... the streets [in small town Alabama], lined with enormous columned mansions built from cotton wealth derived from land stolen from the Creeks and labor stolen from Africa.
30,000 angry Alabamians rejoiced over what they considered the defeat of the unjust Federal government.
States' rights emerged as a result of land swindles.
The inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow, however appropriate, tends to figure most centrally in questions of states' rights and local sovereignty. Overlooked, however, is the appropriation of Indigenous lands where ... arguments about states' rights and white freedom were first worked out.
George Washington's secretary of war, Henry Knox: "There can be neither Justice or observance of treaties, where every man claims to be the sole Judge in his own cause, and the avenger of his own supposed wrongs."...
Instead of the Federalist vision, the notion of a Jeffersonian and Jacksonian idea of republican freedom bound the connections among self-rule, economic independence, and state sovereignty directly to domination -- political,ideological, and military -- of the Indigenous peoples. Freedom shaped by exclusion, freedom combined with power, freedom tied to states' rights, freedom based on theft: these factors became so unconsciously intertwined as to be synonymous with the central aspect of the American creed. The freedom ideal proved so powerful ... that it helped lead the cause of Alabama seceding from the union altogether.
[Jefferson Cowie in his book Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2012), pp 91-93]
