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A landmark publication of public reports that reveal the founding of the Confederate government

Past publications of the proceedings of the Confederate Congress have focused on the public sessions of the Regular Confederate States Congress that met in Richmond, Virginia from February 1862 to March 1865. Omitted were the formative early sessions of the Montgomery, Alabama and Richmond, Virginia Provisional Congresses of 1861 and 1862. In Congress of States, David Carlson reveals these critical early meetings.

To illuminate this pivot point in American and Southern history, Carlson has drawn on detailed and often verbatim minutes reported in Richmond, Montgomery, Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Augusta newspapers, assembling here a unique set of transcriptions that reveal the birth of the Confederate government.

Congress of States provides an introduction to the Provisional Confederate Congress and the purpose of this work relative to the Southern Historical Society’s landmark 1923 publication “Proceedings of the Confederate Congress,” which detailed the 1862–1865 Regular Confederate Congress. He also includes a chronology outlining the major events of the secession crisis, annotated minutes for the Provisional Confederate Congress’s five sessions, appendices featuring the leadership and committees of the Provisional Congress, and fascinating examples of the proposed Confederate emblem and flags debated by the delegates.

A key set of primary sources that scholars, historians, librarians, and political scientists will value for years to come, Congress of States will also be essential reading for the general reader interested in American and Southern history, the Antebellum South, and the Civil War.

 

A thoughtful and provocative meditation on both the potential and limits of constitutionalism.

In the early twenty-first century, constitutionalism confronts numerous pressures and critiques.  Some prominent critics are concerned that constitutionalism’s modern form, in which high courts play a large role, limits popular self-governance. By committing their nations to detailed social and economic policies—from neoliberal requirements for balanced budgets to constitutionalized social welfare and environmental rights—many modern constitutions might make promises they cannot keep and be unduly rigid in the face of changing social, economic, and environmental conditions. Meanwhile, the rise of proto-authoritarian elected leaders around the world shows that constitutions are vulnerable to, and may even enable, democratic backsliding.

Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugarič argue that addressing each of these serious concerns through constitutional design and innovation is potentially valuable, but paradoxically, every remedy also carries with it the possibility that it will intensify the very conditions it seeks to ameliorate. Instead, Tushnet and Bugarič propose a “thin” idea of constitutionalism and suggest that we should scale back our expectations for what constitutionalism can achieve. Political mobilization, led by people attuned to the economic and cultural causes of democratic backsliding, is a better bet. 

As in many other countries, the protection of human rights and other practices of constitutionalism remains uneven in Malawi and Kenya. In this book, Eunice N. Sahle argues that the adoption in 1994 and 2010 in Malawi and Kenya, respectively, of new constitutional frameworks, which have the markings of “critical constitutional events,” provided significant openings for the promotion of human rights. Nonetheless, the emergence of such opportunities does not mean that the protection of human rights is automatic. Sahle zeroes in on the tension between the possibilities of human rights promotion on one hand, and the historical and contemporary factors influencing that process on the other. In that regard, her analysis shows the importance and limits of transformative constitutional frameworks as tools for social change. Further, by focusing on the promotion of human rights by a diverse range of social actors—individuals, civil society, organizations, and public institutions—she demonstrates the need to broaden who “counts” as an agent of human rights and to go beyond a strictly state-centric approach.