Alexander H.
Stephens, who was one of its authors, very properly says:
"The whole document utterly negatives the idea, which so many
have been active in endeavoring to put in the enduring form of
history, that the Convention at Montgomery was nothing but a set
of 'conspirators,' whose object was the overthrow of the
principles of the Constitution of the United States, and the
erection of a great 'slavery oligarchy,' instead of the free
institutions thereby secured and guaranteed. This work of the
Montgomery Convention, with that of the Constitution for a
Provisional Government, will ever remain, not only as a monument
of the wisdom, forecast, and statesmanship of the men who
constituted it, but an everlasting refutation of the charges
which have been brought against them. These works together show
clearly that their only leading object was to sustain, uphold,
and perpetuate the fundamental principles of the Constitution of
the United States."[134]
The Constitution of the United States was the model followed throughout,
with only such changes as experience suggested for better practical
working or for greater perspicuity. The preamble to both instruments is
the same in substance, and very nearly identical in language. The words
"We, the people of the United States," in one, are replaced by "We, the
people of the Confederate States," in the other; and the gross
perversion which has been made of the former expression is precluded in
the latter merely by the addition of the explanatory clause, "each State
acting in its sovereign and independent character"--an explanation
which, at the time of the formation of the Constitution of the United
States, would have been deemed entirely superfluous.
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