Are We Headed for Another Civil War? -- Division No.1: States' Rights

     On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln addressed the Illinois state Republican Party convention that had just nominated him as its candidate for the U.S. Senate.  Lincoln evoked a passage from the New Testament:  “A house divided against itself cannot stand” (Mark 3:25 and Matthew 12:25).  What divided the United States as a whole house was slavery.  Lincoln warned:  “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it…in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike in all the States, old as well as new….”

     In 1858, Lincoln did not believe that the division among Americans would actually lead to the fall of the national “house,” but it did; in just three more years North and South were engaged in a highly destructive Civil War.  Now, in 2017 the American people are once again face-to-face in unusually severe disputes.  What are the divisions in the American “house” today and could they lead to another Civil War? I will discuss in a series of blogs six divisions and whether they could lead to open warfare.

     Division No. 1:  States’ rights vs. National government.  As President of the United States by 1861, Lincoln argued that the Constitution never allowed for any state to secede from the Union.  He further asserted that the unity of the United States of America, a new sovereign country created by the former 13 independent  states by the Constitution of 1787, was the same foundation for American liberties, including the freedoms of religion, speech, press, privacy, and due process of law.  The Civil War settled on numerous battlefields the constitutional issues of secession and the superior powers of the Federal government.

    Ever since the highly controversial measures of the Reconstruction of the South following the Civil War, there have been periodic tensions between some states that wished to move in a certain direction as opposed to Federal policies going in different directions.  These tensions arose again during the civil rights movement (perhaps the Second Reconstruction) during the 1950s and 1960s in both the South and the North (and in the West, too).  The tensions of Federalism once again emerged during the Presidency of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.  Each time some states, particularly in the South, have asserted their sovereign powers to nullify or ignore policies coming out of Washington, D.C. 

     If the states had the power of states’ rights, then what would they do with them?  During the 1950s and 1960s the principal states’ rights concerned the power to enforce racial segregation in public places and maintain discriminatory Jim Crow laws.  In the Obama administration, the state rights advocates advanced state prerogatives concerning where and when women could or could not have abortions, affordable health care insurance, what to do about illegal immigrants, gun rights, gay marriage, and access to public rest rooms.  These rights were expressed in constitutional and legal terms, but the basic concerns were largely social, racial, and religious with some economic but otherwise powerful partisan political undertones.

     Will states’ rights lead to another Civil War in the future?  That seems unlikely today.  States’ rights arguments were largely superficial in 1861 and they remain largely so today.  It is very hard to imagine any state trying to seriously secede from the U.S. again.  I can’t see state "National" Guards fighting against the U.S. Army.  What could happen is not so much a civil war of armies fighting in the style of 1861-1865, but rather passive resistance whereby state authorities refuse to back up Federal authorities trying to enforce national policies opposed by state residents.  There could also be incidents of violence by citizens not sufficiently policed by local, county, and state law enforcement agents.  In this regard, a civil war in the future would not look like a “war” except by acts that might look like guerrilla war rather than conventional war.  And some might call such acts "terrorism"?

     More likely yet, there could be a national government dominated by the same people and same thinking as advocates of states' rights who decompose Federal agencies and policies.  Rather than making Federalism more contentious, political parties and personalities could mitigate states' rights concerns, at least in the South and West, by reducing the reach of the Federal government into the states and encouraging states to manage their own people.  This move might be seen by some as a revolution, resulting in different kinds of resistance by different people, but it would not likely result in a civil war.

© 2017 Stephen M. Millett.  All rights reserved.