The Menace Of State Rights Marshall's reading of the Constitution may be summarized in a phrase: it transfixed State Sovereignty with a two-edged sword, one edge of which was inscribed "National Supremacy," and the other "Private Rights." Yet State Sovereignty, ever reanimated by the democratic impulse of the times, remained a serpent which was scotched but not killed. To be sure, this dangerous enemy to national unity had failed to secure for the state Legislatures the right to interpret the Constitution with authoritative finality; but its argumentative resources were still far from exhausted, and its political resources were steadily increasing. It was still capable of making a notable resistance even in withdrawing itself, until it paused in its recoil and flung itself forward in a new attack. The connecting link between the Supreme Court and the state courts has already been pointed out to be Section XXV of the Act of 1789 organizing the Federal Judiciary. ¹ This section provides, in effect, that when a suit is brought in a state court under a state law, and the party against whom it is brought claims some right under a national law or treaty or under the Constitution itself, the highest state court into which the case can come must either sustain such a claim or consent to have its decision reviewed, and possibly reversed, by the Supreme Court. The defenders of State Rights at first applauded this arrangement because it left to the local courts the privilege of sharing a jurisdiction which could have been claimed exclusively by the Federal Courts. But when State Rights began to grow into State Sovereignty, a different attitude developed, and in 1814 the Virginia Court of Appeals, in the case of Hunter vs. Martin, ² pronounced Section XXV void, though, in order not to encourage the disloyal tendencies then rampant in New England, the decision was not published until after the Treaty of Ghent, in February, 1815. ¹ See pages 14-15. ² 4 Munford (Va.), 1. See also William E. Dodd's article on Chief Justice Marshall and Virginia in American Historical Review, vol. XII, p. 776.