This repo was inspired by a conversation on Twitter between YAppelbaum, JasonKuznicki, JKP_Discovery, and myself about the best way to visualize changes made by the Confederate Constitution to the United States Constitution.
You can get right to the point by looking at the diffs page showing the revisions made by the Confederates in their rebel Constitution.
The source text for the two Constitution files comes from the Avalon Project edition of the U.S. Constitution and the Avalon Project edition of the Confederate Constitution, with one exception. The Confederate presidental oath is for some reason missing in the Avalon edition, so I took that one section from the WikiSource edition.
First, I used pandoc and (in the case of the U.S. Constitution) my own pandocket tool to grab the text from Avalon and convert the HTML to markdown.
Next, I removed some of the extraneous cruft (menu sections, signatures to the Confederate Constitution, and descriptive substitles given next to the section numbers for the U.S. Constitution) so as to make the similarities and dissimilarities in content more clearly stand out.
For the same reason, I also did some light editing of punctuation, capitalization, and numbering and section-heading style to make them more standard between the two documents. A few archaic spellings in the U.S. Constitution (like "labour" and "judgement") were also modernized.
I was not scrupulously consistent in determining which source file to tweak in order to eliminate these slight differences between the two texts. I am also aware that differences that may seem insignificant to me will seem significant to others (for example, the Avalon edition of the Confederate Constitution sometimes capitalizes "States" and "State" in places where its edition of the U.S. Constitution does not).
On the other hand, I left numbers of subsections in because they draw attention to important insertions into the Confederate text, like the clauses related to the slave trade and territorial slavery in Section 9 of the Confederates' Article I, which bumped all of the other subsections up a number. Likewise, leaving the numbers in makes more visible the Confederates' decision to insert the U.S. Bill of Rights into the same section.
My decisions make this project an intepretive act. You are welcome to inspect the changes more closely by looking at the commit histories for the individual Constitution files, which show the initial text as I got it from Avalon as well as the changes that I made.
This project can be seen, in some respects, as a more open (and perhaps more geeky!) version of a similar interactive feature created by the New York Times as part of historian Stephanie McCurry's "Disunion" post, "The Rebel Constitution," published March 10, 2011.
I recommend that you read that post, drawn from McCurry's book Confederate Reckoning, for a good discussion of the major changes and their significance. But my other goal here is to let you explore the differences yourself, without annotations or extensive interpretive notes.
You should also check out how Matt Dickenson did the same thing in his own repo, but with different decisions about how much to tweak the two files.