While most historical studies merely scratch the surface of antebellum state rights and treat the doctrine as just one of many differences between the North and South, this book focuses exclusively on state rights from colonial to Civil War times. It looks particularly at Virginia, examining how the concept of state rights became the backbone of the Old Dominion's understanding of the Union for at least seven decades.

Part One looks at Virginia's ideological attitudes toward state rights, revealing how and why state rights Antifederalists recoiled from the expansive tendencies of central government power during the Constitutional debate and the Virginia ratification convention. Part Two examines the methodologies employed to maintain the currency of state rights in the face of nationalist threats to a southern interpretation of liberty by examining documents and essays by luminaries such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Spencer Roane, Abel Upshur, and Littleton Tazewell.