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Confederate States of America

"Confederate States" redirects here. For the system of government, see Confederation. For a list of confederate nation states, see List of confederations. For other uses, see Confederacy (disambiguation).
For the 2004 film, see C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America.

Confederate States of America
1861–1865
Motto: Deo vindice
Under God, our Vindicator
Anthem: God Save the South (unofficial)
Dixie (popular, unofficial)
March: The Bonnie Blue Flag
Map of northern hemisphere with Confederate States of America highlighted
  •   The Confederate States
  •   Territorial claims made and under partial control for a time
  •   Separated West Virginia
  •   Contested Native American territory
StatusUnrecognized state[1]
Capital
Largest cityNew Orleans
(until May 1, 1862)
Common languagesEnglish (de facto)
minor languages: French (Louisiana), Indigenous languages (Indian territory)
Demonym(s)Confederate
Southern
Government
President 
• 1861–1865
Jefferson Davis
Vice President 
• 1861–1865
Alexander H. Stephens
LegislatureCongress
• Upper house
Senate
• Lower house
House of Representatives
Historical eraAmerican Civil War
February 8, 1861
April 12, 1861
February 22, 1862
April 9, 1865
April 26, 1865
May 5, 1865
Population
• 1860[a]
9,103,332
• Slaves[b]
3,521,110
Currency
Preceded by		 Succeeded by
South Carolina
Mississippi
Florida
Alabama
Georgia
Louisiana
Texas
Virginia
Arkansas
North Carolina
Tennessee
Arizona Territory
West Virginia
Tennessee
Arkansas
Florida
Alabama
Louisiana
North Carolina
South Carolina
Virginia
Mississippi
Texas
Georgia
Arizona Territory
Today part ofUnited States

The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States (C.S.), the Confederacy, or the South, was an unrecognized breakaway[1] republic in the Southern United States that existed from February 8, 1861, to May 5, 1865.[8] The Confederacy was composed of eleven U.S. states that declared secession; South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina; they warred against the United States during the American Civil War.[8][9]

With Abraham Lincoln's election as President of the United States in 1860, a portion of the southern states were convinced that their slavery-dependent plantation economies were threatened, and began to secede from the United States.[1][10][11] The Confederacy was formed on February 8, 1861, by South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.[12][13][14] They adopted a new constitution establishing a confederation government of "sovereign and independent states".[15][16][17] Some Northerners reacted by saying "Let the Confederacy go in peace!", while some Southerners wanted to maintain their loyalty to the Union. The federal government in Washington D.C. and states under its control were known as the Union.[9][12][18]

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina's militia attacked Fort Sumter. Four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—then seceded and joined the Confederacy. On February 22, 1862, Confederate States Army leaders installed a centralized federal government in Richmond, Virginia, and enacted the first Confederate draft on April 16, 1862. By 1865, the Confederacy's federal government dissolved into chaos, and the Confederate States Congress adjourned, effectively ceasing to exist as a legislative body on March 18. After four years of heavy fighting, nearly all Confederate land and naval forces either surrendered or otherwise ceased hostilities by May 1865.[19][20] The most significant capitulation was Confederate general Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9, after which any doubt about the war's outcome or the Confederacy's survival was extinguished. Confederate President Davis's administration declared the Confederacy dissolved on May 5.[21][22][23]

After the war, during the Reconstruction era, the Confederate states were readmitted to the Congress after each ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing slavery. Lost Cause mythology, an idealized view of the Confederacy valiantly fighting for a just cause, emerged in the decades after the war among former Confederate generals and politicians, and in organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Intense periods of Lost Cause activity developed around the turn of the 20th century and during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in reaction to growing support for racial equality. Advocates sought to ensure future generations of Southern whites would continue to support white supremacist policies such as the Jim Crow laws through activities such as building Confederate monuments and influencing the authors of textbooks.[24] The modern display of the Confederate battle flag primarily started during the 1948 presidential election, when the battle flag was used by the Dixiecrats. During the civil rights movement, racial segregationists used it for demonstrations.[25][26]

Events leading to the American Civil War
  1. Northwest Ordinance
  2. Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions
  3. End of Atlantic slave trade
  4. Missouri Compromise
  5. Tariff of 1828
  6. Nat Turner's Rebellion
  7. Nullification crisis
  8. End of slavery in British colonies
  9. Texas Revolution
  10. United States v. Crandall
  11. Gag rule
  12. Commonwealth v. Aves
  13. Murder of Elijah Lovejoy
  14. Burning of Pennsylvania Hall
  15. American Slavery As It Is
  16. United States v. The Amistad
  17. Prigg v. Pennsylvania
  18. Texas annexation
  19. Mexican–American War
  20. Wilmot Proviso
  21. Nashville Convention
  22. Compromise of 1850
  23. Uncle Tom's Cabin
  24. Recapture of Anthony Burns
  25. Kansas–Nebraska Act
  26. Ostend Manifesto
  27. Bleeding Kansas
  28. Caning of Charles Sumner
  29. Dred Scott v. Sandford
  30. The Impending Crisis of the South
  31. Panic of 1857
  32. Lincoln–Douglas debates
  33. Oberlin–Wellington Rescue
  34. John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry
  35. Virginia v. John Brown
  36. 1860 presidential election
  37. Crittenden Compromise
  38. Secession of Southern states
  39. Peace Conference of 1861
  40. Corwin Amendment
  41. Battle of Fort Sumter
  1. ^ a b c "Preventing Diplomatic Recognition of the Confederacy, 1861–65". U.S. Department of State. Archived from the original on August 28, 2013.
  2. ^ "Reaction to the Fall of Richmond". American Battlefield Trust. December 9, 2008. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
  3. ^ "History". Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
  4. ^ W. W. Gaunt (1864). The Statutes at Large of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America: From the Institution of the Government, February 8, 1861 to Its Termination, February 18, 1862, Inclusive. Arranged in Chronological Order, Together with the Constitution for the Provisional Government and the Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States, and the Treaties Concluded by the Confederate States with Indian Tribes. D & S Publishers, Indian Rocks Beach. p. 1,2.
  5. ^ Cooper (2000) p. 462. Rable (1994) pp. 2–3. Rable wrote, "But despite heated arguments and no little friction between the competing political cultures of unity and liberty, antiparty and broader fears about politics in general shaped civic life. These beliefs could obviously not eliminate partisanship or prevent Confederates from holding on to and exploiting old political prejudices. Indeed, some states, notably Georgia and North Carolina, remained political tinderboxes throughout the war. Even the most bitter foes of the Confederate government, however, refused to form an opposition party, and the Georgia dissidents, to cite the most prominent example, avoided many traditional political activities. Only in North Carolina did there develop anything resembling a party system, and there the central values of the Confederacy's two political cultures had a far more powerful influence on political debate than did organizational maneuvering."
  6. ^ David Herbert Donald, ed. Why the North Won the Civil War. (1996) pp. 112–113. Potter wrote in his contribution to this book, "Where parties do not exist, criticism of the administration is likely to remain purely an individual matter; therefore the tone of the criticism is likely to be negative, carping, and petty, as it certainly was in the Confederacy. But where there are parties, the opposition group is strongly impelled to formulate real alternative policies and to press for the adoption of these policies on a constructive basis. ... But the absence of a two-party system meant the absence of any available alternative leadership, and the protest votes which were cast in the 1863 Confederate mid-term election became more expressions of futile and frustrated dissatisfaction rather than implements of a decision to adopt new and different policies for the Confederacy."
  7. ^ "1860 Census Results". Archived from the original on June 4, 2004.
  8. ^ a b Tikkanen, Amy (June 17, 2020). "American Civil War". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved June 28, 2020. ...between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.
  9. ^ a b Hubbard, Charles (2000). The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. p. 55. ISBN 1-57233-092-9. OCLC 745911382.
  10. ^ Thomas, Emory M. (1979). The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865. Harper Collins. pp. 256–257. ISBN 978-0-06-206946-7.
  11. ^ McPherson, James M. (2007). This mighty scourge: perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford University Press US. p. 65. ISBN 978-0198042761.
  12. ^ a b "Confederate States of America". Encyclopædia Britannica. July 20, 1998. Retrieved June 25, 2019.
  13. ^ Smith, Mark M. (2008). "The Plantation Economy". In Boles, John B. (ed.). A Companion to the American South. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4051-3830-7. Antebellum southern society was defined in no small part by the shaping and working of large tracts of land whose soil was tilled and staples tended by enslaved African-American laborers. This was, in short, a society dependent on what historians have variously referred to as the plantation system, the southern slave economy or, more commonly, the plantation economy... Slaveholders' demand for labor increased apace. The number of southern slaves jumped from under one million in 1790 to roughly four million by 1860. By the middle decades of the antebellum period, the Old South had matured into a slave society whose plantation economy affected virtually every social and economic relation within the South.
  14. ^ McMurtry-Chubb, Teri A. (2021). Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy. Lexington Books. p. 31. ISBN 978-1-4985-9907-8. The plantation as the vehicle to wealth was tied to the primacy of cotton in the growth of global capitalism. The large-scale cultivation and harvest of cot ton required new forms of labor organization, as well as labor management, Enter the overseer. By 1860, there were approximately 38,000 overseers working as plantation managers throughout the antebellum south. They were employed by the wealthiest of planters, planters who held multiple plantations and owned hundreds of enslaved Africans. By 1860, 85 percent of all cotton grown in the South was on plantations of 100 acres or more. On these plantations resided 91.2 percent of enslaved Africans. Planters came to own these Africans through the internal slave trade in the United States that moved to its cotton fields approximately one million enslaved laborers.
  15. ^ Robert S. Rush; William W. Epley (2007). Multinational Operations, Alliances, and International Military Cooperation. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 21,27.
  16. ^ John T. Ishiyama (2011). Comparative Politics: Principles of Democracy and Democratization. John Wiley & Sons. p. 214.
  17. ^ Dunbar Rowland (1925). History of Mississippi, the Heart of the South, volume 1. S. J. Clarke publishing Company. p. 784.
  18. ^ Charles Daniel Drake (1864). Union and Anti-Slavery speeches, delivered during the Rebellion, etc. p. 219,220,222,241.
  19. ^ "Learn – Civil War Trust" (PDF). civilwar.org. October 29, 2013. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 1, 2010. Retrieved August 27, 2017.
  20. ^ Hacker, J. David (September 20, 2011). "Recounting the Dead". Opinionator. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  21. ^ Arrington, Benjamin P. "Industry and Economy during the Civil War". National Park Service. Retrieved February 5, 2022.
  22. ^ Davis, Jefferson (1890). Short History of the Confederate States of America. Belford co. p. 503. Retrieved February 10, 2015.
  23. ^ The constitutionality of the Confederacy's dissolution is open to interpretation at least to the extent that, like the United States Constitution, the Confederate States Constitution did not grant anyone (including the President) the power to dissolve the country. However, May 5, 1865, was the last day anyone holding a Confederate office recognized by the secessionist governments attempted to exercise executive, legislative, or judicial power under the C.S. Constitution. For this reason, that date is generally recognized to be the day the Confederate States of America formally dissolved.
  24. ^ David W. Blight (2009). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press. p. 259. ISBN 978-0-674-02209-6.
  25. ^ Strother, Logan; Piston, Spencer; Ogorzalek, Thomas. "Pride or Prejudice? Racial Prejudice, Southern Heritage, and White Support for the Confederate Battle Flag". academia.edu: 7. Retrieved September 13, 2019.
  26. ^ Ogorzalek, Thomas; Piston, Spencer; Strother, Logan (2017). "Pride or Prejudice?: Racial Prejudice, Southern Heritage, and White Support for the Confederate Battle Flag". Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. 14 (1): 295–323. doi:10.1017/S1742058X17000017. ISSN 1742-058X.


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