Righto.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 4
“(4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”
IOW, the CSA built into their constitution a prohibition of emancipation. Presumably this applied to the CSA Congress. I don’t think they prohibited a state from freeing its slaves.
I’ll have to go back and look. As I recall, they wanted to avoid the whole fugitive slave act unpleasantness so they added language precluding any “state” from interfering between someone and his property.
1. The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.Or 3.3, on new states and territories:
"3. The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.The notion that the Confederacy was some sort I states' rights paradise is historical revisionism. Slavery was required of all its member states, who didn't have the right to ever change their own internal policy in the future.