Dual federalism
The states' motives for such a debate have been largely understood as a method for ensuring a strong voice in the federal government so as to maintain a desired degree of sovereignty.
Ogden, citing the monopoly granted to him by the Fulton-Livingstone Company, had successfully prevented Thomas Gibbons from operating a ferry service between Manhattan and New Jersey.
While the constitutionality of some aspects implied by the case remained vague, the decision once more reaffirmed the supremacy of federal law and diminished the power of state-sanctioned protectionism.
These conflicts struck at the heart of dual federalism, and reflected a fundamental disagreement about the division of power between the national and state levels.
[14] While these political battles were ostensibly solved either through legislative compromise or Supreme Court decisions, the underlying tensions and disagreements about states’ rights would later help set the stage for the Civil War.
[15] It was meant as a protectionist measure to help the relatively industrialized New England states against international products, but this had grave implications for the largely agrarian South.
[16] In protest and spearheaded by Vice President John Calhoun, South Carolina formulated a "nullification doctrine", in effect claiming a state's ability to ignore federal law, and rejected the tariff.
[17] The situation became especially serious when President Jackson ordered federal troops into Charleston, though crisis was averted by the drafting of a new tariff to which both sides agreed.
[1] In 1857, continuing the debate between the national government and free states, the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford held that all Americans of African descent were not legally citizens, and therefore could not file suit.
[22] The Civil War brought to a head many of the fundamental disagreements concerning the extent of state and federal powers which presidential candidates Lincoln and Douglas had debated between 1858 and 1860.
[23] Douglas, an advocate of federal government limited by a strict interpretation of the Constitution, championed the vision of America as “the confederation of the sovereign states".
In addition, the Court ruled in favor of states' rights to mandate racially segregated accommodations, so long as they were "separate but equal" in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Although law professor Eugene Gressman views these rulings as a "judicially directed perversion"[26] of what the abolitionists meant to accomplish, within historical context the Supreme Court decisions seem more occupied with sustaining the system of dual federalism.
In making these decisions, the Supreme Court aimed to keep in line with the idea of federalism as it then existed, balancing states' rights with the protection of civil liberties, rather than simply opposing the new amendments.
The general consensus among scholars is that dual federalism ended during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency in 1937[30][31][32][33][34][35][36] when the New Deal policies were decided constitutional by the Supreme Court.
[33] Industrialization, economic modernization, and conditions surrounding the Great Depression elevated commerce to a more national level, so there was an overlap in the powers of the federal government and the states.
[30][31][36][1] The governments of Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Comoros, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Micronesia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Spain, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela also operate through federalism.
