494
Interpreting and Preserving the Constitution
tion and Federal laws. Neither Kentucky nor Virginia interfered with the
enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Kentucky Resolution acknowledged, in fact, ‘‘That although this commonwealth, as a party to
the Federal compact, will bow to the laws of the Union, yet it does at the
same time declare, that it will not now, or ever hereafter, cease to oppose
in a constitutional manner, every attempt . . . to violate that compact.’’ Like
Congress and the President, the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures, therefore, were merely claiming that they too had a right to interpret the Constitution, not that they had the right to be its final interpreter.
In one memorable instance, as we noted, a State supreme court did
challenge the Supreme Court of the United States on a question of constitutional interpretation. This was the case of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee in
which Spencer Roane, the Chief Justice of Virginia’s highest court, argued that his court was not necessarily bound by Supreme Court precedents. Roane did not argue, however, that State courts were the final interpreters of the Constitution.
States’ Rightists obeyed the decisions of the Supreme Court, but they
continued to reject the Court’s theory of the nature of the Union all the
way down to the spring of 1865, when General Robert E. Lee, leader of
the Confederate Army, surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia, to General
Ulysses S. Grant, head of the Union forces. Thus in the final phase of this
lengthy constitutional debate the issue was resolved on the battlefield,
against the States. In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court later declared that the States never possessed the right to secede from the Union,
which is ‘‘indissoluble,’’ and that the State of Texas, like the other States
of the Confederacy, had, from a constitutional standpoint, never left the
Union. Strictly speaking, concluded the Court, the Confederate States
had been in a state of insurrection during the Civil War, and had not
achieved sovereignty or independence in a legal sense.
Although the Interposition, Nullification, and Secessionist doctrines
were southern in origin, it should not be overlooked that there were faithful adherents to these principles of interpretation throughout the Union.
To be sure, the first serious political movement toward secession occurred
in New England at the Hartford Convention of 1815. Prominent New England Federalists, representing Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire, convened in the city of Hartford,