"Know Your History"
So, in this vacuum, an increasingly assertive Right began calling on Americans to "know your history." But an honest examination of that history reveals the Right's version to be thoroughly dishonest.
For instance, the Constitution's key Framers, including George Washington and James Madison, were determined to expand the power of the central government out of frustration with the states' rights-oriented Articles of Confederation. That was the document that made the states "sovereign" and "independent," language that was eliminated by the Constitution, which shifted national sovereignty to "We the People of the United States" and made federal law "supreme."
Rather than seeking to constrain the power of the central government -- as today's Right would have you believe -- the Constitution gave Congress indefinite and elastic powers to "promote the general Welfare." [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-up 'Constitution.'"]
This transformation was well understood at the time. That is why the Constitution faced such fierce resistance from the so-called Anti-Federalists who recognized how much the Constitution would centralize government power. In the South, this opposition to ratification centered on the fears of slaveholders that inevitably the North would come to dominate the federal government and would outlaw the institution of slavery.
After the Constitution won ratification in 1788, the fight of the Southern slaveholders shifted to a political battle aimed at reinterpreting the Constitution as they wished it to be, not as it was written.
Thomas Jefferson, who returned from France in 1789, led this fight and eventually recruited his Virginia neighbor (and fellow slaveholder) Madison from the ranks of Washington's Federalists to the Jeffersonian movement, known as the Democratic-Republican Party. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Dubious Claim to Madison."]
The Route to Civil War
Through bare-knuckled politics and sometimes below-the-belt propaganda, Jefferson's movement gained the upper hand during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century.
The so-called Virginia Dynasty -- 24 years of unbroken presidential rule by Virginians Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe -- oversaw the expansion of slavery to new states and territories to the west and concocted the unconstitutional notion of state "nullification" of federal law, setting the nation on course for the Civil War.
The Jeffersonian critique of the federal government's constitutional powers, of course, was not consistent. There was even hypocrisy within his hypocrisy.
While seeking to protect the institution of slavery from possible federal encroachment -- by repudiating the Federalist view of the Constitution's "elastic" powers -- Jefferson and Madison embraced the same concept when it suited their needs, Jefferson when he negotiated purchase of the Louisiana territories from France and Madison when he formed the Second Bank of the United States in order to strengthen the nation's credit and fund the U.S. military after it failed to protect the capital from British attack in 1814.
Over the next several decades, the battle against the Constitution's broad federal powers became the subtext for the South's growing defensiveness over the institution of slavery and the continuing fear that the North would ultimately grow powerful enough to force its abolition, a threat that became acute with Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.
The secession of the 11 Confederate states became the ultimate expression of Jefferson's earlier political efforts to circumscribe the intent of the Constitution. In that sense, the Civil War and Lincoln's abolition of slavery represented the defeat of Thomas Jefferson as much as Confederate President Jefferson Davis. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Rethinking Thomas Jefferson."]
Enduring Legacies
However, the legacies of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis could not be so easily eradicated. After Robert E. Lee's surrender and Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, Southern white aristocrats were determined to reestablish their political clout and to prevent blacks from achieving full civil rights as citizens, including the right for black men to vote.
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