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This Day (An America 250 History Show)

Writing The Confederate Constitution [Some Sunday Context]

This Day (An America 250 History Show)

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.51K Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2026

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For our "Sunday Context" episode, we look at how the Confederacy scrambled to draft a constitution as Civil War broke out in 1861. Plus, a quick follow up and correction about the founder of baseball.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey everyone, Jody Abergen here. Welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia,

0:09.0

and welcome to our Some Sunday Context series, where we are bringing you conversations new and from the archives

0:14.9

that try and give you a little context for what we are up to here in 26.

0:19.6

Now, this past week, we ran a two-parter about the start of the

0:22.5

Civil War, the Battle of Fort Sumter, and today we are going to bring you an episode about

0:27.2

the Confederacy. Now that it was a full-on civil war and the South was seceding, it had to figure out

0:32.5

how to be a country of its own. And it needed, among other things, a constitution. So up next is an episode

0:38.8

from the archives about how that all came together. But before we do that, a little follow-up,

0:44.3

a little correction. So we did do that two-parter about Fort Sumter, right? And the twists and turns

0:48.9

of the battle and all the characters and all the ideology tearing the country apart, really

0:52.8

fascinating. And one time in each episode,

0:55.9

I made a reference to an officer in the Northern Army who was stationed at Fort Sumter,

1:00.4

Abner Doubleday. And I made a passing reference each time to the fact that Double Day is

1:04.6

considered the inventor of baseball. So again, almost 90 minutes about the Civil War,

1:10.1

two passing references, like 10 seconds total, about Ab minutes about the Civil War, two passing references like 10 seconds total

1:12.8

about Abnerd Double Day. Guess what we got a bunch of emails about. So yeah, it turns out that

1:18.5

basically it's a myth. Double Day is not really the inventor of baseball. I have now been connected

1:23.4

with the official MLB historian. We're exchanging emails. He sent me a bunch of stuff to read. I'm going to find a way to share this with all of you. We're definitely going to put some links in the newsletter. We may actually do a proper episode to both correct the record and talk about the invention of baseball, which feels very worthy of our big long series anyway. Funny enough, my parents were on the way to Cooperstown, the Base hall of fame the very morning that our episode came out. They're not really even huge baseball fans, but they were just like, let's go check out Cooperstown. So they listened to the episode on the way over. They heard me mention Doubleday. They like rolled into the museum expecting to see a bunch of stuff about them and nothing. And my mom called me afterwards and said,

2:02.1

I think he may have gotten that wrong. And I was like, yeah, mom, you should see my inbox. Like,

2:05.6

yes, I know. So anyway, that's the work of history. Very fascinating. We will follow up. Stay tuned.

2:11.6

Now, before we get to that episode about the Confederate Constitution, a reminder to sign up for the

2:16.2

This Day newsletter where we do America 250 watch each week sign up for the This Day newsletter, where

...

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