The constitution of the CSA[1] would look pretty familiar to anyone who has read Jefferson's work; I suspect that if both were written by private entities unde

The constitution of the CSA[1] would look pretty familiar to anyone who has read Jefferson's work; I suspect that if both were written by private entities under current copyright laws, the CSA would be found to have infringed on the document it was abridging. I mean, this is just snark, but it's certainly an example of the words of Thomas Jefferson being used to defend slavery. This is the biggest problem with an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and one could argue that the fact that the constitution was so vague as to what, exactly, constitutes a man or a citizen was actually a progressive thing, because if we had frozen what a voting citizen was in 1787, we'd explicitly only have given the right to vote to property owning white males, something that (I hope) almost all of us would disagree with. Because so many important things were not strictly defined, we sort of have a built in bias towards loose constructionism. [1]http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/selections/confed/trans.html http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/selections/confed/trans.htm...