The Civil War marked the high point of state interposition resistance to the Union or Confederate governments. Sounding the alarm interposition occurred wherever governors and legislators believed their national government had exceeded its powers, particularly with the use of martial law, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and wartime conscription. Moreover, Lincoln’s use of emancipation as a war measure was criticized in North and South as going beyond the effort to preserve the Union and instead converting the war into an abolitionist-inspired moral crusade to end slavery and expand Black rights. After the Civil War, opposition mounted in state legislatures in the North and South to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Reconstruction policies, racial equality, and enhanced national power. The slogan of states’ rights was adopted by those who denied the outcome of the Civil War and by advocates of white supremacy. By the end of Reconstruction, interposition essentially died out, tainted with the discredited notion of nullification, secession and the Civil War, and lay dormant before its reemergence in the twentieth century.

In 1914, the Government of India passed the Ingress into India Ordinance in an attempt to limit the transgressive potential of Ghadar propaganda and transnational revolutionary networks based out of North America and parts of East and South East Asia. The following year, the passage of the Defence of India Act sought to target revolutionaries whom the government deemed to be either in league with Germany, or whose acts of anti-colonial violence aided and assisted the German war effort. Following the conclusion of the war in 1918, colonial officials issued the controversial Rowlatt Act, despite the disapproval of an increasingly vocal Indian public. By tracing the debates and discussions surrounding the passage of these three pieces of 'emergency' legislation, this chapter demonstrates how executive discourses sought to construct and deploy distinct notions of 'the enemy' as a means of legitimizing extraordinary laws meant to target the political challenge of anti-colonial nationalism.