Reactionary Revolutionaries

The Confederate States of America and Mexico’s Conservative and Second Imperial governments failed spectacularly. In retrospect, it is easy to shelve them as the product of strange times and particularly asinine politics. Nevertheless, understanding these regimes clues us into the possibilities of politics at a time of profound crisis. Secessionists, Conservatives, and imperialists forcefully rejected the republic as it had become.

Their breakaway projects meant to restore principles and ethical structures they believed were essential to the commonwealth. The Confederate States of America, in the words of their brand-new vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, were the first nation “in the history of the world” to be founded upon a “great physical, philosophical and moral truth”: that of “negro” inferiority. In Mexico, Conservatives believed the true faith should be the foundation of the political edifice, and neither its principles nor its practices should be sacrificed to modernization.

These reactionary revolutionaries took it upon themselves to recast North America’s political landscape. Southern secessionists created a nation from scratch. In Mexico, the enemies of the 1857 constitution first tinkered with a military dictatorship they hoped would be able to reorganize a society that was falling apart. Defeated in war by the end of 1860, “cast down but not destroyed,” their fears of U.S. intervention conveniently mitigated by the stranglehold that the Civil War had placed on U.S. foreign policy, Conservatives swallowed their qualms about entangling foreign alliances and restored a monarchist regime, led by an Austrian archduke and sponsored by an invading foreign army.

In their efforts to begin the nation anew, North America’s conservative revolutionists knew they tread on dangerous ground. To conceal the untested nature of their political formulas, they stressed continuities with the past — real or idealized — and transcendent principle. The Confederacy presented itself as the true heir of the Spirit of 1776, which had been perverted by fanatical Northerners. Its seal was graced by George Washington riding horseback over the Latin inscription “Deo Vindice [God Our Defender].” Confederate claims to a glorious past were inevitably controversial. But even as Southerners rejected the “bare-faced and transparent fallacies” of Declaration of Independence — the pretense that all men were created equal — they saw July 4 celebrations as an opportunity to “expose the North’s failure to live up to the Revolution’s ideals.” Their own insurgency was construed as both an echo and an “improvement” on their ancestors’ feats.

Maximilian’s empire also tapped into Mexico’s nationalist traditions and historical imagination. Unlike the divided, distracted Conservative governments that preceded it, the empire put forth an ambitious, comprehensive conception of the past, not as the object of angry disputes but as a source of unity. It put together a conciliatory version of historia patria, in which the recent troubles were but an accident in a long and venerable history, in which everyone was a hero: it glorified the extraordinary scientific and artistic achievements of precontact Indigenous civilizations and exalted both the popular revolt that set off the War for Independence in 1810 and the arbitrations of the former royalist officer — and merciless foe of the first insurgents — who had brought it to an end in 1821.

At mid-century, disunionists in the United States and opponents of Mexico’s 1857 constitution drew from different philosophical, religious, and legal traditions to deal with particular challenges. Both faced the Conservatives’ classic dilemma: a desire to appropriate modernity — “progress,” “civilization” — and the need to purge it of its most unseemly, disquieting features, on both the practical and ideological levels. These “retrogrades” feared the political principles and population dynamics that constituted them as minorities. They despaired at the arrogance of men intent on interfering with Providence and the “natural order of things.” They bridled against an expansive, universalist language that jumbled the relationship between words and things and turned the heads of the poor, the ignorant, and the dependent. In rebuilding the political edifice, they hoped to separate the wheat from the chaff and discipline modernity through constitutional and legal engineering.

Southerners equated their rebellion to that of the 13 colonies against British tyranny and to the birth of the nation in 1787–89. To sever their relationship with the Union most seceding states relied on the same device they had used in the late 1780s to create a federal republic. Opting for flight rather than fighting over the character of state and nation with stubborn Northerners, secessionists upheld their legitimate claim to the founding — reloaded — and to the founders’ constitution — perfected because rightly interpreted.

In Mexico, those who disapproved of the 1857 constitution drew from a more eclectic but shallower constitutional arsenal. While secessionists were leaving at least part of their troubles behind as they left the Union, Mexican Conservatives and imperialists were convinced that to save the nation they had to wrest it from the Liberals’ hands. The Conservative military government (1858–60) pulled together a “provisional organic statute” to serve as fundamental law, but they dared not enact it. In 1863, a more ideologically diverse group of politicians aspired to a more profound transformation: it gave up on both constitutions and republican rule.

As they sorted out the characteristics of the new order, conservative advocates of revolution professed to be righting all sorts of wrongs, doing God’s work and fulfilling His will. They argued that they were also heeding the people’s mandate. Mexico’s devout Catholics and the vigorous white citizenry of the South surely condemned the disturbing designs of fanatical demagogues. On these issues, radical conservatives were, nevertheless, often as emphatic as they were unsure: on both sides of the border, “the people” had done things that belied their reasonable assumptions. In their enthusiasm for political meetings and electioneering that was far from sober, citizens had recently shown less than ideal judgment: in Mexico, many supported liberal radicalism with both votes and arms. In the United States, zealots had turned the heads of Northern voters and set the Union on the course of disaster, under the leadership of an untried, irresponsible political party. Even in the South, although voters had thoroughly rebuffed the Republican ticket, many had still backed moderate candidates who insisted on preserving the Union.

Still, North America’s reactionary revolutionaries insisted that they spoke for the people — or at least for their true interests and the common welfare. They feared that the people’s voice would prove them wrong. Wary of popular intervention, the Confederacy’s constitutional congress held its debates behind closed doors, as did the assembly that voted to restore a monarchical regime in Mexico City. Mexican authorities went further still: in order to prevent “bad passions” from “sowing seeds of discord among good Mexicans,” they suspended newspaper publication in the capital during the “most solemn” days during which delegates discussed the fate of the nation. Subsequently, the Confederate legislature frequently went into secret sessions; Mexico’s military and imperial governments abolished almost all representative bodies and regulated the press. Legislation exalted the freedom of public writers but forcibly curtailed their “abuses” if they probed public figures’ “private life” or endangered “morality” or the “public order.”

The architects of confederacy and empire wanted to ground the new order on both “truth” — eternal, immutable — and the people’s will, inevitably volatile and unreliable, unless one assumed that the people could never be wrong. Conservative revolutionaries were under no such delusion. Their skepticism notwithstanding, they could not step away from the essential fiction of modern politics. The voice of the people seemed at once essential and detrimental to good government.

In February 1861, “having dissolved their political connection” to the United States, seven newly independent republics sent some of their most proficient politicians — mostly large slaveholders — to Montgomery, Alabama, to give birth to a Confederate nation by endowing it with leadership and a fundamental law. The provisional Congress, stricken by what Emory M. Thomas described as a “mania for unanimity,” elected two experienced statesmen from the booming cotton states to preside over the new government. Both the president, Mississippi’s former senator Jefferson Davis, who had served the Union as secretary of war, and the vice president, Georgia congressman Alexander H. Stephens, had formerly steered a moderate course by Southern standards. In November, in line with the Confederates’ antiparty stance, Davis and Stephens ran for office unopposed.

At the ballot box, the people endorsed — having been presented with no other choice — the wisdom of their representatives at the constitutional convention. Delegates to Montgomery hammered out, mostly behind closed doors, a provisional and then a permanent constitution. A radical minority considered fundamental law to be useless. Like some Mexican Conservatives, they found constitutions “not worth the paper they were written on.” “God and nature” made states; the Confederacy needed little more than a simple, provisional treaty of alliance to bind them together. This small and cantankerous group, however, did most of its criticizing from the sidelines and to little effect. Most Southern politicians considered a constitution essential. State representatives, then, faced a momentous, dangerous challenge.

In the words of Georgia’s Benjamin Hill, the “formation of a new constitution” had to serve as “a very powerful agency for good,” even as uncertainty and division proliferated. Some “anticipated a more radical democracy,” “a fearful anarchy,” “an aristocracy,” “a slave-trade oligarchy,” and “even a limited monarchy.” Yet framing the new nation’s constitution took less than a month: congressmen reviewed and selectively amended, line by line, the fundamental law whose rule the states had just thrown off, as they insisted on the defense of its spirit. They introduced only “necessary and proper” changes to the 1787 document. The Confederacy’s fundamental law was unanimously adopted on March 11 and then rapidly ratified. Harper’s Weekly hailed the reformed constitution, and asserted that its “principal alterations … would receive hearty support” from most people in the North.

The most consequential changes to the 1787 document did not entail renovating a constitutional tradition but dealing, concretely, with the issues that had driven polarization and secession. Ambivalent silences on slavery were swept away: the Confederate fundamental law asserted that “no slave” could be discharged from service or labor and that “the institution of negro slavery” was protected by Congress in all of the Confederacy, including the territories it might expand into. As one of Alabama’s representatives contended, “no euphony,” dangerously open to interpretation, hid the real name of things: by calling “our negroes slaves,” the constitution “recognized and protected them as persons and our rights to them as property.”

These essential innovations were, nonetheless, not pushed to their last consequences. The document did not normalize the presence of the enslaved in republic, even in terms of how they should be counted for the purpose of apportionment. It preserved the three-fifths clause — a figure which outsiders found “most perplexing.” Politicians who had complained about it for years did not insist on counting the enslaved as inhabitants in order to bolster the political influence of large slaveholders or states with large enslaved populations. There was, perhaps, a powerful political reason for keeping things as they were. Confederates emphatically insisted on the political equality of white men: counting, for purposes of political representation, the “moral chattel” deemed radically unfit for citizenship proved too uncomfortable.

In another gesture of strategic comity, dressed up as paternalistic concern for the South’s “four million improved, civilized, hardy and happy laborers,” the Confederate constitution banned the Atlantic slave trade.

This was meant, on the one hand, to reassure reluctant slave states of their place in the Confederacy, but it dangled over their heads the possibility of shutting down a profitable market if they refused to join the slaveholders’ bold nation-building experiment. On the other hand, as they prepared to launch the nation onto the world stage, the Confederacy’s architects felt it was best not to provoke Great Britain and its abolitionists.

It is in some ways surprising that, having taken the solemn and dreadful step of secession, the builders of a republic premised on slavery and white supremacy enacted no constitutional provisions to shore up its most compelling elements. A majority of delegates either tabled or voted against proposals to explicitly exclude from the franchise those who had African blood in their veins; to forbid Congress from passing any law “denying the right of property in negro slaves”; and to keep free states out of the Confederacy, as long as they recognized the legitimacy of property in man. The framers’ restraint stemmed, in part, from their expectation that free border states would join the CSA; their more fanciful hope of luring some Midwestern states into the would-be powerful agricultural empire and a concern for the newborn nation’s international reputation. They trusted, perhaps, that occasions for disagreement would diminish significantly, since Confederate legislative debates would be purged of the Union’s most disturbing issues: protective tariffs and, intermittently but fatally (in 1820 and after 1846), the status of slavery in the territories.

Their discretion also spoke, perhaps, of peculiar conceptions of constitutionalism, federalism, and the right of property. According to their parameters, slavery was subject only to municipal regulation and property rights were something more than the product of convention upheld by law. Slavery, they contended, was a natural, “original institution”: slaves were property and their title of ownership was not the creature “of human law,” subject to debate, regulation, or restriction. Property — in man as in anything else — was beyond the purview of legislators, state or federal: it would never again become the “hobby of the political demagogue.”

Experience, convictions, and an entrenched political culture, as well as particular understandings of key concepts and principles, kept Confederate constitutional innovation to a minimum. Moreover, fear of politics seemed to weigh heavier on the minds of members of the constitutional convention than their concerns for state sovereignty, the preservation of slavery or their exaltation of white citizenship. In their effort to restore the founders’ vision of a republic idealized as virtuous, harmonious, and honest, the framers took steps to curb the factiousness and corruption which, in their opinion, had so marred Union politics. Their constitution sought to temper and elevate politics and limit their pollution by money and selfish interest. Only “the common defense” and the costs of government were worthy objects of public funding. The “general welfare” was eschewed as something worth spending the Confederacy’s money on. To further check politicking, lobbying, and pork-barrel legislation, Congress was designed to be smaller and less representative: each congressman would stand for 50,000 inhabitants, instead of the 30,000 established in the U.S. constitution.

Consequently, the Confederate government would grant no bounties or impose protective tariffs to “foster any branch of industry.” Despite Southerners’ interest in free trade, the Confederacy would not fund infrastructure: any “internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce” would have to be paid for by the states, unless it was required for the river and coastal navigation vital to the cotton economy. The Post Office Department had to be “paid out of its own revenues.” To prevent the “extravagance and corruption” of congressional logrolling, the constitution required a two-thirds majority in both houses to authorize appropriations not requested by department heads. It also granted the president a line-item veto on budget provisions.

In the face of the excitable, garrulous, perhaps corrupt people’s representatives, the Confederate constitution set up the president as a stabilizing element. This more powerful chief executive saw his hand strengthened by a longer period in office: six years. His informal influence was, nevertheless, abridged. The constitution curbed the president’s — instrumental and much maligned — role as the great dispenser of political patronage. Although he could remove civil servants for bad behavior, unsatisfactory performance, redundancy, or obsolescence, he had to report and justify any dismissal to the Senate. Furthermore, amassing political capital would be useless, since the president could not be reelected.

For all the Confederates’ vehement condemnation of federal despotism, parties, job-seeking, and populist pandering, they too had to rely on a defense of federal supremacy, politicking, concessions, and compromise. As long as the sovereign people remained at the center of public discourse, elections proved contentious, even the absence of old party politics and the power of government was mobilized to protect “class interests.” Even without the crushing pressures of war, then, Confederate design failed to do what it set out to do: secure states’ rights by assertively reigning in federal authority, defuse majority rule if it threatened minority rights, and protect, in James L. Huston’s words, a “legal definition that turned people into property.” Ironically, the Confederate constitution secured slavery by both naming it and setting it beyond the legislator’s reach. The requirements of state-building and republican principles drew the limits of constitutional innovation.

From Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848–1867 by Erika Pani. Copyright © 2025 by The University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of The University of North Carolina Press

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