Confederate Constitution Research Articles

Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph P. Reidy

Reviewed by: Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph P. Reidy Derryn E. Moten Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. By Joseph P. Reidy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 520 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-4836-1. Perhaps no act or achievement of President Abraham Lincoln endeared Black people to him more than the Emancipation Proclamation, signed on January 1, 1863. Legions of American school-children grew up having teachers tell them that “Lincoln freed the slaves.” Those bold assertions were technically incorrect. The Emancipation Proclamation decreed the liberation of enslaved persons in states in open hostilities in a war between the states of the United States. These states seceded following Lincoln’s election, with South Carolina in the vanguard. The Emancipation Proclamation was a Civil War military measure in that it declared free the South’s most valued asset—bondmen and bondwomen. The backbone of the Southern economy, enslaved Blacks represented a net value in the billions of dollars. “On the plantations,” noted historian Benjamin Quarles, “the slave was ‘the stomach of the Confederacy’” [The Negro in the Making of America, 3rd ed. (New York, NY, 1987), 140]. And Montgomery, Alabama, was the birthplace of the Confederate States of America. This is the context for Joseph Reidy’s Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. Plenty of historians before Reidy claimed that “emancipation” in the Emancipation Proclamation was more fiction than fact. Reidy painstakingly details the numerous ways in which emancipation was an illusion. He quotes abolitionist Charles Wesley, who recalled, “No one can tell the day, the month or the month of the year, upon which slavery was abolished in the United States” (5). For all African Americans, free and unfree, freedom in the Confederate States of America, like freedom above the Mason-Dixon Line, was a partial freedom, a freedom by degrees, an incomplete freedom. This is the strength of Illusions of Emancipation. [End Page 179] The 3.5 million enslaved Blacks in what became the Confederacy represented eighty percent of all enslaved persons in the South. As Reidy opines, “No longer simply pawns to be moved about the chess-board of war, black people were emerging as active participants in the strategy to save the Union by destroying slavery” (42). The Emancipation Proclamation signaled a sea change in Lincoln’s war strategy. No longer a war to preserve the Union, blue and gray soldiers alike construed the Civil War as a war to destroy slavery. The unanswered question for Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln was whether white Union soldiers would resolve themselves to fight, bleed, and possibly die to eradicate Black slavery. Many white men violently refuted the Military Draft Act of 1863 precipitating the New York Draft Riot, a nearly week-long bloodletting that targeted Blacks as the locus of white wrath. For the Confederate government, on the other hand, the efficacy of slavery was moot; the Confederate Constitution held that “the institution of negro [sic] slavery. . .shall be recognized and protected by Congress...” Contrary to the of the ambiguity of the U.S. Constitution, referring to slaves as “such Persons [sic],” the Confederate States Constitution was unambiguous. President Lincoln was correct; a divided house could not stand. President Thomas Jefferson was also correct when he surmised that God is just, and his justice would not slumber forever. The United States began as a nation under the principles that “all men are created equal” and that liberty—freedom—is an “inalienable right.” Confederate President Jefferson Davis believed the converse. So too did his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who argued, “Our new government[’s] . . . foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” The Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments resolved the question of slavery as an institution and status of enslaved persons as a social class in the United States. What these acts left unresolved is...

No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding by Sean Wilentz

Reviewed by: No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding by Sean Wilentz Wang Xi No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. By Sean Wilentz. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 350. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-674-97222-3.) Inspired by Justice Thurgood Marshall’s comments on “a deep historical conundrum concerning the Constitution and the freedom struggles that followed,” Sean Wilentz has embarked on exploring the question of how a proslavery Constitution, as generally believed, eventually became “an instrument for antislavery politics” (p. x). Given the voluminous and seemingly exhaustive literature on such subjects as the constitutional founding, the history of antislavery, and the politics leading to the Civil War, Wilentz seems to set himself an unimaginably difficult task. The result of his heroic endeavors, however, is a brilliant and groundbreaking achievement. No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding not only substantially revises our understanding of the original intent of the Constitution’s framers on the issues of slavery and its containment but also critically rewrites the history of the nation’s antislavery struggle. To be sure, Wilentz does not deny that the original Constitution contained many concessions that enabled the continuation of slavery and the augmentation of slaveholders’ power after the nation’s founding, but he aims at uncovering and deciphering “the crucial subtlety” of the framers who had “deliberately excluded any validation of property in man” and acknowledged slavery as nothing more than “a creation of state laws” (pp. 1, 2). The Constitution, instead of being a thoroughly and completely proslavery document, had in fact produced a paradoxical outcome that acknowledged slavery where it had existed without nationally sanctioning it. This paradox, according [End Page 458] to Wilentz, became “the constitutional basis for the politics that in time led to slavery’s destruction” (p. 5). The five-chapter book primarily covers the history of antislavery within the established constitutional and political venues from the Revolutionary era to the secession crisis. Antislavery activists outside the political system, such as Quakers and Garrisonian abolitionists, are also discussed, but not as the story’s protagonists. The most original and insightful contribution, in this reader’s view, is Wilentz’s discussion, in chapter 2, of how the antislavery and proslavery delegates of various backgrounds struggled, through the debates over the three well-known slavery-related compromises (regarding the three-fifths clause, the Atlantic slave trade, and fugitive slaves), to determine whether slaves should be defined as property to be protected by the Constitution. “‘[T]he idea that there could be no property in men’” was introduced into and affirmed by the Constitution, ironically not as a grand philosophy of antislavery but more as the result of James Madison’s effort to clarify a technical glitch questioned during the debate over the slave trade clause (p. 97). But Madison’s clarification, though not intentionally done, “did sustain a principle that most of the delegates honored: that property in man had no place in national law” (pp. 98–99). Along with the framers’ insistence on congressional authority to limit slavery’s expansion, the constitutional exclusion of the rights to “property in man” provided two usable ideas and mechanisms that were invoked by later generations to serve antislavery causes of various kinds. Covering the congressional debates over the organization of key territories (the Northwest, Southwest, Mississippi, Louisiana Purchase, and Mexican Cession), the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, and the party realignment after the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), Wilentz devotes his later chapters (chapters 3–5) to highlighting how different generations of antislavery activists, both inside and outside the political system, enlisted these original antislavery ideas and mechanisms to confront the proslavery aggressions of the Slave Power. The book’s ending is especially powerful as Wilentz dramatically reveals how Abraham Lincoln and South Carolina’s declaration of secession (and, later, the Confederate constitution) contested the U.S. Constitution’s original intent on handling property in man. The contest effectively affirms the validity of Wilentz’s important rediscovery of a usable past that resets the beginning of...

Reframing the Fathers' Constitution: The Centralized State and Centrality of Slavery in the Confederate Constitutional Order

BENJAMIN H. HILL ROSE BEFORE A RAPT AUDIENCE IN ATLANTA, Georgia, on April 4, 1861. Months earlier, he had spoken against secession in state senate. His message had now changed. As delegate Montgomery, Alabama, constitutional convention and member of Provisional Congress of Confederate States of America (CSA), Hill did not need his famed oratory secure crowd's attention. He came bearing constitutional meaning: have not abandoned provisions of old nor set at nought wisdom of its framers. The framers of new do not claim be more wise than those of old. Nevertheless, Hill continued, They have improved upon old--not because they were wiser--but because they had light of years' guide them. this strange constitutional moment, Hill made one principle clear his constituency. In short, he proclaimed, the General Government, in all its jurisdiction, is required protect Slavery. bloody clash with United States ensued, Confederacy stood ready because [w]e can keep negroes at work support us while we send young men war. On prospects for reunion, once cautious Hill vowed, If it is go back Old ... I am UTTERLY, UTTERLY, AND FOREVER opposed it! Musing on changes and continuities, this constitutional framer plausibly fulfilled his promise to speak candidly with you to-night. But there was much Hill could not say. Those seventy-three years' experience separating an eighteenth-century Philadelphia hall from Montgomery framers' convention ensured that meaning of Confederacy's constitutional order would only become visible over time and under duress. (1) Deratification swept lower South in early 1861. Constitutional tissue was severed by word, perception, and deed. With ceremony of conventions and formality of ordinances, six southernmost states had purported resume perfect sovereignty by February 1861. Texas soon followed, and four states of upper South had cut their national sinews by May's end. Yet unbridled statehood was fleeting, as southern leaders sought consolidation with existential haste. Gathering in Montgomery on February 4, delegates scripted political community and legal identity, Confederate States of America. The convention created provisional constitution four days after convening and began drafting Permanent Constitution, adopted on March 11. The body rendered itself into Provisional Congress, wielding authority throughout following year. (2) The Confederacy awoke under looming dangers with an appetite for order, security, and state capacity. must meet [Abraham] Lincoln with President of own. We want military resources of South concentrated at once, U.S. assistant secretary of state William Henry Trescot urged in January, upon resigning his post. (3) Before abandoning U.S. Senate, Florida's David L. Yulee proposed a Southern Government as soon as possible, adopting present Federal Constitution for time, and Southern Army. (4) Attentive risks, financier Gazaway B. Lamar counseled Provisional Congress on imperative of constitutional bonds, to clinch people for their support hereafter, when things change and burdens become onerous. Lewis M. Stone, an Alabama secession convention delegate, anticipated a real, substantial Government--one armed with all power resist any shock which we may be subjected; Government complete in all its parts, established upon an immovable basis, and possessed of all elements of national strength. (5) At stake was viability of secessionists' aims: slaveholding republic, South without North. (6) State conventions swiftly ratified new Confederate constitution. Only Texas held referendum. (7) As Alabama delegate Robert Jemison Jr. concluded, it is our duty . …

Confederate Political Economy: Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation by Michael Brem Bonner

Reviewed by: Confederate Political Economy: Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation by Michael Brem Bonner Bruce E. Baker Confederate Political Economy: Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation. Michael Brem Bonner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. ISBN 78-0-8071-6212-5. 260 pp., cloth, $48.00. In Confederate Political Economy, Michael Brem Bonner sets out to explain the nature of the Confederate state and political system, something many others have done before him. What differentiates this study from previous ones is that Bonner does an exceptionally good job of situating his analysis in its historical moment and examining the Confederacy on its own terms and in its own time. Because the Confederacy was established to defend the institution of slavery and failed to do so, there is always a temptation to see the entire enterprise as the end of an antebellum order based on human bondage that had to be swept away so the United States could modernize. In fact, Bonner's argument, avoiding hindsight, is that the Confederacy represented an early example of the sort of corporatist state we tend to associate with the twentieth century and that the pressures of war required this form of governance. "Corporatism," Bonner explains, "is an arrangement of shared governance and responsibility between the public and private sectors in which government, business, and labor provide direction for mutually beneficial policies" (9). The Confederate version was "expedient" because all the decisions that shaped it were taken in the midst of the crisis of war, rather than as a result of careful planning. Bonner's book argues that this corporatist state took shape in the political culture of the Confederacy and was fundamental to understanding its industrial policy and ultimately how the states and the citizens of the Confederacy were governed. Bonner lays the foundation for his study with an organizational examination of the political culture of the Confederacy. The Confederate Constitution was fundamentally different than the U.S. Constitution since it provided for a much stronger executive branch, unconstrained by a Supreme Court, and facilitated the centralization of power, allowing for easy relationships between the public and private sectors. The Confederate government's extensive use of secret sessions, not just in the formulation of the constitution but in legislative business, shielded its operations from democratic scrutiny and criticism. The most important industry in the Confederacy, a nation that spent its entire existence at war, was munitions. At the beginning of the war, the Tredegar Iron Works was already well established, "the most important heavy industrial complex in the Confederacy" (71). Ensuring that it was contributing to the war effort was crucial to making sure Confederate soldiers had something to fight Union forces with. As a [End Page 421] result, the Tredegar always had the upper hand in negotiations with the government and was able to secure favorable contracts. In contrast, the Shelby Iron Works in Alabama was less developed, and the Confederate government invested in expanding its capacity early in the war. However, the terms of the government contracts the Shelby won insisted on steady repayment of the government loan, creating a conflict between doing government work or securing higher paying private work to make enough money to keep going. An alternative to this sort of back-and-forth relationship with private industry was for the Confederate government to establish its own munitions factories. Josiah Gorgas, head of the Ordnance Bureau, successfully built a powder works at Augusta, Georgia, from scratch. In the case of the Selma Manufacturing Company, the Confederate government purchased outright and expanded an existing enterprise. In all these cases, Bonner points out that the Confederacy operated flexibly, neither leaving private enterprise completely free nor controlling the means of production in some sort of ideologically driven state socialism but trying whatever worked to provide the materiél its military required to preserve the nation itself. Bonner's last chapter, which describes what he calls the "Confederate system … the actual governance of the Confederate states, the intersection of policy with southern citizens, and the corporatist nature of railroad policy," does not hang together quite as clearly as the others, though as the author points out, these topics allow...

Confederate Political Economy: Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation. by Michael Brem Bonner

Reviewed by: Confederate Political Economy: Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation. by Michael Brem Bonner John M. Sacher (bio) Confederate Political Economy: Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation. By Michael Brem Bonner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016.Pp. 272. Cloth, $48.00.) Michael Brem Bonner aims to reassess Confederate political culture in action in order to establish a new model for understanding the political economy of the South during the Civil War. He challenges scholars who have contended that Confederate oligarchs operated an undemocratic, top-down economy and created state socialism. Instead, Bonner paints a picture of leaders who prioritized national survival over any particular economic doctrine. In their attempt to win the war, Confederate politicians worked with industrial leaders, and this cooperation unintentionally led to the creation of a corporatist state similar to twentieth-century nations. Ultimately, he concludes, "in order to fight modernization the Confederacy was forced to modernize" (202). For Bonner, corporatism involves the shared government responsibility between public and private sectors, with each group needing the other to succeed. In the Confederacy, this symbiotic relationship was based on expediency more than any master plan. In fact, throughout Bonner's work, "expedient" serves as the ubiquitous modifier of "corporatism." According to him, this expediency distinguishes the Confederacy from later corporatist states where political leaders consciously chose corporatism rather than stumbling upon it like the South did. Bonner also uses the concept of expediency to remind readers that Confederate politicians did not intentionally embark on undemocratic policies but arrived at them as a result of a combination of wartime needs and a system that fostered this executiveled corporatism. Needing to marshal every available resource, the Confederacy not only worked with existing businesses such as the Tredegar Iron Works but also created others. The Augusta Powder Works, which provided gunpowder for the army, serves as the classic example of the state constructing a business when the private sector could not provide what it needed. Both patriotism and profit motivated the private-sector businessmen. And, when focused on the latter, their actions did not always coincide with the Confederacy's best interests. The Confederacy's railroad policy, where the government deferred to industry leaders until the final months of the war, demonstrates both corporatism in action and the problems of allowing profit-minded businessmen to determine government policies. Bonner has a keen eye for using specific cases and people as examples to support his argument. In addition to addressing prominent leaders such [End Page 324] as Josiah Gorgas and Tredegar's Joseph Reid Anderson, Bonner emphasizes less well known business leaders and army officers such as "patriotic industrialist" Colin J. McRae and Lieutenant Colonel George Washington Rains. McRae served as the key factor in forging a connection between the Shelby Iron Company and the Confederate government. Defying tremendous odds, Rains created the Augusta Powder Works, which kept Confederate armies in the field and thereby demonstrated the value of expedient corporatism. Additionally, Bonner studies a variety of specific policies to show the development of expedient corporatism over the course of the Civil War. First, he examines the Confederate Constitution. Contrary to historians who posit this document as simply the United States Constitution with protection for slavery, Bonner sees it as a fundamentally different document. In particular, it created the foundation for a strong executive and centralized power with its line-item veto, six-year presidential term, and greater presidential power over the purse. When coupled with the Confederacy's antipartyism, the lack of a Supreme Court, and the president's authority as commander in chief, it put in place a framework for executive-driven corporatism. Second, Bonner highlights conscription and the domestic passport system to demonstrate expedient corporatism. Confederate leaders did not begin the war with the intention of implementing either policy, but events forced their hands. Not only did the government use conscription to control manpower and a passport system to control movement, but it made each policy more stringent as the war placed greater and greater demands on the Confederacy. For Bonner, wartime expediency best explains the creation and evolution of these policies, especially conscription, which not only expanded the army but through its exemption...

Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War by Ian Binnington (review)

Reviewed by: Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War by Ian Binnington Michael T. Bernath (bio) Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War. By Ian Binnington. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. 216. Cloth, $39.50.) Scholarship surrounding Confederate nationalism has grown by leaps and bounds. In just the last decade, over half a dozen major new books dedicated expressly to the subject have been published. These works share a determination to move away from the long-standing weak-versus-strong debate of the previous thirty years and to evaluate the roots, substance, dissemination, and legacy of Confederate nationalism within the broader context of nineteenth-century nation-building, and no longer simply as an explanation for southern defeat or persistence. They have challenged us to take Confederate nationalist ideology seriously and to situate it within American and international practices, traditions, and thought. Ian Binnington’s short book is part of this burgeoning trend. He focuses on the symbols of Confederate nationalism (three in particular) and the meaning that white southerners invested in them. He argues that the creation of Confederate nationalism was “a quest for a symbolic text” and seeks to provide a careful reading of that text by highlighting recurrent symbols across different media and genres (6). With an insufficient collective past and an uncertain and incompletely conceived future, Confederate nationalists dwelled in a compressed “mythic present” (2). In constructing that present, white southerners relied upon certain symbolic figures and tropes to define and differentiate themselves from their northern enemies, as well as to assert their “Confederate Americanism”—a shared sense of history that declared theirs to be the true American nation and Confederates the rightful heirs of the legacy of the Revolution. Binnington identifies these symbolic figures as the “Worthy Southron,” the “Demon Yankee,” and the “Silent Slave.” The Worthy Southron was the embodiment of southern [End Page 318] nobility, civility, gentility, bravery, tradition, liberty, and democracy (rightly understood). The Demon Yankee was his polar opposite—venal, fanatical, barbarous, cowardly, meddlesome, greedy, and tyrannical. The Silent Slave was the often-unacknowledged foundation of this constructed South, a loyal “companion to the vocal Confederate self,” who, while visible, never spoke for himself (4). Having defined these tropes, Binnington proceeds with chapter-length case studies to demonstrate their presence and utility both before and during the war. Binnington begins by focusing on the commentary, largely found in southern newspapers, surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Confederate constitution in order to show that Confederate opinion makers believed it vital that their new constitution and the process by which it was created be situated squarely within the American constitutional tradition: firm evidence, Binnington maintains, of their Confederate Americanism. Next, he examines three prophetic antebellum southern novels foretelling secession and civil war, all of which prefigured Confederate nationalist symbolism by employing the figures of the Worthy Southron, Demon Yankee, and Silent Slave, and by depicting their heroic southern protagonists as champions of American liberty, defending themselves against their un-American northern adversaries. In one of his most original chapters, Binnington treats the collective iconography of Confederate currency as text in order to draw the reader’s attention to money as a means of ideological dissemination as well as to reveal how the depiction of the Confederate nation changed, moving from the agrarian to the more overtly martial. His discussion raises questions about the process by which these images were created and who exactly was writing this symbolic text: questions that examining the images on the bills alone cannot answer. It also raises questions about the material constraints under which Confederate nationalists operated and the degree to which the change Binnington describes resulted from the southern inability to produce or commission original images early in the war. Next, Binnington explores Confederate imaginative literature, four novels specifically, in order to show how southern novelists developed the Worthy Southron, Demon Yankee, and Silent Slave tropes in order to bolster Confederate morale and advance wartime nationalism. The final chapter looks at literary depictions of Confederate military figures as living embodiments of the Worthy Southron ideal. Reaffirming the work of Gary Gallagher and others who have...

Continuity in Secession: The Case of the Confederate Constitution

This essay examines two issues: (1) constitutional federalism in the Confederate States of America, and (2) the interpretive theories that Confederate leaders applied to the question of the relationship between their own constitution and the U.S. Constitution. In both structure and theory, the Confederate Constitution displayed what to modern eyes is surprising continuity with the U.S. constitutional regime. The specific textual provisions of the document duplicated some of the most contested language of the pre-war period. These provisions included a necessary and proper clause and a supremacy clause, both of which assumed a relatively powerful central level of Confederate government and a robust congress. Moreover, in addition to replicating some of the most nationalistic aspects of the U.S. Constitution, Confederate officials explicitly referred to themselves as the inheritors of the American Revolution. Confederate statesmen maintained not only that their government was the legitimate legal and political successor to the principles of 1776, but also that their new-modeled constitution of 1861 was a seamless continuation of the Constitution of 1789. This claim of continuity extended all the way from the text itself to the modes used to give meaning to that text. It was a claim about the mechanics of constitutional interpretation, in its most challenging form: interpretation over time, and across what southerners insisted was a break in regimes. The Confederate mode of constitutionalism was thus consciously intertemporal and inter-regime. To be sure, the explicit recognition of slavery in the Confederate Constitution was a crucial substantive difference between the original text and the inheritor. From a structural perspective, however, the relationship between center and periphery set forth in the two documents was remarkably similar.

Lincoln and the triumph of the nation: constitutional conflict in the American Civil War

The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. In Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival. Previous scholars have examined wartime challenges to civil liberties and questions of presidential power, but Neely argues that the constitutional conflict extended to the largest questions of national existence. Drawing on judicial opinions, presidential state papers, and political pamphlets spiced with the everyday immediacy of the partisan press, Neely reveals how judges, lawyers, editors, politicians, and government officials, both North and South, used their constitutions to fight the war and save, or create, their nation. Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation illuminates how the U.S. Constitution not only survived its greatest test but emerged stronger after the war. That this happened at a time when the nation's very existence was threatened, Neely argues, speaks ultimately to the wisdom of the Union leadership, notably President Lincoln and his vision of the American nation.

God's Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: God's Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War Mark A. Noll God's Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War. George C. Rable. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8078-3426-8, 574 pp., cloth, $35.00. This splendidly researched, clearly organized, and persuasively argued study of religion and the American Civil War sets a lofty new standard for a topic that, after long neglect, is now receiving its due. George Rable has undertaken the thorough research in archives, contemporary published writings, and prolific Civil War scholarship required for mastering a large and complex subject. The great success of God's Almost Chosen People, however, is not just its breadth of research; it is even more the empathetic treatment of a subject that for many participants was always critical in the outworking of the conflict. When Rable began his research on this book in the late 1990s, the historians who had gone before with serious work included Lewis Vander Velde, James Silver, James Moorhead, Gardiner Shattuck Jr., and very few others. In the last several years this incongruous situation has changed rapidly, with solid books directly on religion in the war from (among others) David Chesebrough, Kent Dollar, James Lehman and Steven Nolt, Randall Miller, Robert Miller, David Rolfs, Sean Scott, Harry Stout, Charles Reagan Wilson, and Steven Woodworth, along with a wealth of other volumes on religious contributions to debates over slavery, the effects of emancipation on African-American churches, religious factors in Reconstruction and southern "redemption," and many other related subjects. Yet even as Rable has taken advantage of this new wave of scholarship, his own effort has exceeded all previous efforts in both research depth and interpretive power. My one very minor criticism of the book, however, concerns a fine secondary [End Page 268] work that Rable overlooks. Missing from his exhaustive bibliography is Michael Hochgeschwender's Wahrheit, Einheit, Ordnung: Die Sklavenfrage und der amerikanische Katholizismus, 1835-1870 (2006), a book that would have helped explain Catholic attitudes toward slavery through attention to Catholics' strategic alliance with the Democratic Party and their antagonism to the Yankee Protestants who championed both abolitionism and anti-Catholic nativism. Rable's exposition is broadly chronological, beginning in the late 1850s with attitudes in the churches and by self-conscious believers toward the looming sectional crisis, moving through constant efforts to interpret wartime developments with religious categories, and ending in 1865 with strikingly divergent explanations for the providential meaning of the war. In addition, Rable often pauses for short thematic treatments of discrete topics. Thus, he shows that Mormons regarded the war as just retribution for a nation that had squandered its chance to follow the prophet Joseph Smith. He notes that traditional antagonism between Catholics and Protestants occasionally surfaced among the troops and more often in commentary from the religious press. But his full account of hospital care also reveals that the sacrificial service of many nuns measurably softened hereditary anti-Catholic sentiments. Likewise, the faithful work of Catholic chaplains gained the admiration of some Protestants even as it brought sacraments to the hundreds of thousands of Catholics under arms (mostly in Union armies). The difficult task of chaplains is a prominent subtheme. The North provided earlier and more support for the chaplaincy, but in both armies chaplains could easily lose the respect of troops by avoiding combat, acting hypocritically, or preaching long sermons. Conversely, chaplains who shared the hard lot of troops, who stayed at their posts through thick and thin, and who communicated a simple Christian message of purposeful hope sometimes became greatly esteemed. Rable offers similar insight for a long list of other subjects: how God appeared in the Confederate Constitution and how the National Reform Association (founded in 1864) sought to amend the federal Constitution to the same end; why Sabbath observance (and non-observance) factored into military considerations; and the degree to which religion shaped the hagiography for Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and (after his assassination) Abraham Lincoln. Still there is more: hymn singing among the troops, philanthropy from the U.S. Christian Commission, destruction of southern...

'Grease and Slide Back into the Union': Patriotic Essentialism, the Civil War, and Postbellum Reunification

[In speeches, Robert Barnwell Rhett and Abraham lincoln espouse the] views of a Union leader and an outspoken and extreme proponent of the Confederate cause. Both cite the memory and philosophy of the founding fathers, both use rhetoric from the Revolution, and both refer to the doctrines of the government they created. Two politicians, fundamentally opposed and at war, evoked the same brand of American patriotism to justify their beliefs. This was by no means a unique occurrence; men on both sides of the conflict, from foot soldiers to Presidents, believed that their cause was the true defence of American ideals and that their opponents’ viewpoint would only corrupt their country’s ideology. Even when the South formed its own nation, it did so not to separate itself from the ideals of the United States, but to return to them, feeling they had been lost in the North. The Confederate Constitution, with few exceptions (most notably the legitimisation of slavery) reflected verbatim the original (Rable 1994, 44). As Anne Sarah Rubin states, ‘new Confederates created a national culture in a large part by drawing on the usable American past’ (Rubin 2005, 11). The first paradox is: two sides, bitterly opposed fought a violent war, but with matching adoration for the same country and the same confidence in their righteousness.

The Confederate Constitution, Tariffs, and the Laffer Relationship

This article offers an example of a national constitution, that of the Confederate States of America, which effectively constrained its fiscal authorities to tax rates on the lower end of the Laffer relationship. The taxes were Confederate import tariffs. Drawing on primary sources, the paper documents the role that this de facto capping of tariff rates played in the history of the drafting of the Confederate Constitution. That the Laffer relationship found constitutional expression for an important tax suggests that the “tariff” might have played a more significant role in the North–South conflict than is currently acknowledged.

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

On the day Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate authorities, General Braxton Bragg reacted to a newspaper report that might have revealed the position of gun emplacements by placing the correspondent, a Southern loyalist, under arrest. Thus the Confederate army's first detention of a citizen occurred before President Lincoln had even called out troops to suppress the rebellion. During the civil war that followed, not a day would pass when Confederate military prisons did not contain political prisoners.Based on the discovery of records of over four thousand of these prisoners, Mark E. Neely Jr.'s new book undermines the common understanding that Jefferson Davis and the Confederates were scrupulous in their respect for constitutional rights while Lincoln and the Unionists regularly violated the rights of dissenters. Neely reveals for the first time the extent of repression of Unionists and other civilians in the Confederacy, and uncovers and marshals convincing evidence that Southerners were as ready as their Northern counterparts to give up civil liberties in response to the real or imagined threats of wartime.From the onset of hostilities, the exploits of drunken recruits prompted communities from Selma to Lynchburg to beg the Richmond government to impose martial law. Southern citizens resigned themselves to a passport system for domestic travel similar to the system of passes imposed on enslaved and free blacks before the war. These restrictive measures made commerce difficult and constrained religious activity. As one Virginian complained, This struggle was begun in defence of Constitutional Liberty which we could not get in the United States. The Davis administration countered that the passport system was essential to prevent desertion from the army, and most Southerners accepted the passports as a necessary inconvenience, ignoring the irony that the necessities of national mobilization had changed their government from a states'-rights confederacy to a powerful, centralized authority.After the war the records of men imprisoned by this authority were lost through a combination of happenstance and deliberate obfuscation. Their discovery and subtle interpretation by a Pulitzer Prize winning historian explodes one of the remaining myths of Lost Cause historiography, revealing Jefferson Davis as a calculated manipulator of the symbols of liberty.

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (review)

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (review)

Southern rights: political prisoners and the myth of Confederate constitutionalism

Southern rights: political prisoners and the myth of Confederate constitutionalism

Codifying the principles of a welfare state

The present study provides a comparison of the Confederate Constitution of 1861 and the Japanese Constitution of 1946, with emphasis on the role of constitutional constraints on pork‐barrel legislation and increasing rates of federal spending. Because the Japanese Constitution, by all accounts, was produced by Americans (American General Douglas MacArthur and the SCAP), it provided a second possibility for Americans, who had the benefit of hindsight regarding the shortcomings of the US Constitution, to potentially make an improvement. Unlike the view maintained by the Confederate States of America in the drafting of a constitution, MacArthur’s product actually relaxed constraints on central government spending. The result, the apparent product of the new dealism and progressivism ideologies which were prevalent in 1940s America, has produced an open door to increased levels of special interest spending in Japan.

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Partisanship and Confederate Constitution-Making Reconsidered: A Response to Bensel

In his response to my essay on the connection between partisan machinations in the Confederate Constitutional Convention and the disappearance of Democrat-Whig divisions in the Confederacy, Professor Richard Bensel raises a number of interesting arguments as to why partisanship was not a factor during the making of the Confederate Constitution. Additionally, Professor Bensel suggests a different avenue to examine the link between partisanship and constitution-building, specifically state-level constitutional conventions in the South where parties were known to be active and played a crucial role in decision-making.