Sunday, March 17, 2019

The Defining Differences Between the United States and Confederate Constitutions


‘Their revolution (the South in 1861) … was in fact an act of restoration, for the constitution drawn up in Montgomery in 1861 for the Confederate States of America was a virtual duplicate of the United States Constitution.” John McCardell in his Introduction to Jesse T. Carpenter’s “The South as a Conscious Minority, 1789 – 1861”, re-published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1990, p. xiv-xv (emphasis added)

This is a common misconception. The CSA Constitution is not “a virtual duplicate” of the 1787 Constitution. It is a document of greater clarity and stricter understanding. There’s no fabulating. Here’s a list of four (4) major changes:

1. Eliminated ‘dual sovereignty’. No powers were granted to the Central government. Specific powers were delegated.

6 comments:

  1. I remember studying that in college. We had a true "Southern Lady" as a professor that did a great job explaining the subject matter.

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  2. Yes I was. Maybe I can share her "virtues" and "charitable" relationships of the majority of slave owning white families (she carefully added that less than ten percent of Southrons actually owned "slaves") sometime. She was the first person to ever explain to me that a free black man could do ANYTHING (including marry a white woman) in Alabama but vote in the antebellum period. She also explained in open clas that one of the largest slave owners in Montgomery County Alabama was a free black man who at one time owned 362 black slaves.

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    1. a free black man who at one time owned 362 black slaves.

      As I remember the largest was in Georgia.

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  3. I know at one time there was a free black man who owned over 600 in Louisiana. For some reason that I cannot recall he transferred all or partial ownership to a "free black woman". Of course, my memory is foggy and one has to dig very deep on the "sanitized" interweb of today to even find mention of these facts.

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    1. Here's some links:
      http://namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=3522&highlight=black+slave+owners
      http://namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=4825&highlight=black+slave+owners
      http://namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=4832&highlight=black+slave+owners
      Searh at FNC has a few also:
      https://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/search?q=black+slave+owners

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