I figured something out about America today. The notion of “states’ rights” ended when the South seceded from the union and Lincoln had to fight a nasty war to put it back together. 1
Fighting that war demanded lots of new bureaucratic infrastructure, and that’s when the Federal government became a Big Thing, and simultaneously that’s when the rights of states became subordinate to the Federal government. 2
Before the South seceded, it was considered normal that individual states could have their own very particular laws and ways of doing things that were off-limits to any Federal oversight. "State’s rights” carried a lot of water in the ante-bellum USA. 3
It’s not a coincidence that the concept of “states’ rights” is very important in the South, because it basically was a euphemism for slavery. 4
I believe that even today, the phrase “states’ rights” really means white supremacy to those who stridently demand those rights. 5
But the American consensus has always been that slavery is bad and should be abolished. The only people who advocated for it were the slave owners, slave traders, and their lickspittles. And while they had a lot of money (made off the slave’s backs) they were always a minority. 6
The North wanted to respect the rights of Southern states, but they believed that slavery had to go. That’s really the only change that the Yankees wanted. The South believed that slavery would be—quite literally—the hill they would die on. 7
The consequence of secession was militarization of the North, but first, the North had to create civic infrastructure to administer to the military (it’s very American that the military reports to civilians). 8
And the upshot of that civil infrastructure was the death of the rights of states. It took a Federal government to end slavery, and it took a Federal govt to try to reconstruct the South (the South didn’t want it). 9
As far as I’m concerned, the states haven’t done much good with what remains of their “rights”, so I think that it is a fine thing that the rights of states are diminished to insignificance. Serves the South right. 10
