Robert Lewis Dabney was a prominent Presbyterian minister in Virginia who once served as chief of staff to Stonewall Jackson.
He was a great man who saw clearly the challenges of his time.
Jonathan White, Abbeville Institute:
In April 1861, Dabney argued that the Northern interpretation of the reserved rights of the states asserted some dubious positions: “If … a ruthless majority may perpetrate unconstitutional wrong, may trample on the sacred authority of the Supreme Court, and may pervert all the powers of the federal government, instituted for the equal good of all, to the depression of a class of rights as much recognized by the constitution as any other, and the minority have no remedy except submission; … If you mean that one party is to keep or break the compact as his arrogance, interest, or caprice, may dictate, and the other is to be held bound by it at the point of the sword; If you mean that a sovereign State is not to be the judge of its own wrong and its own redress, when all constitutional appeals have failed; Then … this much lauded federal compact a monstrous fraud; a horrid trap and we do well to free ourselves and our children from it.”[20] Dabney here presented a statement infused with States’ Rights philosophy.
The States, according to Dabney, had reserved rights, and Virginia had expressly reserved the right to resume delegated powers should the powers delegated be perverted to her injury or oppression. Virginia, Dabney wrote, “expressly reserved to herself, the right to sever its bonds, whenever she judged they were used injuriously to her covenanted rights. It was on this condition she was received into the family of States.”[21] Dabney wondered whether Virginia would “be called covenant-breaker, because she judges that the time has come to exercise her right expressly reserved?”[22] Dabney felt that Virginia’s right to determine whether the Constitution had been violated, as well as “the mode and measure of redress.” This comes right out of the Kentucky Resolutions. Virgina’s “right to go out of [the Union] whenever she judged herself injured by it, was expressly reserved, and conceded from the first.”[23] Reserved rights do not have to be expressly reserved, but Virginia had, for additional caution, expressly reserved the right to recall delegated powers. In April 1861, Virginia recalled her delegated powers and left the Union.
Finally, Dabney argued that the states had created the federal government as their servant. The “sovereign States, [were] the creators by their free act, of these federal authorities.”[24] Dabney asked his northern friend, if the states “are to be the helpless slaves, in the last resort, of their own servant?”[25]
After the war, Dabney continued these States’ Rights themes in his book The Life of Jackson. The states created the federal government: the “former colonies of Great Britain … voluntarily formed a covenant, called the Constitution …a government which was the creature of the sovereign States, acting as independent nations in forming it.”[26]
The states delegated certain enumerated powers to the federal government. “This compact conferred certain defined powers and duties upon the Central Government, for purposes common to all the States alike, and expressly reserved and prohibited the exercise of all other powers, leaving to the States the management of their own affairs. … By compact, they conceded some of the functions of an independent nation,[27] particularly defined, to the Central Government, retaining all the rest as before.”[28]
The States reserved everything not delegated to the federal government. “They did not,” according to Dabney, “sacrifice their nature as sovereignties, by acceding to the Federal Union.”[29] Echoing Jefferson, Dabney stated, “The States themselves must be the judges whether the covenant was destroyed, and judges too of the necessity and nature of their redress.”[30]
Some might try to tarnish Dabney’s legacy on matters such as race and slavery. I do not because he was a man of his time and place; and he correctly represented biblical norms and priorities in defense of his positions.
On the matter of the historic constitutional order, he was precisely right and well-spoken. And he was nearly prophetic on what the impacts would be of some of the changes that were being forced upon the states.
The factors that led southern states to secede were complex and multifaceted. These states had numerous longstanding, justified grievances against the North.
Today, we have an immense federal government wielding vast unconstitutional powers. This problem did not begin in the 1960’s, with FDR or with Woodrow Wilson. It began in the 1800’s; and the Civil War was the early, transformational event that led to our current state of affairs.
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