Offsite Post: ‘The Anti-Slavery History of Nullification’

 

Scott McKay has already given a good reply to Quin Hillyer’s completely tired, unoriginal criticism of State nullification, which rests mainly on name-calling, that one is racist if he breathes a word in support of nullification.  The Louisiana Legislature should not back away one inch from the resolution they approved (SCR 21).  They should, in fact, answer Mr. Hillyer’s column with even more defiance of what is the truly ‘loony-radical’ idea in US politics:  that the federal government gets to decide the limits of its own powers, as well as the limits of the State and local powers.

To demonstrate the falseness of Mr. Hillyer’s charge, that nullification is almost exclusively a racist Southern ‘heresy’ against the Philadelphia constitution, we present some examples of the Northern States’ exercise of nullification vis-à-vis the federal Fugitive Slave Act.  It comes from J. J. Kilpatrick’s very helpful book The Sovereign States:

But meanwhile, Northern States were far more industrious in seeking to nullify both Constitution and courts. Very early in the period, they began to adopt what were known as “Personal Liberty Laws”—State statutes designed shrewdly and deliberately to nullify the Federal Fugitive Slave Act. That this was their intention, few Northerners denied; that the enactments presented an outright defiance of law was generally conceded. Even the great Webster, no friend of slavery or the South, once commented of Southern outcries against the personal liberty laws, “The South, in my judgment, is right, and the North is wrong.”(155) The laws took a dozen ingenious forms. The Southern slave-owner, who came North seeking his escaped servant or farmhand, was susceptible of arrest himself on a trumped up charge of “kidnapping.” Should the slave-owner actually capture his fugitive, it was necessary for him to prove ownership by the most elaborate evidence— presented before a jury of hostile abolitionists. State officials were prohibited under pain of heavy punishment from cooperating in any way in enforcement of the Federal act. It was made a serious misdemeanor for any person to assist in the recapture of a fugitive slave. In Vermont, all fugitives were declared automatically free men; any person who attempted to detain such a fugitive thereafter made himself liable, on conviction, to a prison term of five to twenty years or a fine of up to $10,000.(156)

 

All told, fourteen respected and honored Northern States engaged in this prolonged, and generally successful interposition of their sovereign powers. Let the roll be called: Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin. Theirs was a planned and deliberate program of nullification, pursued with relentless vigor, in defiance of the Constitution, over a period of nearly forty years. Each of them enacted laws willfully intended to veto the Act of Congress of 1793, and to render nugatory any effort to enforce it. As rapidly as their acts were held unconstitutional,(157) they enacted new evasions, or simply ignored the court decrees.

 

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2023/06/garlington-the-anti-slavery-history-of-nullification/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Greg Jarrett Loathes the Christian South’

 

The United States are often presented as ‘one nation’, but that is far from the reality.  One of the most exemplary of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Donald Davidson, even spoke of a cultural ‘cold Civil War’ that began between the North and the South after WWI drew to a close (Southern Writers in the Modern World, U of Georgia Press, Athens, Ga., 1958, p. 34).

The latest instance of this propaganda war against the South is Fox News journalist Greg Jarrett’s new book Trial of the Century, which rehashes the events of the John Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.  His central claim is that Tennessee’s law against the teaching of evolution was an evil restriction upon the sacred right of freedom of speech.  The rather unmistakable message that emanates from this is that laws upholding Christianity are bad; the untrammeled ‘free exchange of ideas’ is much better.

Southerners should recognize his book for the attack on their Christian culture that it is.  Prof. Davidson and the other Agrarians recognized the Scopes trial itself as such.  Prof. Davidson describes windbags like Mr. Jarrett as ‘vain-minded modernists, all resolved to define God as science and to give the theory of evolution the status of quasi-religious dogma’ (Southern Writers, p. 40).  He adds, ‘ . . . the Dayton episode dramatized, more ominously than any other event easily could, how difficult it was to be a Southerner in the twentieth century . . . .  It was horrifying to see the cause of liberal education argued in a Tennessee court by a famous agnostic lawyer from Illinois named Clarence Darrow.  It was still more horrifying—and frightening—to realize that the South was being exposed to large scale public detraction and did not know or much care how to answer’ (Ibid.).

Hopefully Southerners will know and care how to answer to this reprise of the Scopes trial that Mr. Jarrett is trying gin up.  We can start by learning from how the Southern Agrarians reacted to the Scopes trial.  John Crowe Ransom became a defender of traditional religion:

‘John Ransom astonished his campus friends at Vanderbilt by openly challenging the modernist position and defending Fundamentalism in religion.  I recall a tense scene on the third floor of Calhoun Hall at Vanderbilt during which Ransom, more excited than I had ever seen him, opposed Dr. Edwin Mims in vigorous argument over the issues raised at Dayton.  Out of the bold and somewhat grim conviction of such moments, I should guess, grew the exacting study and thought that went into the composition of Ransom’s great book about science and religion, God Without Thunder:  An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy’ (Ibid., p. 41).

Prof. Davidson wrote searing lines of poetry warning about the idolatrous worship of science.  These are from ‘Fire on Belmont Street’:

 . . .

The rest may be read here

https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/greg-jarrett-loathes-the-christian-south

or here:

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/gregg-jarrett-loathes-the-christian-south/

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘State Supreme Courts Are Co-Equal with the Federal Supreme Court’

The woke social justice warriors, continuing in their flailing fit of Maoist cultural destruction, have recently succeeded in removing the name of Henry Benning from Ft. Benning in Georgia.  But the good people of Georgia may want to find a way to honor him once again, for this same Mr. Benning – an honorable, lawyer, judge, and general of the 19^th century – in a ruling he wrote during his time on the Georgia Supreme Court, explicated a legal principle that could prove invaluable to the States in their battle with the out-of-control federal government.

In the case of Padelford v. Savannah (1854), he proclaimed that principle – that the State Supreme Courts are not inferior to the federal Supreme Court.  He said,

The Supreme Court of Georgia is co-equal and co-ordinate with the Supreme Court of the U. S.; and therefore, the latter cannot give the former an order, or make for it a precedent.

Further on, he expanded somewhat:

But are not the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States to govern this Court, as to the rule of construing the Constitution? They are not, any more than the decisions of that Court are to be governed by the decisions of this.

 

The Supreme Court of the United States has no jurisdiction over this Court, or over any department of the Government of Georgia. This Court is not a United States Court; and therefore, neither the Government of the United States, nor any department of it, can give this Court an order. It follows, if this be true, that decisions of that Court, are not precedents for this Court.

To prove his statements, he provided a lengthy quotation from Alexander Hamilton, in summary of which he said,

The idea meant to be conveyed here is clearly this: that the General Government has a sphere in which it is supreme, and the State Governments a sphere in which they are supreme; that these spheres intersect each other, and that the space included between the arcs of intersection, is common to both-is a space in which both are equally supreme, and in which there is no rule but one-Qui prior est in tempore potior est in jure.

He continued:

The same principles have been expressed by Marshall, Chief Justice, since the adoption of the Constitution. In McCulloch vs. Maryland, he says, “In America, the powers of sovereignty are divided between the Government of the Union, and those of the States. They are each sovereign, with respect to the objects committed to it, and neither sovereign, with respect to the objects committed to the other”. (4 Wheat. 410.)

 

Now, if the General Government, by its Judiciary, can come out of its sphere, into the sphere of a State Government, and ravish a case thence out of the hands of the State Judiciary, the two Governments are not equally supreme within their respective spheres. But they are, by admission of Hamilton and Marshall, equally supreme in their respective spheres; therefore, the former Government cannot do this, with respect to the latter. As well might it be said that England could order a case out of France, from a French into an English Court; or that a State Court could order a case out of the Supreme Court of the United States into it. None but a superior can give an order; none but an inferior is bound to obey one.

 

The question, when tried by the rule of strict construction, does not admit of a doubt. That rule is, that the General Government has no powers, except such as have been expressly delegated to it; and that the delegations of express power are to be strictly construed.

 

Now, jurisdiction over State Courts is not expressly given to the General Government, or any department of it.

 

Therefore, according to this rule, such jurisdiction is not given at all.

To give yet more strength to his position, he then showed that the drafters of the Philadelphia constitution expressly rejected proposals that would have given the federal government the ability to veto State laws:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2023/06/garlington-state-supreme-courts-are-co-equal-with-the-federal-supreme-court/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Strong Stand’

By Tom Riley

 

Chief Watie won an honor rich and full:

they took his statue down in 2020.

Courage was what they labored to annul

back then -- and thus they proved that he had plenty.

Their watery revenge, unfunny jest,

had no effect, of course, upon the hero.

What weaklings by their bitter acts suggest

amounts when Final Judgment comes to zero.

And yet perhaps there was a real effect.

In Heaven, there are crowns:  so I’m maintaining.

Maybe some are for those who stand erect

when those who crawl are boundlessly complaining.

His statue down, he joined the company

of Forrest and of Jackson and of Lee.

 

(General Stand Watie’s statue was placed in storage by the Cherokee Nation on June 13, 2020.)

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Get Ready for “Roe Redux”’

 

The culture warriors had better gird themselves, for we appear to be entering an era much like the 1960s to the 1970s when the federal courts overturned sensible Christian State and local laws for the sake of radical, diabolical social agendas – laws that banned abortion, laws that allowed Christian prayer and Bible reading in public schools.

The State laws threatened now are those protecting minors from drag shows, and from permanently mutilating, gender-changing surgeries and hormones.  Several States have passed them into law, but now the federal courts are swooping in to veto them.

Tennessee’s law outlawing ‘adult cabaret performances’ in the presence of children has been struck down by a federal district judge because it violates the precious 1st amendment rights to freedom of speech/expression of the upstanding drag queen citizens.

Arkansas and Florida have had their laws banning trans surgeries and hormones for minors overturned by federal courts, claiming violations of the Equal Protection clause and the Due Process clause of the 14^th amendment.

The legal reasoning is dubious, of course. 

First, the Bill of Rights of the federal constitution was not applied to the States via the 14^th amendment (the supposed incorporation doctrine), making the Tennessee ruling a farce.

Second, banning the self-chosen harm of children in this instance (trans surgeries and drugs) does not violate their equal protection under the law any more than banning their use of harmful drugs or drinking of alcohol or their being able to terminate their young lives via assisted suicide.

Third, the Due Process claim – that parents have the right to raise their children as they deem fit, even if that includes allowing them to change their sex – is selective, for it isn’t upheld in other instances by liberals/leftists, such as allowing parents a choice in where their children can be educated, or in the instance of requiring parents to be notified before a minor child could have an abortion.

All of these rulings and their reasonings open the door to some frightening developments:  the first, to allowing adults to have sexual relationships with minors; second, to expanding the ‘rights’ of children to engage in harmful activities, even the taking of their own lives (as is being proposed in Canada and which is legal in the Netherlands and Belgium); the third would limit a State’s ability to restrict harmful behavior using the insincere pretext of ‘parental rights’.

Now is a crucial time for the States passing these good and necessary laws.  When Engel v Vitale, Abington v Schempp, Roe v Wade, and the rest began to be handed down by the federal Supreme Court, there should have been an absolute uproar from families, churches, counties, States, etc.  Regular business should have ground to a quick halt by rightly incensed citizens, and protests should have been undertaken until the rulings were cancelled by one means or another . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2023/06/garlington-get-ready-for-roe-redux/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!