>>> jmage at panix.com 01/11/01 09:49PM >>>
> In the situation of the Confederacy, "we certainly had bad facts in
> that case where we were defending state sovereignty by defending
> slavery," she [Interior Secretary-designate Gale A. Norton] said in the speech. "But we lost too much. We lost the
> idea that the states were to stand against the federal government
> gaining too much power over our lives."
>
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> CB:Without federalism and the Supremacy Clause, the slave states would not have been
> able to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in non-slave states.
Charles basic point is surely correct, and certainly the slavemasters of each Sovereign State relied upon a slavemaster unity that transcended the course of the Savannah River (or any other State boundary) in the event of any locally successful revolt. But technically speaking Article 4 Section 2 of the Holy and Sacred Slavemasters Constitution of these United States of America ("No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up ...") gave a Constitutional basis totally independent of the Supremacy Clause for Fugitive Slave Laws.
In fact they weren't able to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in many non-slave states even with their Blessed and Hallowed Constitution, Supreme Court, federalism and Article 4 Section 2... And it was (for instance) the courts of Wisconsin that justified their refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law by reference to "States Rights."
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CB: Interesting. So you are saying that the Fugitive Slave statute, which was not passed until about 1840 ?? was actually enforcement legislation of a clause already in the Constituton, if I understand you. Sort of a latent Constitutional clause, that needed a statute. (Perhaps I could have more accurately said the supremacy principle rather than Clause, i.e. the principle that the federal Constitution and laws are superior to state laws)
The main point here , as you affirm, is that even the clause of the Constitution to which you refer is _federal_ law, and the slave states relied on federal law and federalism, the antagonistic opposite of state's rights , in policing slavery in the non-slave states. The state's righters would have had to be supporting the freedom of the slaves in the non-slave states, which states didn't have slave laws, as in your Wisconsin example. In other words, the slave owners were anti-states righters in 1860.
The Civil War was 1861 to 1865. So, Norton implies that before 1861 the states that became the Confederacy , the slaveowning states, were opposed to federalism and championed states rights. But in the decades immediately before 1861 , on the contrary, the slave states dominated the federal government, as evidenced by the enactment of the fugitive slave act , the Dred Scott case and a pro-South federal Supreme Court, the pattern of pro-South Presidents.
So, the above statement by Norton is a prevarication of history. It also demonstrates that the slave states' cry of "states' rights" was not a matter of principle , but pragmatism, for just right before the Civil War, those very slave states were championing federalism to police their slave laws in non-slave states. The priniciple of the Confederacy was slavery, and their position on states' rights/federalism prostituted to that.