“Stephens resumed speaking as the crowd quieted. He referred to one final “improvement” the Confederate Constitution had introduced, a brief but crucial clause that banned forever any “bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” “The new Constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” This question, Stephens baldly admitted, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”20 Stephens then referenced”