Book Review

In light of the states' rights revival under the Rehnquist Court, it is a good time to reconsider the history of what Georgian Alexander H. Stephens, the former Confederate vice-president, called the "sublime moral principle" (193). Forrest McDonald is well-equipped and well-disposed to take on the assignment. His engaging account of the doctrine's development history is a welcome addition to the literature. Written with characteristic flare and a debunker's relish for puncturing lofty pretensions, States' Rights and the Union both informs and offends.	1
Liberal sensibilities will be most ruffled by McDonald's contemptuous dismissal of the "cocksure self-righteousness of the Yankees" whose crusade against slavery helped bring on the Civil War. Northerners were much more concerned with what they "perceived as the slave power" than with the welfare of the slaves themselves (165). By contrast, the southern majority in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) stands exonerated: because none of the five southern justices was a slaveowner, it could not be true "that the Court was controlled by the slaveocracy." "The justices can be accused of spurious reasoning," McDonald concludes, "but the decision was based upon adherence to the Constitution as they understood it, not upon favoritism toward their section of the country" (179).	2
It would be a mistake to make too much of such tendentious passages. McDonald plays favorites because he hopes to vindicate important constitutional values that have been jeopardized throughout American history by moral extremists--and political opportunists--who failed to respect and uphold the union as it was originally conceived, as "a compact among peoples of different political societies" (9). McDonald takes pains to distinguish this "original understanding" of the federal compact from the Jeffersonian view that state governments could "interpose" their authority on constitutional questions, thus reducing the Constitution to the status of a treaty. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was truer to the original vision as he fleshed out the new sphere of federal authority with his financial program. John Marshall, hero of nationalist historiography and bête noir of the Jeffersonians, also comes off surprisingly well here, except when he embraced the heretical position "that the Constitution was the creation of the whole people of America" (in McCulloch v. Maryland [1819]) and not of the peoples of the separate states, the argument later immortalized in Daniel Webster's "second reply" to Hayne (1830). Marshall's achievement was to carry on with Hamilton's great project, to make the new federal regime congenial to capitalist development.	3
But Andrew Jackson, the pivotal figure in McDonald's history, threatened to destroy all these good works. "King Andrew" personified the dangerously excessive concentration of power that the "whole people" theory implied and justified, even while he laid siege to the Second Bank of the United States (B. U. S.) and the whole infrastructure of federal governance in the name of a misbegotten (Jeffersonian) notion of states' rights. "A system of divided sovereignty such as the Founders had devised requires delicate but strong balancing mechanisms if it is to remain viable, and in this respect, Jackson's doings were unfortunate." The destruction of the B. U. S. eliminated a crucial restraint on the states, as did a reckless abuse of presidential power that brought the office into "disrepute": "his eight years in office saw the triumph of the states' rights doctrine" (119-20).	4
If Jackson is the villain, John C. Calhoun is McDonald's hero. After the War of 1812, Calhoun was one of the prime movers of National Republicanism and the original sponsor of the Second B. U. S. Though he became the great states' rights ideologue in later years, as southern planters mobilized against the tariff, Calhoun remained a friend of banks and bankers. Most importantly, he remained true to the original understanding of the federal compact: his conception of nullification was entirely consistent with that understanding--as would be secession. Calhoun always insisted that his constitutionalism was dedicated to the preservation of the union, and that his primary purpose was never to defend and perpetuate slavery. To the contrary, northern efforts to interfere with the institution supposedly revealed the determination of northern majorities to exploit and enslave the southern minority, and thus to destroy the union. Calhoun's self-serving (and we might add, "self-righteous") account of his principles and motives strains credibility, and we may also question the value, moral or otherwise, of the union he ostensibly hoped to preserve. McDonald does not pretend that southerners were doing anything to rid themselves of their "peculiar institution," or that it was withering away in the years leading up to the Civil War. On the eve of the war, southerners were so complacent about their prospects and so accustomed to having their way with the union that their constitutional attitudes were veering in a Marshallian direction, "even as Yankees were adopting a Jeffersonian and Jacksonian suspicion of the federal government and the Supreme Court" (165-66). It is hard not to conclude that these "Yankees" were right about the "slave power."	5
Be that as it may, McDonald would insist, the important thing is that states' rights ideas have survived, regardless of the uses to which they have been put. The first signs of their life after the Civil War came with resistance to Reconstruction: in 1876, the terminal year of this study, the Supreme Court ruled that congressional efforts to enforce black suffrage in Kentucky under the Fifteenth Amendment violated the reservation of states' rights in the Tenth Amendment. "Now the Court had risen as the champion of the states against the authority of Congress. The doctrine of states' rights had found a powerful friend, albeit a fickle one" (221). However dubious the circumstances of this rebirth, it kept the "original understanding" alive. Perhaps, one day, states' rights ideas would serve loftier purposes than sustaining racial hierarchy. McDonald thinks the day has now come. We might not be convinced this is so, but we can agree that understanding the states' rights tradition is crucial to the understanding of American constitutional development--and its future course.	6
Peter S. Onuf University of Virginia

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