WHAT AMERICANS USED TO KNOW ABT THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE--- The first several generations of Americans understood that the Declaration of Independence was the ultimate states’ rights document.
The citizens of the states would delegate certain powers to a central government in their Constitution, and these powers (mostly for national defense and foreign policy purposes) would hopefully be exercised for the benefit of the citizens of the "free and independent" states, as they are called in the Declaration.
The understanding was that if American citizens were in fact to be the masters rather than the servants of government, they themselves would have to police the national government that was created by them for their mutual benefit. If the day ever came that the national government became the sole arbiter of the limits of its own powers, then Americans would live under a tyranny as bad or worse than the one the colonists fought a revolution against.
As the above quotation denotes, the ultimate natural law principle behind this thinking was Jefferson’s famous dictum in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever that consent is withdrawn the people of the free and independent states, as sovereigns, have a duty to abolish that government and replace it with a new one if they wish.
This was the fundamental understanding of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence – that it was a Declaration of Secession from the British empire – of the first several generations of Americans.
As the 1, 107-page book, Northern Editorials on Secession shows, this view was held just as widely in the Northern states as in the Southern states in 1860-1861. Among the lone dissenters was Abe Lincoln, a corporate lawyer/lobbyist/politician with less than a year of formal education who probably never even read The Federalist Papers.
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE PREAMBLE “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...”
What came after the Declaration of Independence was the "bill of particulars" against the colonial ruler--King George III ---that justified the declaration and subsequent colonial rebellion.
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance,” reads one of Jefferson’s indictments against the king.
The Delcarartion of Independence and the Constitution are very clearly ANTI-STATES RIGHTS. States and all government entities have POWERS. Only PERSONS HAVE RIGHTS. Rights come from God/Natural Law to PERSONS. A person has the right to life, libertry, pursuit; a state does not have a right to life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. A person has a right to bear arms. A state does not have a right to bear arms. Same with all rights.
Use of the term “states rights” is one of the biggest blunders by conservatives in both the logic and the emotion of their arguments. Both the illogic and the misplaced emotion are counter-productive.