"The legislative power vested in Congress ... is so unlimited in its nature; may be so comprehensive and boundless [in] its exercise, that this alone would be amply sufficient to annihilate the state governments, and swallow them up in the grand vortex of general empire," the dissenters declared.
Fearing for Slavery
Southern Anti-Federalists -- the likes of Virginia's Patrick Henry and George Mason -- saw the Constitution as an eventual death knell for slavery, despite the success of southern delegates to insert clauses that implicitly accepted the continuation of slavery.
But Henry and Mason argued that the rights of white slaveholders to own blacks would eventually be challenged by the North as its industries made it more populous and more powerful than the agrarian South. "They'll free your niggers!" Patrick Henry warned his fellow slave-owning Virginians.
As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, Henry and Mason argued that "slavery, the source of Virginia's tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected." Besides the worry about how the federal government might tax slave-ownership, there was the fear that the President -- as commander in chief -- might "federalize" the state militias and emancipate the slaves.
Though losing the struggle to block ratification, the Anti-Federalists and their concerns did not disappear. Instead, they organized a powerful political faction behind the charismatic figure of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, who -- after returning from France in 1789 -- sought to alter the original interpretation of the Constitution into something much narrower, a vision that would protect the interests of "farmers" and would leave plantation slavery untouched.
Jefferson's ruthless political tactics and Federalist missteps in the complex job of forming the new government combined to help Jefferson defeat President John Adams, a Federalist, in 1800 (with Jefferson's winning margin coming from the South's ability to count slaves as three-fifths of a human being for the purpose of representation).
As president, Jefferson rhetorically asserted his "strict construction" view of the Constitution, but in practice he embraced the "originalist" interpretation of the Federalists when it suited his needs, such as when he had the opportunity to buy the Louisiana Territories from France and saw nothing specific in the Constitution to say that he could. With the support of Congress, he simply did so anyway.
As for Madison -- after collaborating with George Washington on the Constitution and working with Alexander Hamilton to win ratification -- the slightly built Virginian aristocrat gradually slid back into the swamp of Virginia's slave-owning politics. A major slaveholder himself and representing other slaveholders, Madison shifted his allegiance to the Jeffersonian camp and succeeded Jefferson as president in 1809.
However, after the debacle of the War of 1812 when an underfunded federal government could not defend Washington D.C. from British destruction, Madison reversed direction again, ignoring Jefferson's "strict construction" principles to support the creation of the Second Bank of the United States in 1817.
In the ensuing decades, the back-and-forth struggle over the scope of federal power continued as the South insisted that Jefferson's pseudo-constitutional inventions, such as a state's right to "nullify" federal law, prevented the national government from imposing restrictions on the institution of slavery as it spread to new states in the west.
Finally, with the election of anti-slavery President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the southern slave states seceded from the Union, drafting their own constitution that explicitly enshrined slavery as a permanent fixture. The bloody Civil War finally ended slavery in 1865 and forced the South back into the Union, but white southern resistance continued to federal laws demanding equal rights for blacks.
Rewriting the Constitution
The relevance of this history to the present is not only that the ideological descendants of the Confederacy are now up in arms over the election and reelection of the first African-American president but that they are insisting on the slaveholders' distortion of the Constitution, over its truly "originalist" interpretation and the plain reading of its words.
The overwhelmingly white Tea Party, with its foothold in the overwhelmingly white Republican Party, has now developed a new variation on the theory of "nullification," asserting that the Tea Party's Confederate-style interpretation of the Constitution must be accepted by the rest of the nation or the country will face endless political extortion.
Like Gary Oldman's team of Russian ultra-nationalists in "Air Force One," the Tea Partiers have maneuvered themselves into a position where they can extort concessions from the President. All they have to do is keep shooting hostages until the price becomes so high that the U.S. government acquiesces to their demands.
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