restacks

What I Learned from Reading the Confederate Constitution

“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.

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. White Christian nationalists are repeating the pattern today.

Here’s that sentence, that for which Christian Nationalists pine: “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, in… ”

The Constitution of the United States never mentions God. That was a deliberate decision by the framers of the document. They did not want an official religion enshrined by the State. The Confederates noticed the absence, so they added God to the very first sentence of their 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.”

And this is exactly what Make America Great, Again has always meant. It’s white supremacy. It’s always been white supremacy.

Delaware has three counties. New Castle county was free. Sussex condoned slavery. Kent had a mix.

The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were passed in 1901. Let that sink in.

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.

Jemar Tisby, PhD nails this. I focus my American Legal History course on the original documents. That is where objective truth resides. When reading the original text of any document, you remove the spin.

Jamar was one of the first voices in scholarship that articulated an issue I saw since I was young. He has continued to be someone I look to when articulating the gospel message of equity and freedom.