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appendix a State Resistance to Federal Authority in the United States For the reader interested in the empirical foundation of the analysis of American state resistance patterns provided in Chapter 1, Appendix A simply provides a more comprehensive narrative account of state resistance to federal authority in the first several decades of U.S. history. The sources for these narratives appear in the notes to Table 3.  [1790] After delaying ratification of the U.S. Constitution until after the First Congress convened, North Carolina eventually did ratify in November 1789, but evident discomfort about submitting to federal authority showed up in both the legislative and judicial branches in 1790. State legislators in the Assembly voted down a proposal that they and all other state officers be required to take an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, despite the clear command of Article 6, Section 3: “Members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers . . . of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution.” In the same year, the highest court of North Carolia (called the Superior Court) refused to obey a writ from a federal court to turn over a case for a federal decision. The case involved a land dispute between British subjects and executors of a North Carolinian estate. The North Carolina legislature formally ratified the state court’s refusal to comply with the federal order. [1793–98] In February 1793 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its first decision , Chisholm v. Georgia. The decision allowed state governments to be sued by creditors. Georgia refused to let the verdict be executed, legislating the death penalty for any attempt to do so. The Court’s decision was so unpopular that the U.S. Constitution was amended by 1798 to overturn it (through a two-third’s vote in each house of the federal Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states). [1794] In Pennsylvania, nongovernmental armed resistance to the federal tax on whiskey—the Whiskey Rebellion—caused the president to call up more than 12,000 troops from the militia of four neighboring states to quell the rebellion. [1796] In Ware v. Hylton, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a Virginia law that had authorized payment of the commonwealth’s Revolutionary War debts in depreciated currency. Virginia delayed complying with the decision , thereby evading its consequences until the more sympathetic, post-1800 (Jeffersonian ) Congress paid off the debts. [1798] In Respublica v. Cobbett, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court refused to allow the removal of a case to a federal appellate court, claiming there existed “no common umpire but the people” who can amend the Constitution to resolve disputes over the boundary between state and federal power. The case concerned a British subject of Federalist Party sympathies who had been charged in state court with libeling Jeffersonian politicians. The state supreme court explicitly denied that the U.S. Constitution authorized the U.S. Supreme Court to control state courts (despite the constitutional wording evidently to the contrary, as described in Chapter 1), and the state judges likened the Constitution to an international treaty that, short of war, would have to be renegotiated if the parties differed as to its meaning. [1798–99] In response to the federal (and Federalist Party–sponsored) Alien and Sedition Acts regulating seditious libel, the Jeffersonian legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia issued resolutions declaring it the right and duty of each commonwealth to determine the bounds of federal power under the national Constitution and to protect those bounds by interposing state authority between the citizens and the federal government, nullifying the illegitimate act within state borders . Kentucky declared these federal laws “void and of no force,” and Virginia declared them “palpable infractions of the Constitution.” Kentucky strengthened and reissued the resolution in 1799. Seven other states condemned the resolutions . The controversial federal laws were allowed to lapse by the post-1800 Jeffersonian-dominated Congress. [1803–9] The U.S. District Court in 1803 decided Olmstead et al. v. Rittenhouse ’s Executrices, a dispute over property seized by the state during the Revolutionary War. The Pennsylvania legislature then enacted a law contrary to the court decree and authorized the governor to use the state militia to oppose enforcement of the federal court order. In United States v. Peters (1809), the U.S. Supreme Court condemned the state assumption of power to nullify federal court decrees. The Pennsylvania legislature then...

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