After the Civil War, men hungry for power worked to weaken the sovereign powers of the states. Washington had assumed enough sovereignty to defeat in war 11 of the states. The federal army held them under martial law for 5 years. The military power that the Federal Government possessed was something that every American now reckoned with and feared. Everyone knew that Washington could use its army against whomever it wished and that it was further solidifying its power with a federal police force and federal prisons. The radical Republicans in power in Congress after Lincoln’s assassination had supported the war and now did everything possible to further reduce state sovereignty. They tried to impeach Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-president, who succeeded him to the presidency. He was against the movement towards expanded federal power and wanted to restore the Washington government and the union to their prewar status. He survived his impeachment trial in Congress by one vote. In law and in fact, the federal government was no more sovereign now than it had been before the war, but the Republican party understood with fervor that something close to full sovereignty could at last be seized by a united group of men. They expanded federal power by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution. They used the court system to strike down state laws that opposed federal policies or tried to regulate business practices.
Everything worked against the sovereignty of the states and towards the sovereignty of the Federal Government. Everything except the Constitution. The Constitution does not assign full sovereign power to any state. Instead it takes sovereign powers away from all the states of the union and gives sovereign powers to a central government that is not located in a state. It not only refuses to the Federal Government the status of a state but also separates its power among three branches, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The Constitution makes no government completely sovereign and forces every one of them to be democratic. The Federal Government marched ahead after the Civil War towards the status of a national state without being a state and the states, weakened by the war, believed they had lost the status as states with nearly full sovereign power that they had had before the war. The rush towards the creation of postwar America as a nation was based on the fiction that the Constitution had created a national government located in Washington D.C.. At the same time, the states suffered from the fiction that the ratification of the Constitution had left them with nearly full sovereign power when in reality such a degree of power had already been taken away from them by the Constitution. The Constitution had limited the powers of all American governments to such a radical degree that they were all doomed forever to be capable of functioning only as democracies.
But the radical Republicans had nonetheless discovered that a political party with branches and supporters in every state could wield sovereign powers from the top down if it could establish solid political centers of power in all the states from the bottom up. The Constitution could be amended but it could never award full sovereignty to any government. The two party system became the only route towards the exercise of something close to full sovereignty by Washington. The two party system is in full force today but so is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the entire legal system of the union, both state and federal, would be nullified. Without it, all the states would become fully sovereign and separate nation-states. The Washington government would still be a non-state agency located in a stateless district but its powers would be invalid because it would no longer have the supreme power and duty of organizing states into a just union. Two political parties can continue to fight for supreme central power but without the Constitution and the Union, no power would exist that they could seize.
Daniel McNeill
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