In this second installment of The Wilson Files, we collect some of Dr. Wilson's most sagacious writings on the topic of nullification and the unenumerated rights reserved to the several sovereign States that comprise the confederation known as the United States of America.
For half a century historian Clyde Wilson has been writing about what he calls “our lost and stolen heritage of states’ rights.” As Dr. Donald Livingston, founder of the Abbeville Institute, has remarked of current devolutionary strategies, “Clyde Wilson had been plowing the ground long before any of us came to plant.”Excerpts from Nullification:
Reclaiming the Consent of the Governed: “The cause of states’ rights is the cause of liberty; they rise or fall together. . . .
We know the problems. Where should we look for solutions? . . . . Thomas Jefferson gives us the answer: our most ancient and best tradition, states’ rights: ‘the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies’ . . . . Some of the Founders hoped that the division of legislative, executive, and judicial power in the general government would help. . . . these checks and balances do not work.
They ceased to work a long time ago. There is no serious conflict of power among the federal branches. The acts of all of them are directed toward checking the people of the States. . . . States’ rights are historically sound, constitutionally sound, ethically sound, and sound from the point of view of democracy. Where they fall short is simply in the realm of political will and agenda. . . . if we are to speak of curbing the central power, the States are what we have got. They exist. They are historical, political, cultural realities, the indestructible bottom line of the American system. It would be a shame if, in this world-historical time of devolution, Americans did not look back to an ancient and honourable tradition that lies readily at hand.”
Clyde N. Wilson is professor of history at the University of South Carolina. He has edited volumes 10 through 20 of "The Papers of John C. Calhoun and is the author of Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew", and of more than one hundred articles and essays in American history and literature.
