ALMOST half of Mississippi's Republicans think interracial marriage should be illegal, according to a recent poll by Public Policy Polling. (Some have accused PPP of having a liberal bias, but the pollster has proven rather accurate, and the question in this poll was straighforward.) Call me naive, but I find this level of support for anti-miscegenation laws in 2011 shocking. And these are Republicans, who are no doubt nominally in favour of less government, yet see no problem with government stopping a man and a woman who love each other from getting married because their skin tones clash. To call this attitude pernicious, small-minded and contradictory is merely to state the obvious, but it does have a long pedigree.

Around 150 years ago, another Mississippian said, "all we ask is to be let alone." That was Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy's president, almost three weeks after the Battle of Fort Sumter, and it's a favourite line of those who believe the war was fought over "states' rights" and federal power. But Davis and his ilk were not always so quiescent. In 1848, just after the acquisition of California and New Mexico, President James Polk was "decidedly in favour of purchasing Cuba & making it one of the States of the Union." Cheering him on was Jefferson Davis, then a senator from Mississippi. "Cuba must be ours," he said, to "increase the number of slaveholding constituencies." Once the plan to buy Cuba failed, Mississippi's other senator, Albert Gallatin Brown, started drooling over Mexico. "I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican states; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery." So Davis and Brown may have wanted the federal government to leave them alone, but don't mistake that plea for principle: Cubans and Mexicans deserved no such shield from federal interference.

Two years later, Congress passed a law granting the federal government immense national power. One would have expected outrage from southern states'-rights advocates; in fact they urged its passage. The law in question was the fugitive slave law. It required federal marshals and deputies to help slaveowners capture their "property" and fined them $1,000 if they refused. It imposed strict penalties on anyone, in any state, who harboured an escaped slave or obstructed his capture. Naturally, it was biased in favour of claimants. Southern senators defeated their northern counterparts' efforts to attach basic civil liberties such as habeas corpus and a right to a trial by jury to the law: these rights, they reasoned, did not apply to property, only to citizens. To Davis then and to those 46% of Mississippi Republicans today, federal power is horrific tyranny when it stops them from doing something they want to do. But when it stops other people from doing something they don't want them to do (helping slaves escape, marrying people of different races), they seem to have little problem with it.

Anyway, appalling as these attitudes may be they are both irrelevant—miscegenation laws aren't coming back, however strong a showing Mississippi's Republicans make at the polls—and bound to fade. More than two-thirds of the voters surveyed in that poll were 46 or older. But Mississippi's mixed-race population is among the country's fastest growing.

(Quotes and historical information from James McPherson's "The Battle Cry of Freedom.)