The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (48 page)

(2) A person charged in any State with treason, felony, or other crime against the laws of such State, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another State, shall, on demand of the executive authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the crime.

(3) 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 [unlawfully 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.

S
EC.
3. (1) Other States may be admitted into this Confederacy by a vote of two-thirds of the whole House of Representatives, and two-thirds of the Senate, the Senate voting by States; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

(2) The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations concerning the property of the Confederate States, including the lands thereof.

(3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several States, and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. 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 in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

(4) The Confederate States shall guarantee to every State that now is or hereafter may become a member of this Confederacy, a Republican form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the Legislature, (or of the Executive when the Legislature is not in session,) against domestic violence.

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V

S
EC.
1. (1) Upon the demand of any three States, legally assembled in their several Conventions, the Congress shall summon a Convention of all the States, to take into consideration such amendments to the Constitution as the said States shall concur in suggesting at the time when the said demand is made; and should any of the proposed amendments to the Constitution be agreed on by the said Convention—voting by States—and the same be ratified by the Legislatures of two-thirds thereof—as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the general convention—they shall thenceforward form a part of this Constitution. But no State shall, without its consent, be deprived of its equal representation in the Senate.

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VI

1.—The Government established by this Constitution is the successor of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America, and all the laws passed by the latter shall continue in force until the same shall be repealed or modified; and all the officers appointed by the same shall remain in office until their successors are appointed and qualified, or the offices abolished.

2. All debts contracted and engagements entered into before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the Confederate States under this Constitution as under the Provisional Government.

3. 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, any thing in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

4. The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the Confederate States and of the several States, shall be bound, by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the Confederate States.

5. The enumeration, in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people of the several States.

6. The powers not delegated to the Confederate States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people thereof.

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VII

1.—The ratification of the conventions of five States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same.

2. When five States shall have ratified this Constitution in the manner before specified, the Congress, under the provisional Constitution, shall prescribe the time for holding the election of President and Vice-President, and for the meeting of the electoral college, and for counting the votes and inaugurating the President. They shall also prescribe the time for holding the first election of members of Congress under this Constitution, and the time for assembling the same. Until the assembling of such Congress, the Congress under the provisional Constitution shall continue to exercise the legislative powers granted them; not extending beyond the time limited by the Constitution of the Provisional Government.

Adopted unanimously by the Congress of the Confederate States of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, sitting in convention at the capitol, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, on the Eleventh day of March, in the year Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-One.

H
OWELL
C
OBB
             
President of the Congress.   

(Signatures)

The literature of the “Lost Cause” is indeed vast, and necessarily the materials mentioned here are but a sample. The sample is not random, however. This bibliography will emphasize by inclusion the “classic” works on the Confederate experience and attempt to summarize the best of recent scholarship. Because this is a survey, a third emphasis will be upon bibliographical guides to broader and deeper study.

Works specifically about the pre-Confederate South are not included here, although the footnotes to chapters 1 and 2 offer some introduction. Two other volumes in the New American Nation Series are more directly concerned with the Old South and the secession crisis—Clement Eaton,
The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790–1860
(New York, 1960), and David M. Potter,
The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861
(New York, 1976)—and both of these books contain fine bibliographies. The materials cited here are intended to compose an introduction to the literature of the South as nation.

For some years now, the most available general guides to the study of the Confederacy have been the relevant portions in the bibliography of James G. Randall and David Donald,
The Civil War and Reconstruction
(Boston, 1969), and Allan Nevins, James J. Robertson, Jr., and Bell I. Wiley (eds.).
Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography
(Baton Rouge, La., 1967). Also helpful is David Donald’s brief bibliography of the war years,
The Nation in Crisis 1861–1877
(New York, 1969), and appropriate chapters of Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick (eds.),
Writing Southern History: Essays in Historiography in Honor of Fletcher M. Green
(Baton Rouge, La., 1965). Reviews and articles in scholarly and some popular journals are the best sources of more recent scholarship. For Confederate history a few of the most significant national, regional, and period journals are:
American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, Civil War History, Civil War Times Illustrated,
and
Journal of Negro History.
State journals, especially those of Southern states, are also important, as are a number of regional and topical journals too numerous to cite here. Perhaps the best access to current periodical literature is the annual “Bibliography of Civil War Articles” published in
Civil War History
or similar annual guides published in the
Journal of Southern History
and the
Journal of American History.

To locate unpublished research studies there are two basic guides: Warren F. Kuehl,
Dissertations in History
(Lexington, Ky., 1965), and the periodical
Dissertation Abstracts
(title varies) published by the University Microfilm Service, Ann Arbor, Mich. The number of cooperating institutions in the microfilm enterprise involved in the latter guide imposes some limits upon the scope of the material surveyed.

General histories of the Civil War period are often important for their content as well as for their use as bibliographical guides. Randall and Donald’s
Civil War and Reconstruction
continues, despite numerous challenges, to be the most widely used general history, and its bibliography, although somewhat dated, remains basic to serious students. Perhaps the best one-volume history of the war is Raimondo Luraghi,
Storia della guerra civile americana
(Turin, Italy, 1966). Luraghi also has an intriguing study of
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South
(New York, 1978). Among multivolume studies Allan Nevins’
Ordeal of the Union,
2 vols. (New York, 1947),
The Emergence of Lincoln,
2 vols. (New York, 1950), and
The War for the Union,
4 vols. (New York, 1959–1971) have surpassed the older standard, James Ford Rhodes,
History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to … 1877,
7 vols. (New York, 1893–1900). A more popular account is Bruce Catton’s
Centennial History of the Civil War,
3 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1961— 1965). The major limitation of both Nevins’ and Catton’s projects is the tendency to hurry through the later war years in the last volumes. Shelby Foote’s
The Civil War: A Narrative,
3 vols. (New York, 1958–1975) is good, especially as military narrative.

Shorter studies of the period include Arthur C. Cole,
The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865
(New York, 1934), and Thomas H. O’Connor,
The Disunited States
(New York, 1972), both of which emphasize the prewar years. Robert Cruden,
The War That Never Ended
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973), emphasizes the black experience. More balanced recent interpretations are William R. Brock,
Conflict and Transformation: The United States, 1844–1877
(Baltimore, 1973); Emory M. Thomas,
The American War and Peace, 1860–1877
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973); Robert H. Jones,
Disrupted Decades: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years
(New York, 1973); Peter Parish,
The American Civil War
(New York, 1975); Roy F. Nichols,
The Stakes of Power, 1845–1877
(New York, 1961); and William L. Barney,
Flawed Victory: A New Prospective on the Civil War
(New York, 1975). Other brief, general works of note are Alan Barker,
The Civil War in America
(Garden City, N.Y., 1961); Harry Hansen,
The Civil War
(New York, 1962); and James A. Rawley,
Turning Points of the Civil War
(Lincoln, Neb., 1966).

Reference works and collections of documents relating to the Civil War era in general and to the Confederacy in particular include Mark Mayo Boatner III,
The Civil War Dictionary
(New York, 1959); David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman (eds.),
The Encyclopedia of Southern History,
soon to be published by the Louisiana State University Press; E. B. Long, with Barbara Long,
The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865
(Garden City, N.Y., 1971); Henry Steele Commager (ed.),
The Blue and the Gray: The Story of the Civil War as told by Participants,
2 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind., 1950); Otto Eisenschiml and Ralph G. Newman (eds.),
The American Iliad: The Epic Story of the Civil War as Narrated by Eyewitnesses and Contemporaries
(Indianapolis, Ind., 1947); Frank Moore (ed.),
The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events …,
12 vols. (New York, 1861–1868); Albert Kirwan (ed.),
The Confederacy
(Cleveland, 1959); Richard B. Harwell (ed.),
The Confederate Reader
(New York, 1957); and
Historical Statistics of the United Stales: Colonial Times to 1957
(Washington, D.C., 1960).

Essays touching Confederate history abound. One of the best collections is David Donald (ed.),
Why the North Won the Civil War
(Baton Rouge, La., 1960), which might be more descriptively titled “Why the South Lost.” David Potter,
The South and the Sectional Conflict
(Baton Rouge, La., 1968) contains some of the best efforts of its brilliant author, as does C. Vann Woodward’s
Burden of Southern History,
revised edition (Baton Rouge, La., 1968) and
American Counterpoint
(Boston, 1971). Frank E. Vandiver (ed.),
The Idea of the South
(Chicago, 1964), is a collection of thoughtful pieces, as are Charles G. Sellers, Jr.,
The Southerner as American
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960), and William R. Brock (ed.),
The Civil War
(New York, 1969). Vandiver makes some especially perceptive observations in his contribution to William F. Holmes and Harold M. Hollingsworth (eds.),
Essays on the American Civil War
(Austin, Tex., 1968). Two essays with essentially the same title written some years apart by different scholars are suggestive: Charles W. Ramsdell, “Some Problems Involved in Writing the History of the Confederacy,
“Joumal of Southern History,
II(1936), 133–147, and Frank E. Vandiver “Some Problems Involved in Writing Confederate History,”
Journal of Southern History,
XXXVI (1970), 400–410. Finally, some reflections of a “master” are contained in Douglas S. Freeman,
The South to Posterity
(New York, 1939).

About the Confederacy per
se
a number of general histories exist. One of the most interesting is one of the oldest, Edward A. Pollard’s
The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War …
(New York, 1866). Pollard was a talented journalist who wrote from a pro-Southern, anti-Jefferson Davis bias. Somewhat more recently, the standard modern work has been Clement Eaton,
A History of the Southern Confederacy
(New York, 1954). E. Merton Coulter,
The Confederate States of America, 1861–1865
(Baton Rouge, La., 1950) is an encyclopedic work which presents more facts than interpretation. The best general reader’s history is Frank E. Vandiver,
Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy
(New York, 1970). Other studies appealing to a general readership are Clifford Dowdey,
The Land They Fought For: The Story of the South as the Confederacy, 1832–1865
(Garden City, N.Y., 1955), and Robert S. Henry,
The Story of the Confederacy
(Indianapolis, Ind., 1931). The best short general history is still Charles P. Roland’s
The Confederacy
(Chicago, 1960).

Among significant interpretive works on the Confederate experience, Nathaniel W. Stephenson’s
The Day of the Confederacy
(New Haven, Conn., 1919) and Frank L. Owsley’s
State Rights in the Confederacy
(Chicago, 1925) are older standards. Frank E. Vandiver’s “The Confederacy and the American Tradition,”
Journal of Southern History,
XXVIII (1962), 277–286 is seminal. Bell I. Wiley’s
Road to Appomattox,
Atheneum edition (New York, 1968) focuses upon the negative aspects of Southern nationhood, while Emory M. Thomas’
Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971) emphasizes the positive.

There is a significant literature which attempts to determine the reason or reasons the “Lost Cause” lost. The best summary of this material is Henry Steele Commager (ed.),
The Defeat of the Confederacy
(Princeton, N.J., 1964). Further contributions include: Wiley’s
Road to Appomattox;
Lawrence H. Gipson, “The Collapse of the Confederacy,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review,
IV (1918), 437–458; and Robert L. Kerby, “Why the Confederacy Lost,”
Review of Politics,
XXXV (1973), 326–345.

The rawest raw materials of Confederate history, manuscript, and archival materials, are fairly well scattered. Much official and personal material did not survive the Confederacy and more has perished since 1865 through fire, neglect, and like causes. Nevertheless, because the Confederacy and its war came very close to the Southern people, much abides, and still those interested in the study make “finds” among old trunks in attics.

Important to the location and use of this material are several guides. Henry Putney Beers,
Guide to the Archives of the Government of the Confederate States of America
(Washington, D.C., 1968) is a veritable gold mine. Beers lists and locates records of the Confederate government, cites printed material, and notes secondary works which relate to the items listed. Moreover the guide offers the locations of manuscript collections of the papers of government and military officials. Since most archival material of the Confederacy is in the National Archives and most of it is contained in Record Group 109, the National Archives
Preliminary Inventory,
number 101,
War Department Collection of Confederate Records,
compiled by Elizabeth Bethel (Washington, D.C., 1957), is also useful.

For manuscript collections, the most important guide is U.S. Library of Congress,
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections,
which describes and locates the important collections of major repositories. Also useful are National Historical Publications Commission,
Guide to Archives and Manuscripts in the United States,
ed. by Philip M. Hamer (New Haven, Conn., 1961), which provides notes on the holdings of 1,300 repositories; and American Association for State and Local History,
Directory of Historical Societies and Agencies in the United States and Canada
(Nashville, Tenn., 1965).

Archives of the individual Confederate states as well as some city and county records are important. An introduction to British materials is Bernard R. Crick and Miriam Alman (eds.),
A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland
(London, 1961). The largest collection of district court records is in the Federal Records Center at East Point, Georgia. Most individual manuscript and archival repositories have a publication describing their holdings and facilities. These range in size and scope from pamphlets to Susan Sokol Blosser and Clyde Norman Wilson, Jr.,
The Southern Historical Collection: A Guide to Manuscripts
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970).

Guides and lists are important. Too often, however, the researcher may in his or her haste overlook an even more significant resource: the people who work with the materials in a given repository. These professionals may often save many hours or locate items otherwise unknown. If nothing else they usually offer a sympathetic ear to a wandering scholar.

In addition to the published material cited under “Biography and Personal Narratives,” on page 331–349, there is a rich trove of eyewitness accounts in
The Southern Historical Society Papers, The Confederate Veteran,
and Clarence C. Buel and Robert U.Johnson (eds.),
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,
4 vols. (New York, 1887).

For contemporary statistical data and encyclopedic material see
The Eighth Census,
1860, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1864–1866); Frank Moore (ed.),
The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events
…, 12 vols. (New York, 1861–1868);
The American Annual Cyclopedia
…, 5 vols. (New York, 1862–1866); Rembert W. Patrick (ed.),
The Opinions of the Confederate Attorneys General, 1861–1865
(Buffalo, 1950); and the reports of the secretary of the treasury appended to Henry D. Capers,
The Life and Times of C. G. Memminger
(Richmond, Va., 1893). Confederate statutes are in James M. Matthews (ed.),
The Statutes at Large of the Provisional Government…
(Richmond, Va., 1862-1864), covering all but the final session of Congress and some secret acts; and Charles W. Ramsdell (ed.), Laws and Joint Resolutions of the Last Session of the Confederate Congress … Together with the Secret Acts of Previous Congresses (Durham, N.C., 1941).