States' Rights is a doctrine and strategy in which the rights of the individual states are protected by the U.S. Constitution from interference by the federal government.
According to Encyclopedia.com, states' rights played a major role in the U.S. political process from the early 1800s until the end of the Civil War in 1865.
The doctrine was most fully articulated in the writings of South Carolina statesman and political theorist John C. Calhoun. He contended that if acts of the federal government ran contrary to state or local interests, then states had the right to nullify said acts.
Calhoun further proposed that states had the right to dissolve their contractual relationship with the federal government rather than submit to policies they saw as destructive to their local self-interests. His followers linked states' rights to slavery, and thus, protecting slavery became the equivalent of protecting regional Southern interests.
Read more about the South Carolina Nullification Controversy at ushistory.org.
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