Stephanie McCurry, the author of last year’s Confederate Reckoning, has contributed a fascinating interactive annotation of the Confederate Constitution to Disunion, the New York Times Civil War blog. In an accompanying post she notes that, even after losing the Civil War, Confederate leaders maintained the constitutionality of their secession as an attempt to restore American government to the role envisioned by the Founding Fathers. As evidence, they pointed to their Constitution of the Confederate States of America, which they described as a simple copy of that of the United States.
As McCurry shows, though, the document had some significant alterations that made this new document fundamentally different from its model. In fact, far from merely copying the original, the Confederate States created something McCurry says never existed before: “an explicitly proslavery constitution for an explicitly proslavery—and anti-democratic—country.” The document and McCurry’s annotations make for compelling reading; point your browser here to take a look.
You can also follow McCurry’s posts to A House Divided, the Civil War blog of the Washington Post, to which HUP authors David W. Blight and Gary W. Gallagher also contribute.
Earlier this week, Adam Arenson, author of The Great Heart of the Republic, contributed a piece to Disunion on how it was that St. Louis became the only major city in a slave state to favor Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860, and Missouri the first state to vote at its secession convention for remaining in the Union.
From his piece:
For too long the Civil War has been understood as a two-way conflict, between (mostly) Northerners arguing for cheap, slavery-free land across the continent and (mostly) white Southerners seeking to expand and strengthen slavery and resist federal interference. In this view, each was fighting to control the bounty of the West. Yet Westerners had their own agenda. (In the mid-19th century, residents of Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Michigan as well as California, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin and the western federal territories considered themselves Westerners.) Despite their political differences, regional advocates including otherwise rivals like Henry Clay and Thomas Hart Benton or Lincoln and Douglas all championed the economic, political and cultural agenda of the West as distinct and at times at odds with those of the eastern North and South. The residents of St. Louis went their own way because they sought to lead a new, third way in American politics: a vision built on the agricultural, mineral and industrial promises of the West, one that would later reshape the nation’s very identity around the values of the heartland. and a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s A House Divided blog, has a fascinating interactive annotation of the Confederate Constitution.
Read the whole post here.
