The Three Citizenships*

Abstract

We are at once citizens of the nation, the states and their local governments. To the extent this citizenship is more than a legal formality, it implies a loyalty, a loyalty of varying degrees to three distinct though by no means separate political communities. The degree of loyalty evinced toward these communities has differed widely over time and over place as circumstances have made one or other plane of government a source of attachment and instrument of common purpose more meaningful to all or some of the nation's inhabitants. Jefferson saw the ward republics as perhaps the most significant level of loyalty to be followed by states and federal government in that order. The nationalist of the Civil War saw in the nation the paramount value center and had little patience with claims of the states. And indeed the Civil War transformed the Union from what many regarded as a confederation of states into a nation state. The federal government which initially was the creation of the states became as the result of the Civil War the final judge of its own powers, if not an Austinian sovereign. Furthermore the new states carved out of the territories were creations of the federal government rather than creators of that government. The thousands of immigrants coming from abroad came to America, not to the individual states, though ethnic concentrations gave particular states a special character and attraction. Vast internal migrations loosened the ties of local territorial loyalty and made many an American a transient with little if any in the way of political roots. The thrust of national market capitalism and the nation state has been to batter down the walls not only of the city as Max Weber saw but of the states as well. How can you *Presented at the Center for the Study of Federalism's Conference Toward '76 Serving the