I want to talk about our lost and stolen heritage of states' rights.
I want to make it clear that I am not encouraging anyone to take what may be a premature and ill-considered action
in regard to Fort Sumter or any other federal installation at the present time.
I do want to talk very straightforwardly about certain truths as I see them in the American situation.
Federalism, we had a couple of years ago a celebration of the bicentennial of the American Constitution.
As far as I know during that celebration, there was never any mention of Republicanism.
There was never any mention of Federalism, which are the two essential characteristics of the American Constitution.
Instead, we have a celebration of multiculturalism and big government.
Federalism is the essence of the American system.
Federalism implies states' rights, states' rights implies, in order to mean anything, implies, in the final analysis, a right of secession.
The cause of states' rights, to put it very bluntly, is the cause of liberty, I would suggest, as proved by American history.
States' rights and liberty have risen and have fallen together.
If we had been able to preserve the original union of sovereign states that was founded by our forefathers,
There would be no question of the American Empire that we have today.
The American Empire could not exist, would not exist if we had preserved the original
union of the founding fathers.
But instead we have this empire which interferes in our local and individual affairs ever more
And we find ourselves more and more controlled by remote power, and we have an empire which
also uses our resources to meddle in the affairs of distant peoples.
The old union was a friendly contract between sovereign states who managed their own affairs
Congress and who got together for purposes of defense.
They also enjoy a complete free trade among themselves, if you recall the Constitution.
Requires that all taxes be uniform throughout the Union, is often forgotten.
The Constitution absolutely forbids any tax upon exports.
It does allow the Congress to lay a small customs duty upon imports.
This was for the purpose of raising the government's small revenue and it was considered a reasonably
fair tax.
It was not designed to protect industry or to manipulate industry in any way.
In fact, at the Philadelphia Convention, a proposal to allow the Congress to adopt tariffs
to protect industry was thrown out.
Nevertheless, the idea was brought up by General Hamilton, not long after the government was founded, like so many other evil schemes.
But it took almost 40 years for it to begin to become an established policy.
Ever since I got the Bifidels, I've developed an unnatural relationship with my materials.
On what the United States meant to our forebrothers was that happy union. Basil Gildersley, probably
the greatest scholar ever produced by America, a great classicist, was born here in Charleston
and was a Confederate soldier. And he remarked after the war that the war between the states
was a conflict over grammar.
It was a question of whether, which was correct,
the United States are or the United States is.
And if you, well, we have been using the wrong grammar
for a long time now, and if you're using the wrong grammar,
you can't get anything correct.
It certainly did not, the happy old union did not,
did not mean a government that dictated the use of parking spaces in every public and private building in every town in the country.
It did not mean a government in which women and children were incinerated by a bunch of brutal mercenaries
posing as a federal police force unknown to the Constitution, did not mean, as in the case of Kuwait,
that Americans were obligated to put an oriental death spot back upon his throne.
And I guarantee you, if George Washington had heard of any of those things,
he would have reached for his sword to take care of the perpetrators.
The founding fathers knew, they were very much aware, that Republican societies such as they had erected were fragile, they were always in danger of disintegration or degeneration into something less desirable.
One of the ways in which they expected to avoid this was through federalism, the dispersal of power among the states.
So they hoped, but self-government represented for the founding fathers not just a democratic majority voting anything it wanted,
But what self-government meant was that the community was superior to the rulers for the first time in history.
So they thought the rulers became the delegates of the community rather than, as in an empire like the one from which they had succeeded,
of the community and the people being the subjects of the government.
Here at the foreign society, the people, the community had existed for the support and the gratification of those who ruled.
This was the definition of an empire.
Republican America, on the other hand, was to be governed by the communities that made it up.
In an empire, the government operates according to the interests, the ideas, even the whims of the rulers who can doubt that the American government is today an empire.
Republicanism, as it was understood by the founders on the other hand,
consists essentially in the inviolability of the community.
The community takes precedence over the government.
The purpose of the government is to serve the community.
And political activity is directed towards the well-being of the people.
In an empire, political activity is management-oriented,
is directed towards managing the people
for the benefit of their government, their rulers, who can doubt that the American government
is today an empire by that definition.
And the evidence mounts every day that the American people no longer think of the government
as theirs, but as hostile, manipulative, unjust, distant, and unresponsive.
An empire contains not citizens, but subjects, interchangeable persons who have no intrinsic
value, except as taxpayers and cannon fodder for the empire. If the governors of the empire decide that it's more expedient for them to placate criminals rather than to punish criminals, then they may very well turn over people's communities and schools to the criminals, as has already happened in this country,
and violate the first rule of government, which is the preservation of order.
In an empire, people's culture may be changed by government or fiat into a trumped up multiculturalism.
Their religion may be attacked, and the surest sign that we now live under an empire is the fact that
that the ruling class does not live
under the rules that they make.
One of the hallmarks of republicanism
was that the officeholders were temporary.
They returned to the ranks of the people
to live under the benefits or the burdens
of the laws that they had made.
Our rulers no longer do that.
Our children are bused, theirs are not.
If they happen to get kicked out of office,
as they go to work for foreign governments and corporations,
selling out the birthright of America.
And this is very evident in the case of war
or in international relations also.
A republic goes to war for the benefit of its own interests
as they are perceived.
An empire goes to war because that is one of the things
that empires do.
is one of the things that irresponsible rulers do. So that in an empire you can have a situation
where warfare and foreign policy reflects the vagaries of mind of the rulers and not the
interests of the society. You can have, for instance, a ruler who can proclaim that it is the
duty of Americans to propagate global democracy in a new world order
by contrast, the old union, the true union, Thomas Jemerson remarked in his first Inaugural
And he asked rhetorically, Everson said, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people?
Still one thing more, he said, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another,
which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits and shall not take from them out of labor the bread that it is earned.
This is the sum of good government, a rather far way we are from that today, I would think.
Jefferson went on to talk about how do you preserve the sum of good government and the things that you must do or not do in order to maintain it.
And he suggested we must preserve the right of election, although he said not a word about the sacred two-party system, preserve equal justice under the law,
rely upon the militia rather than a peace and standing army, by all means avoid government debt,
preserve freedom of speech, of religion, the right of trial by jury,
avoid entangling alliances with foreign powers, and Jefferson said most important
To the preservation of the sum of good government is the support of the state governments and all of their rights as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks of our liberties, the surest bulwarks of our liberties.
There is a very moderate and sophisticated literature which tells us that Jefferson was really not very serious about states rights.
That was an incidental thing. What he was really interested in was equality or some other things.
This is not true. It was well understood at the time and for a generation or two after that.
The main point of Jefferson's platform in American public life was states' rights.
He was the author of the Kentucky Resolution, which outlined that a state may nullify unconstitutional federal law.
The state is the judge of the constitutionality.
And, in fact, late in his life, well, people denied that Jefferson had written the Kentucky Resolution after he had died until his son-in-law produced the original draft, which was even stronger than what was adopted.
But late in his life, Jefferson very specifically recommended that this be done again against the Virginia nullify the federal internal improvements legislation,
almost exactly the same thing that Calhoun in South Carolina did, about ten years later.
It was understood that the principles of 98, the Kentucky resolutions, were the main point of Jefferson's public position.
John C. Calhoun said, speaking in exactly the same tradition a few years later,
The question is in truth between the people of the states and the Supreme Court.
We contend that the great conservative principle of our system is in the people of the states,
as parties to the constitutional compact, and our opponents contend that it is in the Supreme Court.
Without a full practical recognition of the rights and sovereignty of the states, our liberty must perish.
States' rights will be found in all cases of difficulty and danger to be the only conservative principle in our system,
the only one that can oppose an effective check to power.
By a conservative principle, Calhoun means not in terms of left or right, liberal or conservative, but he means that which conserves, that which saves, preserves the essence of the system.
I don't really need to dwell on what a contrast that is with the present situation.
The R.S. McDonnell, our greatest constitutional scholar, says not long ago,
Political scientists and historians are in agreement that federalism is the greatest contribution of the founding fathers to the science of government.
It is also the only feature of the Constitution that has been successfully exported and can be employed to protect liberty elsewhere in the world.
Yet, what we invented and others imitate no longer exists on its native shore.
The very simple proposition that our founding fathers understood and that indeed underscored
everything that they did, that the only way to preserve liberty is to check governmental
power.
The only way to check governmental power is to divide and disperse it.
Many of the founders hoped that the federal system would do this, would allow expansion of the country without centralization.
We have to, and this was the whole point of the ninth and tenth amendments, we have to base the fact that this has failed, it did not work.
That was their main advice. It was also hoped that the different branches of the federal government,
The division of powers between the executive, the judicial, and the legislature would perform the purpose of checks and balances.
We should face the fact that this does not work. It ceased to work a long time ago.
There is no serious conflict of power between the three branches of the federal government.
The Supreme Court does not check the President or the Congress. The Supreme Court checks us.
All of the branches of the federal government are directed towards checking the states and the people of the states.
The federal government will never check itself.
As Calhoun says again, power can only be opposed by power.
Federalism may constitute the only hope.
And there is no genuine federalism unless it is backed up by, ultimately by the right of secession.
Otherwise it has no final force.
And interestingly, of course, the recognition of the right of secession generally obviates its use because if the ruling powers really have to acknowledge that people can leave, can withdraw, then they have every incentive to behave themselves, that they do not have otherwise.
Federalism has talked about a great deal. There's a whole shelf of books in the library about it.
It's one of the least understood, it seems to me, of all political phenomenon, both theoretically and practically.
And we should be aware of the many phony forms that are floating around.
In true federalism, we use that power comes from the roots up.
And if people in Washington are talking about letting the states of the Union do this or that, that is not federalism.
That's just another form of federal administration.
True federalism is when the states say to the federal government, you may not do this.
Your limits have been reached. Stop. That is genuine Federalism. Forget any of the rest of it.
If we agree with the most political philosophers that there is a, in every society, a sovereign somewhere, a final authority, an ultimate power,
Then that sheds light, sheds light on the concept of states' rights.
If there is a sovereign, which I think is an accurate conception, in every society, somewhere, there is a power that has the ultimate say-so when everything else is said and done, when you reach the bottom line, somebody who has the last word.
The sovereign can delegate powers as the states did to the federal government, but it cannot give them up.
Americans have always agreed that the people are sovereign.
As I say, America is a republican system and not a monarchy or an aristocracy.
The term people is not self-defining, however. What do we mean by the people?
A mere 51% electoral majority will not work when you're talking about the sovereign,
because there's nothing ultimate about the people. It can change in 24 hours,
and frequently does. Nor, when we talk about the people, do we mean, I think, that if a million
In the American system, plainly and simply, the people means only one thing, it can't
mean only one thing in a constitutional sense.
It means the people of the states as living historical corporate communities.
The whole of the Constitution rests on this.
The Constitution exists because of its acceptance, its ratification by the people of the states.
The states are said to be indestructible and they are represented in the Senate and in the Electoral Committee, to some degree in the House of Representatives.
In fact, there is no point in the Constitution of the United States where a simple majority of the people rules on anything.
There is no point in which the states are not represented as such.
It is only by reference to the people of the states that we can say in America that the final sovereign is spoken on anything.
And it is still quite evident that three-fourths of the states who may amend the Constitution may do anything.
Three-fourths of the states may abolish the Supreme Court, may abolish the income tax, may indeed dissolve the Union.
If they so agree, there is nothing to prevent that.
I'm suggesting that that power still exists in the American system.
It is certainly in abeyance, but it is still there.
What is lacking is, of course, the will to exercise it.
As James Madison says,
The meaning of the Constitution is to be sought not in the opinions or intentions of the body which planned and proposed it, but in those of the state conventions where it received all the authority which it possesses.
We have in fact, as Calhoun suggested, have allowed the sovereign power to be exercised by the Supreme Court.
Allen said the choice was either the states or the Supreme Court. If you, if
somebody, either one of those two things is going to make the final decision, we
have allowed it to be done by the Supreme Court. Five black-robed justices may go
into the closet and commune with the guides and come out and tell us what we
We must do, and we must obey, no matter how absurd their interpretation is in the life of the Constitution, no matter how in conflict their interpretation is with the will of the people.
This is what we have allowed.
But the fundamental of the American system is still there.
Each state still retains its sovereign constitution,
making power, if it will exercise it.
As the states did in the American Revolution,
by throwing off the royal authority
and assuming their own sovereignty,
and making their own constitutions
and ratifying the Constitution of the United States,
which was in effect making it a part of their constitution,
historical and constitutional understanding.
A little commentary on the history of South Carolina,
which in many respects is typical of all of the states, which I know of.
Galhoun, as Galhoun referred to, our gallant little state.
In 1719, the Lord's proprietors were the owners of Carolina.
They became high ed, they attempted to abolish the assembly, the elected assembly
assembly the South Carolinians had enjoyed. They attempted to gross the lands which the South
Carolinians had won in Indian wars by their own efforts. The people of South Carolina acting
through their legislature, which they had chosen through a governor, which they chose themselves
and through their own militia, threw the proprietors out. And an exercise of their sovereignty.
They subsequently gave their allegiance to the British Crown.
One historian has commentated on this. It was a thoroughly orthodox English Revolution, seeking to conserve, not to destroy.
They advised substantial citizens for the definite purpose of correcting their grievances.
Or as Mel Bradford, most of you know, or know of, you should say, about the American Revolution, it was not a revolution made, but a revolution averted.
In 1776, the people of South Carolina, acting through their legislature, their own chosen governor, their militia,
ejected the royal governor, made their own constitution and assumed their own sovereignty.
And this was before the Declaration of Independence.
Months before the Declaration of Independence or any notion of the Union of the Colonies,
this was true of all of the states, five years before the Articles of Confederation,
the state of South Carolina was sovereign and exercising all sovereign powers.
War, diplomacy, taxation, the execution of felons, exercising every sovereign power.
And as was being described at the Historical Society this evening,
about a week before the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776,
the South Carolina forces at Fort Moultrie repulsed the British fleet and established,
and self-government. There were a few military experts who had been sent down by the Congress to inform Colonel Moultrie that his palmetto log for it was not defensible and it should be abandoned.
Colonel Moultrie told him to get lost and went about his business, an early example of Federal interference.
And of course, he was perfectly right and won the battle.
And we might think just a little about the later attempt to exercise the same sovereignty
in the middle of the 19th century, which was a deal as successful and met with a much heavier opposition.
We usually think of Fort Sumter in terms of the first incident of the war,
and the surrender of course, Fort Sumter was occupied by the South for all the rest of the war,
and it was bombarded by fleets and by land mercilessly for almost four years.
For years, it was literally reduced to rubble, although it was never given up, never abandoned,
until it was taken from the rear.
And while this was going on, the army also, including using some of the largest artillery
in the world, amused itself by lobbing shells into Charleston, the lower part of the city
that they preach, causing numerous civilian casualties and destruction of property. Leviathan can be very nasty when he is frustrated and thwarted.
States' rights, I'm suggesting, is fundamental to the idea of liberty, but also what is not quite the same thing, fundamental to the idea of democracy or republicanism or government of the people or whatever you wish to call it, which Americans presumably believe in.
Government rests upon the consent of the government, as Mr. Rockwell said at the opening of this meeting.
This is the key part of the Declaration of Independence, and not the little decorating bit about equality.
The consent of the government. Government is legitimate, just to the extent that it rests upon consent.
That is to say, the people accede to the government.
The opposite of to accede is to secede, to withdraw, to withdraw consent.
The right of self-government ultimately rests on the right to withdraw consent
from an oppressive government in the final analysis, that is the only thing that can restrain a repressive government.
And our forefathers did not regard the American Revolution as a one-time event, which all of our sort of folklore,
Federalist, nationalist folklore suggests that the American Revolution had occurred at one time,
then the people gave their consent to the government and the government is forever.
Not at all. The consent of the government was a recurrent or an ongoing process. Thomas Jefferson
referred specifically to the succession of the colonies from Great Britain. This is the first
First, political use of the term. Americans invented the idea of political secession. Americans invented it. They brought it forward.
And very clearly, if you read Jefferson and the other better of the founders, what they want to preserve is not the union, but the principle of self-government.
And Jefferson is perfectly willing to entertain that probably in the future, in fact, America will break up.
The point is not the union, the point is self-government, and whatever is the best way to preserve self-government, whether it's either one union or two confederacies or more, that is the principle to be preserved, or not the government and the union in itself.
As Mr. Ostrowski described this morning, this whole notion of states' rights and the original
nature of the American government, there's no doubt about this to any honest matter, despite
the fact that we have a vast literature built up to sort of justify the nationalist interpretation.
And the question of state sovereignty is not altered by the fact that there are now fifty states in the Union.
The Constitution, very wisely, probably provided that new states may be admitted to the Union.
The Union is expandable.
The Congress may admit new states to the Union.
But the Congress does not create a state, or the Federal Government does not create a state.
The state creates itself. The state can only be created by the act of a sovereign people, not by law of the federal government.
A people adopt their own constitution. They incorporate themselves into a political community.
The federal government may admit them to the Union or not, but it does not create a state.
if you believe in that the people are sovereign and give their consent to the government.
This is just as true of Idaho as of South Carolina.
Our forefathers understood this perfectly.
The United States has always spoken of it in the plural until the Civil War.
The Bill of Rights was understood as a restriction on the Federal Government, despite what lies and semantics you may get from the courts and the scholars these days.
This is absolutely clear, read the language. The Bill of Rights, Congress shall make no law. Congress shall make no law.
All rights not delegated are reserved to the states and the people. That could be clearer than that.
And it was also, they were also clear about the understanding of American history.
When the government had first begun, General Hamilton had come along
with all sorts of schemes that were bent on stretching the federal government
further than it was supposed to go. General Hamilton was defeated by Jefferson
and his friends in 1800 and sent home. And that idea was supposed to have been
put to rest. This is the way people understood the history until the Civil War.
And this was certainly not just a Southern conception.
Tocqueville, the great French observer, says in his book in the 1830s,
the union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states,
and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their nationality,
nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people.
If one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract,
It would be difficult to disprove its right to do so.
And Tocqueville was only stating what everybody understood as a simple fact at the time.
Lord Acton, the great British historian of liberty, writes to General Lee shortly after the war,
that the fief of the Athlomatics is a greater setback for the cause of constitutional liberty
And Waterloo was a victory. Waterloo was a victory for constitutional liberty because it put the end to an expanding empire.
Appomattox was a loss for constitutional liberty because it established an empire.
Acting as on the say of all Czechs on power, federalism has been the most efficacious and the most continual.
The theory, which gave to the people of the states the same right of last resort against Washington as against Great Britain, possessed an independent force of its own northern statesmen of great authority maintained it.
Its treatment by Calhoun and by Stevens forms an essential constituent of the progress of democratic thinking, as much so as Rousseau or Jefferson.
You have to resort to a great deal of semantics, legalisms, or outright lying and distortion in order to refute that proposition.
So, a very politically incorrect term, states' rights. States' rights have certainly fallen into disuse.
This is not because, I suggest, this is not because they are unsound in history,
and History, about the cause they are unsound in constitutional law, about the cause they are unsound in political philosophy and democratic theory.
They fall into disuse for a couple of reasons. For one, they were suppressed by a force in the last century.
A force can settle questions of power, but it cannot settle questions right or wrong.
And it's also true that the trend of civilization for the past century or more has been centralization or consolidation.
Read the Founding Fathers and you see one of their great concerns is what they call consolidation, the centralization of power.
This is something to be feared. It was a danger, a temptation, but something to be feared and avoided if at all possible.
is a great evil, while the trend of history has been, seemingly for a long time now, in favor of consolidation.
We appear to have reached a point in history where we have reason to believe that perhaps that trend is coming to an end.
All over the western world, we found an impulse towards the devolution of power, the break-up of large states.
I was visited by some people from Ireland not long ago, and in Ireland they had a grassroots movement that tried to avoid the government,
completely in recent, some settlement of their problems, and they came up with a report which
was very specifically referred to John C. Calhoun and the concurrent majority, and both the government
and the press over there went crazy. They couldn't, what is this? How can you learn anything from this
old slaver crap? But they, you know, they stuck to their guns. It was very clear. Scotland, Quebec,
Anyway, I'm suggesting that we have some reason to believe that the world is changing as some of the
forces of history may be finally on our side for a while. The period of consolidation may be coming
to an end. We may indeed have reason to hope for a new flowering of freedom, of communities, of
of individuals, of small states, and after all, we often forget that freedom is the hallmark of Western man.
Freedom is what Western civilization is about preeminently, something that our leaders certainly have today observed.
We also have the great advantage of the comprehensive wisdom of Austrian economics, which our forefathers did not have.
So we're not in a bad position in many ways.
And if we're going to talk about federalism, we mean the states, and the states are all that we have.
And I understand that the politicians who run the states are in every respect as despicable as the politicians who run the federal governments.
However, they are closer to be reached. The states exist. They are realities. They are what we've got. And they can, it seems to be, be made use of.
It would indeed be a shame and a tragedy if in this period of devolution Americans did not look back to their ancient, unprovable founding tradition of state rights.
We don't have to resort to revolution, which is just a somewhat more drastic step.
We did not have to resort to anarchic individualism in order to cripple Leviathan.
We have the states ready-made.
That can be employed for that purpose if we have the will to do so.
So, I'm suggesting maybe what we ought to do is go back to our states and begin to work upon the people they're really involved to govern themselves.
And concentrate perhaps upon that and ignore certain other things that have occupied us.
For instance, do we really care whether the Republican Party succeeds or fails?
Or do we really care whether Newt Kindredge's futuristic predictions are fulfilled or not?
Or do we really care whether the Congress cuts the rate of growth in the welfare budget by 1% or 2%?
Maybe we should think about some other things that we can have some effect on that will make a difference in the long run.
are lost, instilled in heritage of state rights, a term that was once an everyday term in America, a household word, and yet it is hardly heard, hardly dared to be spoken of.
If we can do that, if we can really restore the old, the true American Union of self-governing states in place of the present imperial America, that will be a wonderful thing.
There's no need to fool ourselves that it will be easy. It will not be easy. But we can make a start, and we have made a start.
The first step is to free ourselves of the superstition of consolidation, the superstitious belief in a wise and good federal government and that the inevitable trend is always towards more and more centralization.
That is a superstition, a falsehood that we have lived under for far, far too long.
We have to free ourselves of that superstition and we will make a great step forward.
And I take it that is what we have been doing this particular weekend.
And the fact that we are doing that is a great step forward in itself.
Thank you very much.