The Confederate Constitution of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS28 1 their addressee, others, with proper federal postage attached, would be taken to a regular post office for delivery elsewhere. Of the many local fairs, only the eight largest, beginning with that in Brooklyn in December 1863 and ending with that in Springfield, Massachusetts , a year later, issued sanitary stamps. Of these, the most numerous are from the Philadelphia Fair held in June 1864. The Kantors provide a synopsis of each of these fairs and a detailed description of their philatelic offerings. They also have a briefchapter describing various medals and commemorative sheet music produced by the different fairs. In addition, they provide brief overview chapters of the work of the United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission. The last third of the book is devoted to a discussion of military and hospital mail, Civil War prison correspondence, and a variety of wartime benevolences , including those of the Confederates. Two appendices contain the order of the secretary of war appointing the United States Sanitary Commission on June 9, 1861, and a list of all military hospitals (both Union and Confederate ) and their bed capacities. There is also an extensive bibliography, arranged by topic. For all of that, this is primarily a volume of interest to collectors, philatelic and otherwise. Profusely illustrated with both color and black-and-white depictions ofthe various stamps, covers, medals, and sheet music, the descriptions of these are largely in collector terms. Those familiar with the sanitary movement will find little else new here. William E. Parrish Mississippi State University VAe Confederate Constitution of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism . By Marshall L. DeRosa. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Pp. 192. $32.50 cloth, $14.95 paper.) Marshall L. DeRosa examined the Confederate constitution to find in its text "viable alternatives to the current course of constitutional-political development " (4). The Confederate document supposedly embodies certain ideas "indigenous to the American constitutional system of government" (3). DeRosa's attempt to locate universal principles in the Confederacy's founding document is the root of the problems in this book. The Confederate principles DeRosa identifies are state sovereignty and limited national government. "Through state's rights," DeRosa argues, "potential excesses of the Confederate government were to be constrained, while the states themselves were to be controlled by their respective citizenry" (133). The framers eliminated the general welfare clause, emasculated the federal judiciary, limited congressional appropriations powers, and introduced various semantic changes designed to create a state-centered democracy . The war was fought chiefly for this distinctive—and appealing— version of American constitutionalism, according to DeRosa. 282CIVIL WAR HISTORY His argument is reminiscent of postwar Southern polemicists which elevated the Confederate war effort to a high and principled constitutional plane. Like them, DeRosa displays an unfortunate tendency toward oversimplification . For example, in an attempt to illustrate the polarization of the two sections, he depicts William Seward as the "epitome" of Northern constitutionalism , giving Seward nearly universal Northern support that he most certainly did not possess. Likewise, DeRosa sees John C. Calhoun as the "recognized theoretical leader of the South," a role which many moderate and conditional Unionist Confederates would have been unwilling to concede (155). Southern fear of centralization is crucial for DeRosa's purposes, since it is this apprehension—and the alternative viewpoint it spawned—that makes Confederate constitutionalism so applicable to modern problems. But Donald Nieman has persuasively argued that the reverse was true: fear of factionalism and internal bickering was at the heart of Confederate constitutionalism . Southerners also seemed to harbor no Ul will toward national power before 1861, when they called for the creation of a comprehensive fugitive slave law, backed by a federal police force. DeRosa's downplaying of the slavery issue is the most glaring distortion in his work. He belittles the "specious contention that the Confederacy was designed exclusively or primarily to maintain a slavocracy" (134). He concedes that the Confederate constitution protected the transition of slave property through any Southern state, guaranteed the institution's existence in the territories, and prohibited laws "impairing the right of property in Negro slaves." Nevertheless, he argues, the document restricted only Richmond's right to emancipate. The states could...