BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – With the nation locked in debates over Confederate symbols, the very document that defined the legal structure of a government built to preserve slavery will spend its 160th anniversary, where it spends almost every day: hidden in a university file.
The Confederate Constitution is a forgotten relic of an ignoble cause that remains contentious for generations after the end of the Civil War, but few people know of its existence or final resting place. Historians say that better knowledge of the document would help people – especially whites in the south who downplay the role of slavery in the war – to understand what was at the heart of the Confederacy.
And that, the constitution and other documents explain, were slavery and white supremacy, historians say. At the same time that it prohibited the importation of Africans from any place other than the confederate states, the constitution also prohibited laws that interfered with “the black slaves’ property rights”.
“It’s not old history and I think accepting it is something that southern whites need to do,” said Paul Finkelman, who specializes in southern history and is president of Gratz College, a small school in Philadelphia.
Found in a cart when the war ended in April 1865, the original Confederate Constitution adopted on March 11, 1861 was kept for decades at the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts. The university bought the constitution of a property in 1939.
Composed in faded ink on five large sheets of animal skin connected on a single parchment over 12 feet (3.7 meters) in length, the constitution is stored in a vault and rarely seen in public. In contrast, the United States Constitution is on display in the National Archives, visited by 1 million people in a typical year.
However, the Confederate version is almost entirely unknown in a country where some display rebel battle flags and struggle to preserve statues for the “lost cause” myth of southern history presented by the sons of daughters of Confederate veterans. And last week, an Alabama lawmaker leading a fight to strengthen legal protections for rebel memorials contested that white supremacy and slavery were central to the Confederacy.
“There is no proof of that,” Republican Representative Mike Holmes told a reporter.
The Confederate Constitution was a product of white men who wanted to defend themselves, according to Columbia University historian Stephanie McCurry. Without black slaves or white women having any political say, white men had full power as they met to ratify the constitution at Montgomery.
“The political history of the Confederate States of America was a long and bloody test of their fundamental principles and stated objective: to build, once and for all, the perfect republic of white men,” McCurry wrote in his book “Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the South of the Civil War. “
Gathered at the Alabama Capitol, 49 delegates from seven states – Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas – signed the constitution just a month before the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter.
Similar to the United States Constitution in many respects, including most of the Bill of Rights and entire sections that are almost identical, the Confederate version was very different in other respects, including the use of the phrase “black slavery” and its protection from slavery as an institution. Together, the constitution helped set the stage for four years of war that claimed some 620,000 lives.
The defeated South and its government in disarray, correspondent for the newspaper Felix G. DeFontaine found the Confederation’s constitution at a railway station in Chester, South Carolina, amid boxes of records that were transported out of Richmond, Virginia, when the capital confederate was evacuated, according to a story compiled by the Georgia archive.
DeFontaine sold the copy to one of Georgia’s wealthiest families in 1883, and the University of Georgia bought it almost 60 years later. Before that, the constitution was exhibited for several years at the Library of Congress in Washington and was exhibited at other events and museums.
Katherine Stein, director of rare books and manuscripts at the Georgia library, said the constitution was publicly displayed for the last time as part of a one-day exhibition in 2018.
The huge document cannot be shown regularly because of its size and fragility, Stein said, and unfortunately, for scholars at least, relatively few people understand how slavery was central control.
McCurry, the Columbia University historian, said the void “is not for lack of historians trying”.
“The refusal to know serves a myth of use in the present,” she said.