Governmental rights granted to individual states in a country by a federal constitution are called states’ rights. On Feb. 19, 1985, the United States Supreme Court ruled that federal minimum wage laws apply to employees of state and local governments. The case, Garcia vs. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, was one in a long series of controversies over the issue of states’ rights. Article 6 of the United States Constitution states: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof… shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” The Tenth Amendment, however, says that: “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.”
Since the administration of President George Washington, the interpretation of these two statements has created a conflict between the power of the federal government and the powers of the states. Before the Constitution was ratified in 1788, most of the opposition to it was based on a fear of endowing the central government with too much authority. Under the Articles of Confederation the states’ rights were restricted on paper, but in practice they were free to conduct their own foreign policies, make international trade agreements, and even declare war. They could also obstruct the national government’s power to raise taxes because Congress had no authority to enforce its measures.
Fear of the federal government was based greatly upon the high-handed policies of Great Britain’s king and Parliament prior to the American Revolution. For that reason many U.S. citizens viewed the new Constitution as a pact between the states giving any state the right to nullify if it felt threatened. Even the safeguards written into the Constitution by the Bill of Rights were not enough to ease fears of too great a national power. From the 1790s until the end of the American Civil War (1861–65), there was almost incessant conflict—with states and regions on one side and the federal government on the other.
The first disagreement was a short-lived affair late in the administration of John Adams. In 1798 Congress passed four internal security laws in anticipation of an expected war with France. These were collectively called the Alien and Sedition Acts. Three of the laws restricted the freedom of immigrants, and the fourth put limitations on freedom of the press. Although the acts were generally popular, Thomas Jefferson and his followers strongly opposed them.
Jefferson and James Madison drafted documents of protest that were passed by the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, as they are generally called, affirmed the right of the states to determine the validity of federal legislation. This controversy soon faded away when both the threat of war with France vanished and Adams lost the presidency to Jefferson. Eventually the Alien and Sedition Acts were either repealed or allowed to expire. (See also Alien and Sedition Acts.)
The next serious conflict occurred during the War of 1812. In opposition to the war and envious of the influence of the South in the federal government, representatives of New England states met in a secret convention at Hartford, Conn., in 1814–15. The purpose of this convention was to propose revisions to the Constitution that would shift the balance of power back to the North, abolish commerce restrictions, and limit the settlement of the West. The end of the war made the proceedings at Hartford a dead issue.
As conflict began to emerge between North and South—as evidenced by the Missouri Compromise of 1820—arguments for states’ rights soon became localized in the South. The two most divisive issues between North and South were tariffs and slavery. The tariff issue led to the nullification crisis of 1832, but the slavery problem was not resolved until after the American Civil War.
Southerners believed that a protective tariff would harm their economy. When Congress passed what the South called the “Tariff of Abominations” in 1828, John C. Calhoun responded with his carefully reasoned “South Carolina Exposition and Protest.” When Congress passed another tariff act in 1832, the South Carolina legislature passed an Ordinance of Nullification on Nov. 24, 1832. It declared that the tariff acts were not binding on South Carolina. President Andrew Jackson responded with a threat of force, but he finally convinced Congress to modify the tariff.
Meanwhile, Northern states were beginning to resist federal enforcement of laws protecting slavery. They began passing personal liberty laws in order to make it difficult for Southerners to recover fugitive slaves. Indiana’s law of 1824 was the first. These laws were deliberate attempts to nullify the protection of slavery written into the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. In 1859 Wisconsin’s legislature issued a resolution of nullification two years after passing its personal liberty law.
Secession, leading to the American Civil War, was the final and most severe test of the states’ rights doctrine. The North’s victory in 1865 settled permanently the problems of nullification and established the power of the federal government.
After the American Civil War the principle of states’ rights was invoked in an attempt to abolish civil rights for black citizens and to prevent the passage of child labor and anti-lynching laws. Southern states tried to prevent enforcement of civil rights laws, and Western states embraced the doctrine in order to control their natural resources. Since World War II the federal government’s ability to control subsidies to the states, as well as its regulation of interstate commerce, has effectively nullified assertions of states’ rights on many issues.
The government’s subsidy program extended its influence into public housing, road construction, school systems, airport construction, vocational education, fish and game conservation, use of public lands, the criminal justice system, and other areas that were traditionally considered the prerogative of the states. Canada and Australia had similar experiences, with their central governments moving into fields of provincial or state action through subsidy programs.