During this lockdown and quarantine, I recently re-watched Ken Burns’s epic documentary series on the Civil War, serenaded with the dulcet, non-rhotic tones and mellifluous commentary of the late Shelby Foote. I also read several speeches and essays by one of our Fathers of Confederation, Thomas D’Arcy McGee. The Confederation Debates and much of the public discourse in British North America of the 1860s focuses on the Civil War and its potential consequences for Canada. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, to the extent that he endures in our national memory today at all, mostly features as the “Poet of Confederation” and for having earned the ignoble distinction of becoming the first of only three Canadian politicians ever to die by assassination. But we should also treat him as a serious political thinker and theoretician of federalism, constitutional monarchy, and parliamentary government.
The combination of Burns’s documentary and McGee’s writings prompted me to read for the first time the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, and it contained for me two surprises: first, that its text expressly rejects the “States’ Rights” narrative, which, in turn, has greatly contributed to the “Lost Cause” mythology; second, more innocuously – if it’s even possible to examine a secessionist polity steeped in slavery and expressly founded upon racial inequality in such a manner – its small concession (dare I say, surrender?) to parliamentary government.
