The Southern leaders met in Montgomery, Alabama, to write their constitution. Much of the Confederate States Constitution replicated the United States Constitution verbatim, but it contained several explicit protections of the institution of slavery including provisions for the recognition and protection of slavery in any territory of the Confederacy. It maintained the ban on international slave-trading, though it made the ban's application explicit to ""Negroes of the African race"" in contrast to the U.S. Constitution's reference to ""such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit"". It protected the existing internal trade of slaves among slaveholding states.