Of course, the anti-federalists did not entirely go away, especially when it became clear to the agrarian South that its economic model, based on slavery, was losing ground to the growing industrial power of the North and the influence of the emancipation movement.
In the early 1830s, Southern politicians led the "nullification" challenge to the federal government, asserting that states had the right to nullify federal laws, such as a tariff on manufactured goods. But they were beaten back by President Andrew Jackson who threatened to deploy troops to South Carolina to enforce the federal supremacy established by the Constitution.
In December 1832, Jackson denounced the "nullifiers" and declared "the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed."
Jackson also rejected as "treason" the notion that states could secede if they wished, noting that the Constitution "forms a government not a league," a reference to the line in the Articles of Confederation that had termed the fledgling United States "a firm league of friendship" among the states, not a government.
The nullification crisis was defused, but a few decades later, the South's continued resistance to the constitutional preeminence of the federal government led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. It took the Union's victory in the Civil War to firmly settle the issue of the sovereignty of the national Republic over the states.
However, the defeated South still balked at the principle of equal rights for blacks and invoked "states' rights" to defend segregation during the Jim Crow era. White Southerners had amassed enough political clout, especially within the Democratic Party, to fend off civil rights for blacks.
Ending Segregation
The battle over states' right was joined again in the 1950s when the federal government finally committed itself to enforcing the principle of "equal protection under the law" as prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Many white Southerners were furious that their system of segregation was being dismantled by federal authority.
The South's anger was reflected in the prevalence of the Confederate battle flag on pickup trucks and in store windows. White Southerners were expressing the bravado of secession even if it was more tough talk than anything real.
Gradually, the American Right retreated from outright support of racial segregation and muffled the threats of secession (although the idea still surfaces once in a while as it did in recent comments by Texas Gov. Rick Perry).
Instead, the Right has sought to impose a reinterpretation of the Constitution by revising the history of the United States and pretending that the Founders designed the Constitution as a document to establish the supremacy of the states over the federal government.
This revisionist view is now at the heart of the Tea Party movement and has powerful propaganda support from the right-wing news media. Since few Americans understand the reasons for the Constitution -- or the fact that it represented a major consolidation of federal power -- this right-wing disinformation campaign has proved effective.
Tea Party activists add to the misimpression about the Founders' intent by dressing in Revolutionary War costumes and channeling the Founders' supposed hatred of the federal government. The Tea Partiers wave "Don't Tread on Me" flags as if the American revolutionaries were addressing that to their own government, not the British colonialists.
(Interestingly, the Tea Partiers ignore another common banner of the era, showing a serpent representing the 13 colonies cut into pieces with the instruction, "join or die." That banner recognized the need of the disparate American states to cooperate as one nation or perish.)
The Right's so-called "originalist" thinking about the Constitution -- how the Founders allegedly disdained federal authority -- also ignores the fact that nearly all the Founders were advocates of replacing the Articles of Confederation (the state sovereignty document) with the Constitution.
Among its biggest advocates was George Washington who commanded the Continental Army when it was hamstrung by the lack of resources caused by the absence of federal taxing authority in the Articles of Confederation. Washington presided at the Constitutional Convention and was elected the nation's first president under the Constitution.
Though the Tea Party doesn't want to admit it -- and it is an inconvenient truth for the American Right -- the Constitution represented the most important expansion of federal power in American history.
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