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Back in the 1830s... heh heh... John C. Calhoun led or at least is the best known champion of the “Nullification Controversy”; the view was, individual states didn’t have to follow federal law, iow, they could nullify them by legislative acts. This is part of the proslavery movement which led (in time) to the Civil War (1861-65), which led to the deaths of about 2 per cent of the US population back then. If we pulled that today, it would be six million, back then it was a mere 630,000, more than all other US wars COMBINED. :’)

Later, there was the Dixiecrat movement, which nominated Strom Thurmond for president in, hmm, 1948. The cry then, as now, and as in the 1860s, was “states’ rights”. It is and always has been bogus. Only individuals have rights; the only powers given to gov’t by the people are spelled out in the Constitution as amended, iow, our rights are not a gov’t grant. The Constitution is framed to assure separation of powers, and a sort of division of labor, and also (via the bicameral congress and 49 of the 50 state legislatures) a balance between geography (the individual states) and population.

The original language of the Constitution didn’t forbid slavery, and in fact made allowances for slave populations when calculating representation in the House of Representatives — despite the fact that the slaves had no votes. In the eventual, short-lived Confederate States of America, there were 9 million people, of whom 4 million were slaves; those states remaining in the Union (as it was called during the War) had about 21 million, including a very small number of slaves (since slavery wasn’t illegal anywhere until the 13th Amendment).

By contrast, Britain outlawed slavery, hmm, it sez 1770 in one place (and that is NOT true) and 1807 in another (I think it was de facto not illegal in British colonies until much later). Britain built ships for the Confederate navy, consorted with Confederate agents and ambassadors, and came within an nth of recognizing the Confederate States of America. Britain sent observers to various battles to observe how the CSA was doing; in the movie “Gettysburg” (the 1863 battle which began the decline and defeat of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia; the greatest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere, and may it always be so) there’s a scene where one of the principal actors was explaining to the British observer who was who in the Confederate corps assigned to Pickett’s Charge (which turned into the disaster of disasters for the CSA, and was Lee’s monumental blunder), but I don’t know if that is one of those whole-cloth things.

The late Shelby Foote, in interview snippets in Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” — IMHO, the greatest TV show of all time — said a couple of things worth mentioning; one is that as Americans we like to say we don’t compromise, but our entire Constitution and system of gov’t is based on compromise, and in 1860 it fell apart. He also referred to the Civil War as “the crossroads of our being, and it was a Hell of a crossroads.”

Anyway, the Civil War was about slavery, no ifs ands or buts about it. The Confederate Battle Flag wavers (here on FR, and elsewhere) will whine that it was about Northern Aggression (like when the CSA fired on the federal forts to start the war) or about sovereignty, but a quick visit to the Ordinances of Secession for the various states, or the Cornerstone Speech (below) rips the guts out of those claims.

March 21, 1861, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens
http://members.aol.com/jfepperson/stephans.html