Delegates to the Montgomery Convention had created a Committee of Twelve, headed by Christopher G. Memminger of South Carolina, to develop a constitution for the new nation of states that had seceded from the Union. Memminger’s committee submitted its document to the full convention on the 7th, and the delegates reviewed and debated the findings in secret session. Finally, near midnight on the 8th, they approved “The Constitution for the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America.”
The committee had used the United States Constitution as its starting point, making changes it felt necessary to make the document more amenable to southern interests. The preamble of the Confederate Constitution changed the U.S. version of “We, the people of the United States” to “We, the people of the Confederate States.” To counter the northern argument that the people of the nation superseded the states, it explicitly declared that each state was “acting in its sovereign and independent character.” This implied that states could secede from the Confederacy if desired, but no definitive verbiage on the subject was provided.
The document upheld the recent Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) U.S. Supreme Court ruling by forbidding national interference with slavery in the states and allowing slaveholders to bring their slaves into any Confederate territory. The verbiage “person held to service or labor” in the U.S. Constitution was changed to “slave” in this document, and the fugitive slave provision in the original document was strengthened…