The erosion of “states rights” was largely self inflicted wound.
States failed to stand up to the ever increasing encroachment of federal power due to lingering effects from the Civil War.
The Civil War put an end to the notion that states voluntarily seceding from the Union was their right.
Bucking the federal power grab might just get federal troops sent in.
It did more than that.
Between the Revolution and the Civil War, the argument was about federalism. The Hamiltonian impulse toward centralization was pushed by Hamilton, the two Adamses, Webster, Clay and Lincoln. The Jeffersonian impulse toward decentralization was pushed by Jefferson, Jackson and Calhoun. The Civil War ended that argument with a military victory by the Hamiltonians.
Whether intended or not, the Civil War bequeathed us an early and primitive form of corporate fascism. The country was run by Big Business in general and Big Rail in particular. The federal government had become the central government, and the sphere of the states was diminished. Where would the Jeffersonian impulse go?
The Jeffersonians decided to take that powerful central government and turn its energy into helping the people, not Big Business. Thus were born the Progressives, who came out of the Republican Party in the Northeast and Midwest in the decade of the 1870's. They had a Protestant view of the world, no doubt because their roots were in Northeastern Episcopalianism and Midwest Lutheranism. They wanted to regulate Big Business before more radical folk, like the Populists, could nationalize everything.
Like most American political movements, the Progressives spent 30 years wandering in the political desert before they achieved power with Theodore Roosevelt, who imparted legitimacy to the movement. Since then, the debate between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians has been all about who will control that all-powerful central government and how its power will be used.
After World War II, the attempt by Southern segregationists to use states’ rights as the means of preserving the “Southern way of life” discredited federalism further.
It is only now that federalism is emerging once again as a potent philosophy. We are hearing arguments once made by Calhoun coming from Andrew Napolitano, among others. We are in for some interesting times.