Reply #30: The only "Southern rights" that were spoken of before the war [View All]

"were always tied to the right to enslave, to enjoy their property undisturbed, and to take it where they pleased."

"That law and that judicial system the South most praised in the 1850s both mocked states' rights to aid slavery. Roger Taney for the Supreme Court said that blacks could not be citizens, despite what many states wished to do and had long done. And the South's best-loved law, that against fugitive slaves, was the one that asserted federal authority over traditional state powers and perogatives most completely. State courts, state law, state officials, and the will of the state's citizens were to be sacrificed to federal power to regaina few head of runaway chattel, whose dark skin overrode any state's right to determine its own citizenship."

David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1821-1861: Toward Civil War, 264-65.