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Chapter V - Secret Resolutions and States Rights
Secret Resolutions and States Rights
Nevertheless, Republicans objected to the Alien and Sedition Acts and turned to state legislatures as a vehicle of protest rather than to the Federalist-controlled Congress or the Judiciary. In 1798 Jefferson and Madison secretly drafted a set of resolutions in both the Virginia and Kentucky state legislatures which denounced the acts as un-constitutional, They also devised the state compact theory which argued that since the Constitution was a product of agreement among the states, the states retained the right to impose their judgment on acts of Congress and to nullify them if necessary. The resolutions concluded that, because the Alien and Sedition Acts violated the First Amendment they were null and void.
Although some states largely ignored these resolutions, Southern states' rights radicals expanded on them in the 1830s and again in the late 1850s. Central questions arose. How far could the states go in opposing the national government? How could a conflict between state and federal rights be resolved? These two questions were not clearly answered until the broken bodies of six-hundred thousand Americans lay strewn between Gettysburg and Atlanta and the Confederate States of America had been completely crushed in 1865 by the overwhelming military and economic power of the federal government.
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