The Day of the Confederacy | Page 6

The commissioners were sent, were graciously received, were
accorded seats in the Congress, but they exerted no influence on the
course of its action.
The Congress speedily organized a provisional Government for the
Confederate States of America. The Constitution of the United States,
rather hastily reconsidered, became with a few inevitable alterations the
Constitution of the Confederacy.* Davis was unanimously elected
President; Stephens, Vice-President. Provision was made for raising an
army. Commissioners were dispatched to Washington to negotiate a
treaty with the United States; other commissioners were sent to
Virginia to attempt to withdraw that great commonwealth from the
Union.
* To the observer of a later age this document appears a thing of haste.
Like the framers of the Constitution of 1787, who omitted from their
document some principles which they took for granted, the framers of
1861 left unstated their most distinctive views. The basal idea upon
which the revolution proceeded, the right of secession, is not to be
found in the new Constitution. Though the preamble declares that the
States are acting in their sovereign and independent character, the new
Confederation is declared "permanent." In the body of the document
are provisions similar to those in the Federal Constitution enabling a
majority of two-thirds of the States to amend at their pleasure, thus
imposing their will upon the minority. With three notable exceptions
the new Constitution, subsequent to the preamble, does little more than
restate the Constitution of 1787 rearranged so as to include those basal
principles of the English law added to the earlier Constitution by the
first eight amendments. The three exceptions are the prohibitions (1) of
the payment of bounties, (2) of the levying of duties to promote any
one form of industry, and (3) of appropriations for internal
improvements. Here was a monument to the battle over these matters in

the Federal Congress. As to the mechanism of the new Government it
was the same as the old except for a few changes of detail. The
presidential term was lengthened to six years and the President was
forbidden to succeed himself. The President was given the power to
veto items in appropriation bills. The African slave-trade was
prohibited.
The upper South was thus placed in a painful situation. Its sympathies
were with the seceding States. Most of its people felt also that if
coercion was attempted, the issue would become for Virginia and North
Carolina, no less than for South Carolina and Alabama, simply a matter
of self-preservation. As early as January, in the exciting days when
Floyd's resignation was being interpreted as a call to arms, the Virginia
Legislature had resolved that it would not consent to the coercion of a
seceding State. In May the Speaker of the North Carolina Legislature
assured a commissioner from Georgia that North Carolina would never
consent to the movement of troops "from or across" the State to attack a
seceding State. But neither Virginia nor North Carolina in this second
stage of the movement wanted to secede. They wanted to preserve the
Union, but along with the Union they wanted the principle of local
autonomy. It was a period of tense anxiety in those States of the upper
South. The frame of mind of the men who loved the Union but who
loved equally their own States and were firm for local autonomy is
summed up in a letter in which Mrs. Robert E. Lee describes the
anguish of her husband as he confronted the possibility of a divided
country.
The real tragedy of the time lay in the failure of the advocates of these
two great principles--each so necessary to a far-flung democratic
country in a world of great powers!--the failure to coordinate them so
as to insure freedom at home and strength abroad. The principle for
which Lincoln stood has saved Americans in the Great War from
playing such a trembling part as that of Holland. The principle which
seemed to Lee even more essential, which did not perish at
Appomattox but was transformed and not destroyed, is what has kept
us from becoming a western Prussia. And yet if only it had been
possible to coordinate the two without the price of war! It was not

possible because of the stored up bitterness of a quarter century of
recrimination. But Virginia made a last desperate attempt to preserve
the Union by calling the Peace Convention. It assembled at Washington
the day the Confederate Congress met at Montgomery. Though
twenty-one States sent delegates, it was no more able to effect a
working scheme of compromise than was the House committee of
thirty-three or the Senate committee of thirteen, both of which had
striven, had failed, and had gone their ways to a place in the great
company of historic futilities.
And so the Peace Convention