State's Rights and Nullification

State's rights were a huge part of why the southern states that seceded did so in the first place. South Carolina, the state that started the seceding frenzy, was one of the absolute biggest advocates of state's rights all through the civil war. What I mean by state's rights is that the southern states all felt that they had the given right to do what was best for themselves. These things included feelings that the Fugitive slave act, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was absolutely necessary for southern states because if northern people were not returning slaves, which were considered property, the south would be living with the loss of billions of dollars of property, which is a ton of money. Southern states called it unconstitutional to not require the return of slaves. Yet another way that states argued for their rights was the right to vote for whether or not they wanted slavery, because it was considered unfair for the South to have an unbalanced ratio of slave states to non-slave states in the house of representatives. Subsequent events that led to the argument for state's rights was when the northern states began to ignore the fugitive slave acts, and as a result of state's rights arguments, the congress did in fact back up the fugitive slave act. The biggest argument was that of nullification of laws passed by congress, which South Carolina's John C. Calhoun exerted tremendously. This means that when a state did not like something the government passed, they could deny to follow that law. Many laws were passed that led up to this event which made the south unhappy and edgy, and it led to the south ultimately seceding from the union. Calhoun stated that nullification was needed because "the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium of the two sections was destroyed.", of course referring to the south. 

 John C. Calhoun

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-overview/statesrights.html
en.wikipedia.org
www.uen.org