The Supreme Court Case that Proves that the Antebellum South Wasn’t Really Concerned with States Rights

Mr. Finkenbine is Professor of History and Director of the Black Abolitionist Archives at the University of Detroit Mercy.


A few days ago, Texas adopted new social studies textbooks, based on recently-approved state standards. These textbooks imply that sectionalism and states rights were the primary causes of the Civil War; slavery was, at most, a secondary motive. Pat Hardy, a member of the board that created the new state standards, asserts that slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War. . . . There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states rights.” Similar claims have been heard from opponents of the recent efforts to take down the Confederate battle flag in the wake of the mass shooting at Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. It is to correct such historical misrepresentations that I regularly introduce my students to the little-known U.S. Supreme Court case of Ableman v. Booth.
The origins of the case came in 1852 when Joshua Glover, a Missouri slave, fled to the free state of Wisconsin and settled near Racine. Two years later, his owner, Benjamin S. Garland, tracked him there. Utilizing provisions of the recently-enacted federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Garland obtained a warrant for Glover’s capture from the federal fugitive slave commissioner in the area. With the assistance of a deputy marshal, he forced his way into Glover’s cabin, physically assaulted him, bound him, and escorted him to the jail in Milwaukee, where he was placed in federal custody. When this became known, Sherman W. Booth, a local abolitionist and the editor of an antislavery newspaper, obtained a writ of habeas corpus from a county judge for Glover’s release. Noting that the slave was in federal custody and was captured under federal law, Steven V. Ableman, the U.S. marshal responsible for holding Glover, refused to honor the order of the lower court. Before long, a crowd broke into the jail and rescued Glover; he was never recaptured.



http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159936

Silly.  State's Rights only became an issue because of slavery.  It is a single trick pony.

HistoryNet wrote:What brought the question of states’ rights to the fore was changing attitudes toward slavery. Northern abolitionists began vehemently assailing the institution and the states that continued to practice it, nearly all of them below the Mason-Dixon Line.

The Constitution, in 1789, altered the notion of independent states.  Article Six made the Constitution the supreme law of the land.  The prerogative of the individual states was relegated to the Tenth Amendment.  It was at this point that ...these united states became The United States.

Ableman v. Booth was a side-show, proving only that an issue is apt to have several incarnations over it's lifetime. Indeed, from the standpoint of the practicing lawyer, it is the aim to analogize fact patterns to existing case law. (Indeed, even Abelman involved slavery at its core.) Nevertheless, that has nothing to do with history and historical themes, which is about social ideology and not esoteric court cases.

Only secession reinvigorated states rights.  And secession was for reasons of slavery.