What I Learned from Reading the Confederate Constitution

The other founding document and the vision some still want today.

Jemar Tisby, PhD
Jun 23, 2026

This year, the country turns 250. We’ll hear about the founding documents—the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

We’ll hear almost nothing about the other one.

On March 11, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, seven slaveholding states signed into being the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

They copied most of it word-for-word from the U.S. Constitution.

Then they changed a few parts, and the changes tell you what kind of nation a certain group of white Christians wanted.

I read the whole document. Three changes stand out.

They put God in the Constitution. They explicitly named slavery to protect it forever. And they built a strong central government while claiming to fight for states’ rights.

Writing God into the Constitution

The Constitution of the United States never mentions God. That was a deliberate decision by the framers of the document.

The Confederates noticed the absence, so they added God to the very first sentence of their constitution.

“We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.”

The first sentence is almost word-for-word from the U.S. Constitution, but at the end it adds: “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”

The men who built a nation to protect slavery wanted God’s blessing as they did so. And they wanted it on record.

The same government that reduced human beings to property prayed for the Almighty’s blessing in its opening line.

The cruelty is not the only point. It’s cruelty in the name of piety.

Yet they did keep a ban on an official state church. In Article I, the CSA constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

They wanted God’s name above the nation without tying themselves to any particular church or creed.

Naming, Protecting, and Expanding Slavery

The U.S. Constitution never uses the words “slave” or “slavery.” Knowing how contentious the practice was, it used a euphemism: “persons held to service.”

It still protected slavery through several provisions but avoided using the word itself.

The Confederates did away with the coded language and made it plain.

They said it, over and over again. Ten different times.

“Slaves.” “Negro slaves.” “The institution of negro slavery.”

First, they ensured that slavery would be the law of the land and that no other law would overrule it.

“No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”

No future Congress could touch it. The right to own a human being was fixed in the Constitution itself.

A Confederate legislature could not have abolished slavery even if it had wanted to.

Next, they made sure slavery could spread. Every new territory the Confederacy might acquire was required to keep it:

“In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them..."

Wherever the Confederate flag flew, slavery would exist in its shadow.

Lastly, they made sure that escape from slavery was impossible.

A slaveholder could carry human “property” into any Confederate state and retain his claim to property in people.

“No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due.”

The U.S. Constitution had its own “fugitive slave clause”, but it concerned only enslaved people who escaped and crossed into free states.

In the United States, enslaved people always had the possibility, however remote and dangerous, of self-emancipation.

If they escaped from their bondage and crossed into a non-slave state, they could gain their freedom.

Not so in the Confederacy.

The Confederate Constitution added the words “or lawfully carried into another.”

It means a slaveholder who traveled into another Confederate state with enslaved people kept his legal claim.

The U.S. clause was about runaways. The Confederate clause was about that and preventing any state from being a place where slavery could be loosened by mere presence.

Building a Centralized Government

Every time a Confederate apologist opens their mouth, they say the Civil War wasn’t about slavery; it was about “states’ rights.”

In their minds, it’s the idea of protecting local control against federal government overreach. So, in this telling, the Confederacy stood for liberty against centralized power.

Their own constitution contradicts that story.

The preamble starts like a states’ rights argument. It refers to each state “acting in its sovereign and independent character.”

They stripped the central government of many of the powers the old Union had claimed.

Congress could no longer raise tariffs to prop up favored industries: “nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry.”

But then the Confederate Constitution takes a turn toward centralized power.

Once slavery is the topic, states’ rights disappear.

When it came to slavery, the central government was forbidden to weaken it, and every new territory was required to protect it.

In an even more telling move, the Confederates kept the supremacy clause—copied almost word for word from the Constitution they had just abandoned:

“This Constitution, and the laws of the Confederate States made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the Confederate States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The supposed champions of state sovereignty wrote federal government supremacy straight into their founding document.

When a state law clashed with the Confederate government, the Confederate government won.

So what was the states’ rights argument really for? To protect slavery.

The people who ranted and raved about states’ rights all but abandoned them when slavery was protected.

The War Still Rages

The Confederates lost the Civil War. Now their constitution sits as a historical artifact of a nation that never was.

But the ideology that animated the Confederate Constitution never went away.

There are still people today who call the nation Christian even as it commits horrific acts of cruelty.

Under this White House and following plans outlined in Project 2025, states’ rights are being steamrolled in the name of authoritarianism and centralization of power.

There is a concerted effort to hide the historical record of the nation’s racism and slavery.

It’s as if today’s white Christian nationalists are working from a replica of the Confederate Constitution.

This is what the 250th anniversary is really about.

The choice the nation has always had between two founding documents and two visions of itself.

The one in Philadelphia in 1787 that left room for a “more perfect union,” and the one in Montgomery in 1861 that tried to freeze a moment in time when liberty was determined by skin color.

The Confederate Constitution was an argument about who counts, who is free, who gets to decide, and how God’s name gets used in those efforts.

That argument never ended—whether on the ballot, in the pulpit, or in the laws being written right now.

In the nation’s 250th year, we have the opportunity to move toward a truer democracy or toward a Confederate vision that buries freedom beneath the bloodied soil of injustice.