States' Rights

STATES' RIGHTS HAVE been an important element of the American federal political system. While major areas of policymaking responsibility, such as the treaty power and the power to coin money, have been delegated to the federal government, others arguably have been reserved to the states. When the federal government has attempted to legislate in reserved areas, states have at various times raised claims to their rights in order to negate the federal initiative, with various degrees of success.

The idea of states' rights resulted naturally from the multiplicity of societies that participated in the American Revolution. In addition, many of the grievances against the British government that drove the American colonists to rebellion centered on British rejection of the Americans' understanding concerning their colonial assemblies' (soon to be their states') rights. Most famously, the Americans insisted that only their local assemblies could tax them, but they also complained that the royal government had dissolved the New York assembly, reorganized the Massachusetts assembly, refused to approve bills passed by the Virginia assembly, and in many other ways denied American colonists the self-government to which they believed themselves entitled. Although the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and 1770s imbued a sense of shared dangers and common [Page 881]interests in the leaders of the American Revolution, it was to 13 separate colonial-cum-state governments that they looked for a substitute for discredited royal authority. While coordinating American efforts in the War for Independence, members of Congress also persisted in seeking the interests of their own respective states in lieu of the common good where feasible.

The most significant conflict over states' rights during the American Revolution arose over the question of the original 13 states' western land claims. While some states, such as Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland, were confined to small areas on the Atlantic Coast, others (particularly Virginia) pointed to their charters in claiming extensive western lands. (Virginia's claims, for example, extended all the way northwest to what is now Wisconsin.)