Finding Ourselves Again: A Conversation With Nicole Williams, Part I

Is there anything that unifies us right now?

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a transcription of an interview conducted earlier this year with Nicole Williams, who will introduce herself. Ms. Williams is among the most knowledgeable I’ve ever encountered with respect to American history, so I wanted to do this interview with her in hopes that readers will not only come to realize how little we’ve been actually taught of our own history, but also change the way they look at their country. As America undergoes a tremendous upheaval and its accompanying transformation, it’s now more important than ever before to learn who we really are and where we’ve been. The real story of America isn’t the story our educators and leaders have told us.

I also hope this interview will be among the first of many more to come. There are many figures I’d love to have similar conversations with, so I hope you enjoy this talk with Ms. Williams and that you will come to demand more such talks with others in the future.

[Transcription edited for brevity and clarity]

Let’s begin by having you introduce yourself: Who are you, where are you from, and what are you all about?

My name is Nicole Williams, I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, although I am talking to you from Atlanta, Georgia, or the metro Atlanta area, anyway. I’m a native of Georgia, back in America after three-plus years living in the UK and my research focus, which I hope to finish by the end of May, was originally cultural history with a focus on the Scots-Irish of the Carolinas. I’m working on a comparative cultural study in the uses of ritualized communal violence in the north of Ireland and in the Carolinas from 1760 to 1840.

Prior to that, I worked 15 years in corporate IT in Atlanta and New Orleans and I also worked for the president of the New Orleans city council, a Richmond, Virginia city councilman, and I worked as a staffer in the House of Commons in the British Parliament for a time, about five years ago.

That’s a pretty impressive pedigree. I think I speak for all of us when I say that I wish you all the best in your academic and scholarly journey.

So, if you had one chance to tell Americans only one thing they ought to know about their country, dispel a misconception, debunk conventional wisdom, what would that be?

That’s a tall order. I’d probably begin with the fact that we are supposed to have decentralized governments in this country. Too many Americans tend to think we are a centralized state, that America’s a unitary state, that we’re all Americans, and that means we’re all supposed to have the same cultural beliefs, traditions, heritage. That wasn’t true in 1776, it wasn’t true when the Constitution was brought up for ratification in 1787, and it is extraordinarily not true in 2024.

We are an incredibly culturally and geographically diverse federal - meaning decentralized - republic made up of 50 states, 50 states that are sovereign, that surrendered a limited amount of authority to the federal government. Emphasis limited, and the states’ are supposed to retain everything else, and the fact we are now fighting with each other the way that we are is because we are an incredibly diverse federal republic and we all want to push our beliefs that may fly in our corner of the world onto other Americans who have different beliefs about how the country ought to be run and the responsibility of government and what should be appropriate cultural norms where they live.

So that’s a perfect jump-off point because the people in charge today, who I like to call “The Regime,” they cite America as a multicultural society. They say diversity is our greatest strength. Now, you agree that America is a very diverse country, but you also highlighted the tension that exists: despite being very diverse, we’re all, on some level, expected to be exactly the same in the sense that we have the same cultural values from coast to coast.

How do you reconcile that? Because to someone to me, that makes absolutely no sense and as I like to say on my blog, it’s not supposed to make sense. But how does something so contradictory remain so prevalent and so dominant with respect to our national lore and our national creed, to the extent that we have one?

I would probably say that a lot of this comes from pure ignorance. Americans don’t know anything about their country. This is something that’s eroded away since probably the 1850s. Each generation, we lose a little bit of something to the point that for the most patriotic Americans, it’s just little flags made in China that appear to be American flags, eagles, maybe a little Lee Greenwood, and that’s the extent of what it means to be an American. Maybe throw around some words like “freedom” and “liberty.” But those words are defined differently by different people. One person’s liberty may mean a libertine attitudes toward anything and everything, but also means that the state should protect peoples’ right to do anything and everything. Another person may have a libertarian attitude: “Yank yourself up by your bootstraps, the government shouldn’t do anything.” These things just mean completely different things in different parts of the country. This was true in 1776 and its been true throughout the country’s history.

The only reason that we don’t know any better is that we’re living in kind of a fading twilight of this nationalistic fervor that swept the United States after the end of World War II. Americans didn’t get along even in the 1930s. What we think of America is an abberation in the history of our republic. And the problem is, of course, the federal government oversteps its bounds and people being wholly and completely ignorant of these things. They want what they want and are willing to use the force of government to push their will for what they see as honestly American down on anyone else and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a terrible person, a traitor, an insurrectionist, a dissident, all the way down to words like “fascist,” “Nazi,” take your pick.

Is there anything that unifies us right now?

[long pause]

No.

Okay! [laughter]

Maybe 20 years ago, maybe I could’ve found something. But right now? No, not really.

You mentioned the end of World War II. A good friend of mine remarked on one of my recent blog posts regarding that 80-year cycle of crisis and that’s something we’re going to get into a little bit later, but I want to just get into it now while it’s still fresh in my mind. He says that currently we are 160 years or almost removed from the American Civil War and that halfway point was around the time World War II broke out. It’s very interesting to me when you look back during that time that there internal tensions in the country. The stock market had crashed, the Great Depression had more or less passed, and then you also had people like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin emerging during that time.

How important was World War II with respect to America’s continuity? In other words, and I realize this might be kind of a difficult question because there’s some historical retconning that might need to take place, but if World War II hadn’t happened and also if the U.S. had not emerged victorious in World War II, where would we be today? Would America even exist today?

That’s a complicated question to answer. Let’s assume that either America hadn’t entered World War II or that the Allies had been defeated. I seriously doubt there would’ve been an Axis occupation of North America. America would probably exist, but it would exist in a much more decentralized state. America inadvertently - a lot of people don’t like to hear this - took up the mantle of empire. More economic and military than it was actually going out and occupying land.

After World War II, an empire boosts up a lot of hubris in a population. It makes people feel, especially for the people who experienced hardship, that it was worth it, like we accomplished something, we’re passing this onto the next generation. For us, after World War II, it was economic vitality and opening up of consumerism. Most Americans, up until the 1950s, were incredibly poor by today’s standards. We all think that “standard of living” is just running down to the store, grabbing whatever you want to eat, ordering things on GrubHub or whatnot and going and buying whatever you want. That’s not the way most people could’ve ever lived. And that’s not a thing that would’ve occurred to anybody.

But once you got saturated by that, inadvertently, we became a little “dumb.” A little ignorant of the reality of the world. We’re living in a fantasy world.

Interesting. That’s definitely a topic we can come back to some later point in time, the impact World War II had on the future viability of the United States. But let’s go back to the very beginning. Who were we at the very beginning? What were the different groups and nations that ultimately formed what we’ve come to know as the United States?

There were four main waves of immigration, which left a dramatic footprint on what became the United States. That’s not the totality of the people that made up the early United States, but those are the waves of immigration who came from self-segregated areas within the British Isles that left a cultural footprint. For good or bad, these people didn’t get along with each other, nor were they culturally homogeneous. They didn’t see eye to eye, and as such they self segregated themselves apart from one another along the eastern seaboard in the 17th to 19th century.

And those were English-speaking Americans, of course, starting with Jamestown, which were largely, originally people from in and around London who came with the Virginia Company seeking profit in the form of gold and and other exotic minerals. Well, that didn't really pan out, but what did pan out was the fact that there was a large availability of land. And before anybody jumps ahead and say, Oh well, they stole the land from the natives!, a lot of the native population had been utterly depleted through the arrival of settlers in other parts of the Americas, from Spain who had inadvertently bought with them European diseases, which they didn’t bring on purpose. It’s just the native population had no immunity to them and it literally wiped them out much in the same way that the bubonic plague spread across Europe, which is why that land was taken so easily.

That area of Virginia was also later populated by gentlemen, a lot of whom were the second and third sons of the English aristocracy that came from southwest England, and those are the people that really led the Virginia Tidewater/Maryland/Eastern North Carolina into an agrarian economic and cultural powerhouse of which resulted in George Washington, the Jeffersons, Madison, Monroe, etc.

And then of course you have the Pilgrims and later Puritans who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts and spread throughout New England. A lot of those people came from East Anglia, which is along the North Sea, up from Kent to around Norfolk in points northward. They had a very communal attitude toward liberty that, in other words, the needs and desires of the community were the most important thing. The individual was not important. You may have heard this before: there was this attitude that they were coming to establish the “city on a hill.” Which was later used by Ronald Reagan and some of his commercials when he ran for president. Well, that city on the hill is Puritan-speak.

And those people did not, in the least, see eye to eye with the established people who were living in and around the eastern part of Virginia, who had a literally cavalier attitude, were into, ordered liberty, social hierarchy. And then there were the Quakers and I’m not an expert in in Quakerdom, but they settled a lot in Pennsylvania. I think a lot of them were or were pacifists, and supposedly the Quakers and Puritans didn’t along with each other, which I couldn’t imagine a worse fate than being stuck in a room with Puritans and Quakers arguing with each other. [laughter]

And probably one of the most prolific of those four waves of immigration were the people who came from northern Britain. And when I say northern Britain, I mean, what is now presently Northern Ireland, southern Scotland, the north of England and scattered other groups of disparate people, many of whom were dissenting Protestants. I think at one point they were they were called the “refuge of humanity.” They tended to be hyper individualistic people. Not all of them, but many of them were kind of a peasantry. It was a migration characterized not by individuals, but of entire families, entire towns, that arrived.

Many of those people originally came in through Philadelphia, figured out that they were not wanted by the Quakers, and they quickly set down through the backcountry and settled in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and into the Carolinas, into the back country of the Carolinas, what’s now upstate South Carolina, into the Piedmont, and so forth in the Appalachian area and the Carolinas. They were people that you commonly referred to as the Scots-Irish, but in reality they were, most of them were from the north of Ireland, but they were also from other areas.

Interesting. Before going any further, you mentioned the Native Americans and obviously you can’t get into who we are and how our story started without bringing them into the discussion. There’s obviously a real moral burden that that seems to rest on many Americans with regards to what happened to the natives. But my question to you is, what is your response to those who say that we stole land from the natives?

That was probably more true as the United States later in the 19th century moved further West. A lot of the land in on the eastern seaboard was traded away by the Native Americans. I can tell you offhand that I’ve read journal articles from people of Scots-Irish heritage as they proceeded through upstate South Carolina. Many the first settler said it was creepy because the land had essentially been deserted, but you could tell people had lived there like they were still remnants of trails. You could tell that there had been more people there. They said it gave them a creepy feeling as if it was haunted. But the people who had inhabited a lot of those settlements were dead.

And they were smatterings of like Cherokee, Catawba Indians and there was conflict as you would imagine. Because you’re going to have conflict anytime different cultures come together. But I want to say that when the disease epidemic came to North America before the landing of the English, it killed up to 90% of the native population. There was no way that the natives could’ve ever held that land to begin with. And it also should be said that they were human beings, no different than Europeans or anyone else on this planet. They would have been just as likely to commit genocide on the Europeans if given the opportunity. They committed genocide on one another.

Again, that’s not downplaying the Native American history on this continent. But for the majority of European, mostly Anglo-Americans, who settled along the eastern seaboard, it wasn’t a huge factor for most of them. They didn’t come over to steal land from the natives. They mostly came over because all the land on the British Isles was gone, and there was literally no chance that anyone could possibly own a piece of land. Which rolls over incidentally, into the same reason that when indentured servants were bought from Europe to work farms and clear land, once their indenture was over, there’s no way that you could keep those people because all they could see on the horizon was more land.

Everyone in the British Isles and other parts of Europe dreamed of owning land, which was not possible because it was all owned by the aristocracy. You’d come to America and become what at the time was called a freeholder. You could actually own your own piece of land and pay very little to next to nothing for it.

So you mentioned indentured servitude. Now, slavery is not necessarily the same thing, but slavery is unfortunately a part of the American story. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Similar to the question that I began this discussion with, is there anything about slavery that you think Americans ought to know that may change the way that they look at slavery?

I’m no scholarly expert in slavery. But everything that I’ve read - I draw a lot from former Emory [University] Professor Eugene Genovese, who was a New York-born Jewish man who came to Emory and became enamored with what he called the “Southern tradition” and died a Southern conservative - there was a lot of nuance in the practice of slavery. Unlike what the 1619 Project likes to say, slavery didn’t began in 1619 in Virginia. There were Africans who were forcibly taken, like other poor Europeans were to Virginia in 1619, but they weren’t slaves. They were indentured servants. Slavery was first codified into law in Massachusetts, and I want to say it was 1640. You might want to double-check me on that, but I’m sure it was 1640. It did not become codified in Virginia until the late 1640s, early 1650s.

The court case that codified it was brought by a Black man who had been an indentured servant, had become a land owner, and decided he wanted to force his Black indentures indentured servants to stay and work his land. I want to say his name was Anthony Johnson; obviously, this was an Anglicized name that he was either given or had taken on. Not much is known about Anthony Johnson. He could have been born in Virginia, or he could have been born in Africa, but he had no qualms about trying to codify slavery into law so that he could find workers for his plantation. It became useful to have people to work the land. However, slavery was not what many people think it was until much later, after the invention of the cotton gin.

Many people in the South and in the North had one or two slaves on their farm. They were used as almost just hands to help out with labor. Overly large plantations, as we think of them, did not exist until the ability to process cotton as a cash crop became possible toward the end of the 18th century. And that is when you had an explosion in slavery and the fact that the slave trade was closed legally - bringing Africans over was closed in the early 19th century - made slavery that much more profitable because you couldn’t just go get people off of a ship who were sold at ports in Africa and buy them. You had to deal with the people that were available in the Americas and, of course, slavery existed throughout North and South America and throughout the Caribbean. It was only really abolished in the northern states because once the slave trade became incredibly profitable, they could not carry on growing seasons in the North in the same way that you could in the South. The growing seasons were longer in the south than they were in the North and the soils in the South were much more fertile. The people in the North didn’t have the need for slavery, so it became much easier to just abolish the practice altogether.

Having said that, there were also different cultures of slavery that took place in different parts of the South. I would probably say what people really think of as slavery was probably more rampant in Georgia, coastal South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, where you have these large plantations, where at some point in the 19th century, you have had hundreds of slaves working the land. For a lot of people who did have slaves, they may not have had more than five or six, who probably again just worked the farm and again, I’m not saying this is as an expert, just things that I've read.

Your relationship, if you were a slave owner, with those slaves would have been dramatically different if you owned several hundred versus owning five or six. If you owned five or six, you knew them. They knew you. You developed a close relationship with them. In many cases, you grew up with them. If you had 600 slaves on your plantation, you were basically a corporation. You didn’t know who these people were as individuals. You didn’t care who these people were as individuals. It was like working for a company; you were a number working for IBM. Get get my crop in on time. That dramatically altered how slavery was practiced. And for many of these smaller slave holding families and even into Virginia and Maryland, slaves also were given some freedom, sometimes on the weekend, to either do their own labor or earn their own money, have their own time. I know in Louisiana, slaves were given, I want to say it was Sunday off. There’s a place in New Orleans that even today is called Congo Square, where African Americans used to go dance and congregate with one another.

In North Carolina, up until the 1830s, the free blacks were also allowed to vote. That was only taken away because of the the slave insurrection led by Nat Turner in early early 1830, 1831 in Virginia, which terrified a lot of people. It just wasn’t a unified practice. But on the flip side of this, all the while this was going on in the South, the north was industrializing and they were using some of the weakest members of society in factories who may have been European Americans, but many of them were chained or tied to machines and locked factories. Those people were just as likely to be abused and there was no investment in their welfare. You could really throw those people away. So when people condemn slavery - it’s fair to condemn slavery, no one in their right mind would ever want to bring back slavery - there were other brutal practices that were going on, which today people seem to just completely overlook, as if those things didn’t happen, didn't exist, or they just don’t want to know about them.

While you were speaking, I looked up Anthony Johnson. There is actually a Wikipedia article on him and this is somebody I never learned about in school. He was born in Portuguese Angola, and there’s actually a story there regarding the Portuguese and the slave trade as it existed in Brazil. But yeah, this is the sort of thing we never learned in school. And I would think something like this would definitely complicate the picture, if not change one’s overall position on slavery.

A lot of Americans want history to exist in a black and white sense. I think that’s probably a normal human reaction. They want to right? Like World War II: Nazis bad. We were good. I mean, that’s pretty clear cut. But the majority of human history doesn’t really work that way. There’s different shades of gray and as a historian, you’re trying to get into people’s mindsets of how they view the world, things that we may think of as morally abhorrent. They weren’t sitting there, twirling their mustache, thinking, “I’m so evil! Ha ha ha.” It made sense to them. It’s the world that they lived in. And if we somehow managed to not destroy this world and the human race in 200 years, attitudes and cultures and mores will be completely different, and they’ll look back at 2024 as if we were all psychopathic monsters.

So what percentage of Americans owned slaves? Or is there even a way to know anywhere close to the to the actual number?

I have seen different percentages maybe. Three to five percent, maybe, because by the time of the Civil War, slavery was an incredibly expensive endeavor. I mean, owning and buying a slave was like buying a expensive car in terms of the ownership and maintenance of a human being. So it was not something that most people - as I said, most Americans, for the majority of this country’s history, were poor - could have afforded. It probably never occurred to them to own another human being, because they could barely feed themselves as it was.

So let’s skip ahead a little bit to, say, about 10 years before the Civil War. Are there any indications of what Americans’ attitudes towards slavery were at the time?

I can tell you, having come across some of this stuff, mostly in newspaper articles from throughout the United States, slavery did not become a huge issue until probably the late 1820s. Now before that, I ran into some information while I was looking through the Presbyterian records of the Synod of the Carolinas around the turn of the century, 1800, 1801. And there was debate there amongst the Presbyterians about how they should deal with slavery. Some of them had thought that the church should press for the emancipation of slaves, but there was concern that if the church interferes in political matters, that the government would interfere in the church.

So what they decided to do was to educate and teach and have slave members of the congregation in order to prepare for what would eventually happen for emancipation of slaves. But you did not see a lot of discussion about it until these abolitionist groups came along. I can’t tell you exactly when they started, but it became more of a public pressing matter in the late 1820s. And when I say it was a public matter, it wasn’t a public matter in the South, it was a public matter in the North. Abolitionists seem to behave in a manner that would probably make Antifa proud. There were multiple riots in the North. Not committed by Black people, but abolitionists who took their cause with a religious fervor and most Northerners were very annoyed by them. There were repeated amounts of violence in the North throughout that period of time. It didn’t suddenly become an issue in the South until the 1830s, and as you get into the 1840s, because people, especially in certain states, the slave population was incredibly large and after the Nat Turner rebellion, people worried, “Do my slaves hate me? Did they actually want to kill me?” No one knew. If you didn’t actually know your slaves, or you didn’t know anything about slave population, you did not know “Are they being honest with me? Do they like me? Do they not like me?” But what they really worried about were abolitionists, strangers coming in from up north and trying to stir up insurrection amongst the slave population. I have read several articles and I’ve written in my own research about individuals who weren’t from local areas being found in the fields, White people being found in the fields with slaves, trying to preach to them that they needed to get up and kill their masters. So there was a lot of mistreatment of suspected abolitionists in the South.

But again, people really didn’t know what to think. There was a lot of suspicion of, “Is the next shoe going to drop? What exactly is happening here?” And this is where you start seeing a bit of a noted chasm between the North and the South. I think the cultural chasm between North and South had always existed. There was there was reports of it as early as the 1760s, where people kind of went “Ha ha ha, you know those crazy Northerners or Southerners are a bit weird.” But the slavery issue became an opening by which other political forces would use to deepen the social rift between those two factions.

So I think we’ve pretty much beat this slavery issue to death as far as this conversation goes, but I do want to ask you one more thing before we move on.

Sure.

How many slaves were White?

You’d have to define “White.” I can tell you off top my head, Louisiana had some law that if you were a slave, if you had any known African ancestry, then you were de facto a slave, unless you had been emancipated legally. There were people in Louisiana - I’m sure this was true in other states too, but Louisiana in particular was noted for this - who looked White, who were slaves, but who probably had African ancestry. This was not incredible. I’ve seen pictures of children who were slaves, children who grew up with other children, and one would be described as “Master so-and-so.” And the other would be described as “His slave friend”, and you’re looking at the kid - he looks as White as I am. So it was something that was passed on through blood, unless somebody emancipated a slave.

Again, defining “White” becomes problematic. This is one place that I think the Left is a little bit on point - White is not an ethnic group. White is some amorphous pie-in-the-sky thing that no one seems to really be able to define. Back in the day, it meant someone of Anglo-American heritage, broadly speaking, the people that were here at the time of the Revolution. But beyond that, it doesn’t mean anything. That’s why, if you tell someone you’re “White,” you’re not telling anything about yourself. Are you Irish? Is your background Irish? Are you from New England? Are you from New Orleans? Are you Greek?

Well, let me bring it into focus. You mentioned Irish. Is there really anything to that thing about the Irish being enslaved by the masses?

I have not found it, but I really haven’t done a deep dive on it. It seems so utterly controversial. And unless I’ve seen a primary document, I can’t refute it or confirm it one way or the other.

Alright, fair enough. So let’s go and make our transition now. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley, a couple of months ago, had or was hosting a town hall and she got asked what caused the Civil War. The exchange did not go so well for her. Her response, what was it? Freedom or states rights or something like that. I can’t remember exactly at this point, but imagine you’re Nikki Haley and somebody asked you that question - “What caused the Civil War?” What is your response?

[long pause]

I would say, “How much time do you have?” [Laughter]

If you had to distill it down to one sentence, what would it be?

The federal government interfering in matters that were retained within the state and not given to the federal government, the Constitution, including slavery, taking slaves into territories which had not yet become states. But it also included tariffs. It included a whole host of economic issues. But ultimately - let me put it this way: Abraham Lincoln believed. The war was fought over slavery. The South said, “We’re not fighting a war over slavery,” because at one point during the war, I think there were two times, once it was 1863 - again, don’t quote me on this - Lincoln offered the olive branch to the South, to come back into the Union to keep slavery. Before the war, Lincoln had tried to pass or pressed to pass an amendment which would have enshrined slavery into the Constitution, to stop secession. And even no more than a month or two before the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy, Lincoln told Jefferson Davis, “If you come back into the Union, you can vote down the 13th and 14th Amendment.” And they still refused. They said. “This is about independence. This is not about slavery.”

This gets into the issue more or less of what federalism is, the voluntary nature of the compact between the states, and if secession is permissible. I can tell you states voluntarily acceded to the Constitution as they had the Articles of Confederation, and no state would have ratified the Constitution had they believed that it was a death sentence for the state. What’s outlined in the Constitution, what’s prohibited to the states, is outlined in Article One, Section 10. It’s also underscored by the Bill of Rights and the 10th Amendment. There’s no prohibition on leaving the Union. Had you told any state between 1787 and 1791 that they were not permitted to leave the Union, you probably would have had a union of about three or four states. Maybe.

So the Civil War is obviously a hugely controversial topic 160 years later. I guess my point in bringing up Nikki Haley was that what you, Nicole Williams, just gave me is an academic answer, which is exactly what I was looking for. However, if you’re someone like a presidential candidate, you can’t go up there and give a history lecture, right? So what is a good public answer that you can give as far as what caused the civil war that people will still, you know, if they don’t necessarily agree with it, it won’t cause a moral outrage because Nikki Haley…

…Oh, I think absolutely it would cause a moral outrage; this is such a loaded topic at this point. You can’t say anything without something becoming a moral outrage. But I can’t quickly in a sound bite address what caused some war. There’s no way. There’s no way in the English language to convey that. But you could say that states voluntarily came into the Union. There’s no prohibition on them leaving, and they can leave for any reason, any reason at all.

Yeah, I’m sure if you go anywhere else in the world and ask people on both sides, or however many sides are may be, what caused you know this civil war in their country, you’ll get as many answers. It’s never just one answer. If there is one answer, it’s because somebody’s basically enforcing it.

But let’s talk a little bit about the Constitution, because you and I were talking the other night, and I gotta say it was pretty mind blowing. Let’s talk about what this country really should have been if we adhered to the Constitution in its most original form. You had specifically said, for example, California, if they wanted to ban firearms, they absolutely could under the Constitution, can you unwrap that a little bit? How does that work out?

Again, the Constitution doesn’t guarantee individual rights. What it really guarantees is that it prohibits the federal government from interfering in the business of the states. Whereas it does not prohibit the states as sovereign entities from interfering in the same actions. So take what we just said, firearms. Second Amendment prohibits the federal government from regulating firearms, period. There should be no federal regulation of weaponry in the United States.

But states have always had a free hand to regulate firearms, depending on the language of their own constitution. Most people don’t know that their states even have a constitution, and certainly haven’t taken the time to read it if they do. Like I had told you the other night, Massachusetts and South Carolina both had state-established religious faiths after they ratified the Constitution, and I know Massachusetts maintained that at least until the 1830s. I think it was the Congregationalist church. Today, people go, “You can’t have a state faith because there’s no state established religion! Because there’s freedom of religion! And that applies to the states, too!” That’s not the way that that was ever intended to work. And even the states that gave up their established churches didn’t do it because they were forced to, they did it because it just didn’t make any sense, at a point.

The same goes for the Bill of Rights. North Carolina was one of the last states to ratify the Constitution because they were very concerned that the federal government would not abide by the limits set forth, that they would expand past Article One, Section 10 of the delegated authority given to the federal government, which is why the Bill of Rights is written. But no one in their right mind would have ever thought that the Bill of Rights would be incorporated against the states.

Now, a lot of people today will say that the 14th Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights against the states, making the states a non-entity. Courts did not rule that way until, I want to say it was the 1920s, when the Supreme Court came out with the Incorporation Doctrine. There was a book written by a man named Raoul Berger, and I’ve only read excerpts of it - I need to get my hands on full copy of it - called Government by Judiciary, where the government essentially holds the states to account and lets the court system rule on what states can and cannot do, rendering the states to be little more than counties or shires, which is what the Left has always wanted. And the Right, or at least the Republican Party, has always acquiesced to it.

When you let the federal government regulate things that it should not be regulating, you are giving the federal government more power. In other words, if people in California want to keep their firearms, and California banned the use of firearms, and those people went to the federal government and said, “California has violated the Second Amendment!” and the court system comes in and slaps California down, California has lost its sovereignty under the Constitution to determine those things. They may grant the people in California the right to use this or that weapon or whatnot. But that also leaves that court decision intact so that if the U.S. government now has the right to regulate firearms, which it shouldn’t have the right to do to begin with.

I know that sounds really complicated and it actually took years for me to get this into my own head, because you just automatically think, “Oh, I have the right to free speech. I have the right to worship as I see fit. I have the right to firearms.” But when you give the federal government that right to decide those things, you’re neutering your own state and you’re handing the right of regulation to an entity of whom you will never know and you will never speak. You will never know these people. They will never come to your town. You will never establish a relationship with them and they don’t care what you think. They’re only aggrandizing and accumulating power for themselves.

Anyone would know this if you ever have a problem and you write your congressman: you will never, almost never, get a satisfactory answer to whatever that problem is. This may not work in California because California doesn’t have a good representative ratio to its population, but in most states with a better ratio, you can write your representative and an issue has a good chance of being resolved. If not, it won’t, because the government is too big, there’s too many hands in the pot. And you’re dealing with people you will never know and don’t care what you think.

Well, it’s interesting. You and I live in different states, but just from what I’ve seen, I feel like state governments now are behaving a lot like the federal government. They’re taking after their overlords. But when I listen to you explain how it’s really supposed to work, America seems less of a federation and more of a confederation is. Is that accurate? Is that what we’re really supposed to be?

It’s supposed to be essentially a union of states, where done by the federal government are limited and everything else is handled by the states. Period. And that would mean even Social Security, student loans, Medicare, Medicaid. And if you had that sort of situation, you could have a policy laboratory where you have states trying to abide by the culture and wishes of their population, where you might have a more libertarian-leaning state where everybody pretty much is “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” You don’t want the government involved at all in our lives.

You might have a socially conservative state which doesn’t allow same-sex marriage and maybe bans abortion. You’ll have another state on the flip end of that who may allow abortion just up to the time of birth and may have a massive, robust social safety net. But you also have states that can determine who is and who is not a legal citizen of that state. States used to be able to banish citizens that it didn’t want outside the state. So instead, we don’t have state citizenship anymore, we have state residency, and that’s usually established with squatting in the state for 30 days, which is not particularly useful at all.

But if we had that, we would have this real vibrant policy laboratory, where people could vote with their feet. People could look over at the next border and think, well, what are they doing over there? That seems to be working for them. It’s not working here, so you’re going to have a much more diverse and vibrant union than you would if everything is ossified and centralized. The way it is in this country.

That concludes the first part of this interview, bifurcated due to its length and to allow you all to enjoy the holiday without spending all your time reading. The second and final part of the conversation with Ms. Williams will be released in the coming days. If you would like to know more about Ms. Williams’ professional background, you can view her LinkedIn profile here.

In closing, allow me to wish you all a very happy Independence Day. May the spirit of 1776 never die, not on our watch. May the Grand Union live on for as long as we wish.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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