Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Half-witted academic: “The only difference between the United States Constitution and the Confederate States Constitution was slavery.”

Or maybe you heard Eric “the Red” Foner tell Judge Napolitano that “No one was talking about the tariff” in the months leading to the War in 1861.

No one.

Or perhaps you are a Jaffaite neo-con writing for the Federalist.com who claims that John C. Calhoun and the Confederate government were the precursors to modern Marxism and progressivism.

Sure.

These people believe that the only words to pass the lips of every Southerner in the antebellum period were slavery.

They woke and thought of nothing but slavery all day and went to bed dreaming of slavery.

A speech would have sounded like this: “I rise today to talk about slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, and slavery. Thank you for your slavery, and I now turn my time over to slavery.”

Where we hear Charlie Brown’s teacher, “wah, wah, wah, wah, wah,” they hear “slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery.”

All other issues were subservient to…slavery.

And, say these dunderheads, the Confederate Constitution proves it! Why they use the word “slave” in it! See, it is all slavery and nothing but slavery!

I would bet that most of these idiots have never read the document and even worst wouldn’t understand it as a part of the American constitutional tradition if they did.

You see, the Confederate Constitution did talk about tariffs, federally funded internal improvements, “state’s rights,” and a host of other issues that “no one was talking about” in the antebellum period (even weeks before the War) according to Comrade Foner.

I thought it was a prime moment to discuss the Confederate Constitution, so I cover the document in Episode 99 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Trust me, Comrade Eric the Red would not approve.

By the way, the best book ever written on the document is Marshall DeRosa’s The Confederate Constitution of 1861. Get that one.

Brion McClanahan
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