile, and with good reason. You see, the word “nullify” like its conceptual kissing cousins “secession,” “states rights,” “delegated powers,” and sometimes even “Constitution” belongs to a special class of political four-letter words, so called for the reason that they are verboten in polite conversation amongst the political mainstream. In that parlance, they are akin to the type of words that self-conscious adults tend to spell-out in front of small children so as to avoid embarrassment, and are allowed to be spoken only in a historical context, and only when accompanied by an obviously derisive tone of voice. Continue Reading

by Shannon Firth

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. Continue Reading

by David Gordon, Mises.org

[The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. By Kevin R.C. Gutzman. Regnery Publishing, 2007. Xiii + 258 pgs.]

Kevin Gutzman gives his readers much more than they had a right to expect. The “Politically Incorrect Guide” series in which his book appears aims at a popular audience: its goal is to correct commonly held myths of leftist propaganda.

Gutzman eminently fulfills this goal, but his book cannot be called an elementary work. Quite the contrary, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution is a major contribution to American constitutional history.

Gutzman is a leading authority on the Virginia ratification debates on the Constitution, and he uses his research to great effect. He has been much influenced by the pioneering originalist scholar Raoul Berger, but he strengthens and extends Berger’s views.

The principal thesis of the book is that the Jeffersonian, states’ rights understanding of America’s founding and the Constitution is correct. When the American colonies assembled in the Continental Congress and adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they did not create a new nation, Abraham Lincoln to the contrary notwithstanding. Continue Reading

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On 02-26-09, a number of Virginia State Representative intrduced House Resolution 61, which reads:

RESOLVED by the House of Delegates, That the Congress of the United States be urged to honor state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The Commonwealth of Virginia hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States. The Commonwealth by this resolution serves notice to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers. Further, the Commonwealth urges that all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding shall be prohibited or repealed.

For those history buffs out there, Virginia (along with Kentucky) was at the forefront in asserting the principles of State Sovereignty and limited government in the early days of the Republic. The Virginia Resolution of 1798, authored by James Madison in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson, took what some consider to be the strongest position on this issue in our history.

Here’s an excerpt: Continue Reading