A Nation Without a Supreme Court

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America, unanimously adopted on March 11, 1861, by the as- sembled delegates of the original seceding states and on June 19, 1861, by the state of Virginia, was for all practical purposes a copy of the Constitution of the United States. Its judicial provisions begin in Article III with the familiar-sounding phrase The judicial powers of the Confederate States shall be vested in one supreme court and. . . . There is no reason to believe that this phraseology was a blind copy of the older document, and that it was not the intention of the framers of the Confederate -Constitution to include the provisions for supreme judicial review in the chart that was to guide the newborn nation. Nearly sixty years had passed since John Marshall had brilliantly expounded the necessity for supreme judicial autho-rity over the acts of the various legislative and executive bodies that comprised the nation and the years had only confirmed the wisdom of his decision. Surely the forty-four delegates who signed the Constitution of the Confederate States were aware of this necessity when they retained a provision for a supreme court within the confederation. Otherwise it would have been a simple matter to expunge such a requ