The differences between the nationalist and state rights schools were, however, deep-rooted—­altogether too fundamental to be obliterated by even the nationalizing swing of the war period; and in a brief time the old controversy of Hamilton and Jefferson was renewed on the former lines.  The pull of political tradition and of sectional interest was too strong to be resisted.  In the commercial and industrial East tradition and interest supported, in general, the doctrine of broad national powers; and the same was true of the West and Northwest.  The South, however, inclined to limited national powers, large functions for the States, and such a construction of the Constitution as would give the benefit of the doubt in all cases to the States.

The political theory current south of the Potomac and the Ohio made of state rights a fetish.  Yet the powerful sectional reaction which set in after 1820 against the nationalizing tendency had as its main impetus the injustice which the Southern people felt had been done to them through the use of the nation’s larger powers.  They objected to the protective tariff as a device which not only brought the South no benefit but interfered with its markets and raised the cost of certain of its staple supplies.  They opposed internal improvements at national expense because of their consolidating tendency, and because few of the projects carried out were of large advantage to the Southern people.  They regarded the National Bank as at best useless; and they resisted federal legislation imposing restrictions on slavery as prejudicial to vested rights in the “peculiar institution.”

After 1820 the pendulum swung rapidly back toward particularism.  State rights sentiment was freely expressed by men, both Southern and Northern, whose views commanded respect; and in more than one State—­notably in Ohio and Georgia—­bold actions proclaimed this sentiment to be no mere matter of academic opinion.  Ohio in 1819 forcibly collected a tax on the United States Bank in defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of M’Culloch vs. Maryland; and in 1821 her Legislature reaffirmed the doctrines of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions and persisted in resistance, even after the Supreme Court had rendered a decision[9] specifically against the position which the State had taken.  Judge Roane of Virginia, in a series of articles in the Richmond Enquirer, argued that the Federal Union was a compact among the States and that the nationalistic reasoning of his fellow Virginian, Marshall, in the foregoing decisions was false; and Jefferson heartily endorsed his views.  In Cohens vs. Virginia, in 1821, the Supreme Court held that it had appellate jurisdiction in a case decided by a state court where the Constitution and laws of the United States were involved, even though a State was a party; whereupon the Virginia House of Delegates declared that the State’s lawyers had been right in their contention that final construction of the Constitution lay with the courts of the States.  Jefferson, also, gave this assertion his support, and denounced the centralizing tendencies of the Judiciary, “which, working like gravity without any intermission, is to press us at last into one consolidated mass.”