Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy (review)

In a short 1999 article, William Watkins proposed that "secession is the quintessence of Americanism" (http://www.mises.org/story/223). He has now written a book-length treatise developing this fairly unconventional take on the nation's political tradition. In doing so, Watkins has chosen his evidence selectively, overlooking a wide range of scholarship that may have forced him to qualify his claims. Rather than a careful and balanced assessment of the resolutions and their place in the nation's political history, this book is a briskly argued brief on behalf of a version of American federalism in which state nullification has been retrieved from the dustbin of southern history, stripped of its association with slavery (according to Watkins "recent scholarship has shown that there was no nexus between . . . nullification and the preserv[ation] of slavery" [117]), and repositioned at the center of the nation's constitutional tradition. The last half of the book traces how a small band of virtuous Americans have reclaimed the legacy of 1798 in their efforts to protect the "original purity" of "our constitutional compact" (154) against forces such as "the Lincoln dictatorship" (148), the "War on the Republic" (120, more commonly known as the Civil War), the regulatory apparatus that emerged in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and the "chains" Americans have "forge[d] . . . for themselves" with programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (159).

Watkins is strongest when he outlines the thinking behind the 1798 resolutions, particularly Jefferson's. While he is not the first to note that Jefferson advocated Virginia and Kentucky's secession from the union in 1798, he goes further than most historians in suggesting that this strong emphasis on state sovereignty, rooted in the compact theory of the Constitution, lay at the core of Jefferson's and perhaps even Madison's vision of federalism. When Watkins extends this claim to assert that nullification was one of "the first principles of the American Revolution" (1) and a central component of the broader political thought of the founding era, he is on much shakier ground. After all, the Kentucky legislature, led by John Breckinridge, significantly muted the language that Jefferson had sent them. They removed the term "nullification" from the resolution and excised Jefferson's suggestion that they correspond with other states in order to encourage coordinated resistance across the nation. Watkins does not trace out the political machinations within the Kentucky legislature, so we have no idea whether Breckinridge was representative of his fellow legislators or was imposing moderation upon an otherwise radical assembly. Watkins also acknowledges that no other state in the union responded positively to Kentucky's watered-down resolution, and indeed, most rejected the argument even after the radical language of nullification had been excised. Meanwhile, the Virginia resolution authored by Madison never broached the doctrine of state nullification. That should not come as much of a surprise, since in 1787 Madison had advocated a federal veto over state laws. But since Watkins has already decided that the principles of nullification lay at the core of the American political tradition, he quickly passes over such inconvenient details.

When Watkins extends his investigation into the nineteenth century, his account suffers from a similar paucity of concrete evidence and an overreliance on one figure, in this case John C. Calhoun. Considering the current historical interest around questions of memory and the invention of tradition, one might expect that a chapter on the "legacy of the resolutions" would provide an examination of how a range of political actors in the nineteenth century created that legacy by deploying and reconfiguring the memory of 1798 in new contexts. Unfortunately, the only evidence Watkins provides of such action is in 1828 when Calhoun made explicit reference to the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in a piece critical of the tariff. The reader is left to wonder whether anyone else had either attacked or...