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“States’ Rights” Really Means…

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Southern states had a long tradition of using states’ rights doctrine since the late eighteenth century to support slavery.[16] A major Southern argument in the 1850s was that federal law to ban the expansion of slavery into the territories discriminated against states that allowed slavery, making them second-class states. In 1857 the Supreme Court sided with these states’ rights supporters, declaring in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories.[17]

Jefferson Davis used the following argument in favor of the equal rights of states:

Resolved, That the union of these States rests on the equality of rights and privileges among its members, and that it is especially the duty of the Senate, which represents the States in their sovereign capacity, to resist all attempts to discriminate either in relation to person or property, so as, in the Territories—which are the common possession of the United States—to give advantages to the citizens of one State which are not equally secured to those of every other State.[18]

Southern states argued against “states’ rights” when it benefited them in the context of fugitive slave laws. For example, Texas challenged some northern states having the right to protect fugitive slaves, with the argument that this would make the institution null once a particular slave had crossed into a free state. The question was pivotal in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.[19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights

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