Originally aired on January 06, 1995 - In part 19 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson discusses how the Confederate States and the Union States differed constitutionally. The answer, he says, is the foundation for the Civil War itself.
#19 – Confederate Constitution
A question often asked is how constitutionally the Confederate States differed from the United Sates. It is a natural inquiry, as well as a vital one, for in the answer is the foundation of the Civil War itself.
When the Southern states left the Union in 1860-1861, their leaders honestly believed that the action they took upheld the Constitution as conceived by the Founding Fathers. It was the North, ostensibly seeking a social and political revolution, that had usurped the basic law of the land. In other words, the South wanted status quo, the North wanted change, and each side went to war with complete self-assurance that it was defending basic American principles.
The permanent Confederate Constitution moved in the same direction and possessed the same channels as the original federal document. Little originality existed in the Southern constitution; in many sections, wording was the same. The major difference evident in the Southern document had to do with safeguarding slavery, guaranteeing state rights, and improving governmental machinery.
Slavery was the backbone of the Southern economic system. Therefore, the Confederate Constitution declared the legality and permanence of slavery. However, importation of slaves (except from the Northern states) was forbidden.
Like its Union predecessor, the Confederate constitution called for three branches of national government. The legislative body would consist of two houses. A president was to be elected for a 6-year term and not eligible for re-election. The president had the power of line-item veto, which is to say that he could kill parts of a bill without having to destroy the entire bill.
Just as the U.S. Constitution made no mention of the right of a state to leave the Union, the Confederate Constitution was also silent on the question. Yet the legality of secession was implicit in the existence of the Confederate States of America.
That the Southern nation was an alliance of states and not a single federal entity was made clear throughout its constitution. Each state, the document announced, acted “in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form” not “a more perfect union” but “a permanent federal government” acting under the authority of the member-states. Further, Southern law declared that any federal officer, acting improperly within the boundaries of a state, could be impeached by that state.
“State sovereignty,” as used by Confederates, had a different meaning than what modern historians give to it. Confederate state rights meant the sovereignty of the people of the states. The people of Virginia would act in concert, not the government of Virginia acting for them (unless so ordered).
The Southern constitution made provisions for a Supreme Court and “such inferior courts as the Congress may … establish.” No such national judiciary was ever established.
Confederate cabinet members could serve at the same time in either house of Congress, the idea being that such overlapping duties facilitated a smooth government. Incidentally, in what modern Americans will find unbelievable, the Confederate Congress could not appropriate money except by a two-thirds vote of both houses; and Congress was required by law to give a prompt and public accounting of all expenditures.
What the authors of the Confederate Constitution had in mind at the outset was a document designed to produce “the elimination of political waste, the promotion of economical government, and the keeping of each echelon of [the] complex government within its appointed orbit.” One observer has gone so far as to the call the Southern constitution “the peak contribution of America to [the field of] political science.”
