Disunion Feed

"We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent States of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, invoking the favor of Almighty God, do hereby, in behalf of these States, ordain and establish this Constitution for the Provisional Government of the same [...] The importation of African negroes from any foreign country other than the slave-holding States of the United States, is hereby forbidden; and Congress are required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same."

Four days after the delegates sat down, a nation exists on paper. The preamble names its six states one by one — Texas, which seceded Feb 1, has not yet sent delegates. The slave-trade clause is the wager underneath the new government: the African trade is banned, which protects the market value of the slaves already held in the South. Non-contiguous passages from the one document joined with [...]; verified against the Yale Avalon Project.

Read it in the original — Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States, Feb 8, 1861 ↗

"At the same moment when the Southern seceding States are uniting in convention at Montgomery to create a new government for a new Union, the border States are holding another convention at Washington City for the purpose of restoring, if possible, the old order of things. [...] The preservation of the Union by any of the forms of the present constitution is so plainly impossible that the first and fundamental idea of any convention which looks to a further association of these thirty-four States under one government must be that the old constitution is suspended in fact as to six of the States [...] They have taken positions from which it is impossible to retreat if they desired it."

Two conventions sit in the same week: one at Montgomery building a government, one at Washington trying to save the old one. The Picayune — a conservative New Orleans daily, no fire-eater — reports the symmetry and calls the Washington effort already lost. The Peace Conference would sit until Feb 27; Congress declined to act on its proposals. Non-contiguous sentences from the one editorial joined with [...].

Read it in the original — Daily Picayune, Feb 8, 1861 ↗