Confederate States of America

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

The Confederacy was formed on February 8, 1861, by seven slave states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. All seven are in the Deep South region of the United States, whose economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture, especially cotton, and a plantation system that relied on slave labor. The Federal Government in Washington D.C. and states under its control were known as the Union.

The 1860 United States presidential election served as the catalyst for economic discussion; the North was a heavily populated, industrialized society fed by constant immigration and required heavy regulation, while the South was a traditional agricultural society, economically laissez-faire, and depended on plantations. Mississisippi senator Jefferson Davis argued that every state had the right to resist Federal regulation, and could choose the economic system that it wanted, including for newly admitted states. Illinois representative Abraham Lincoln opposed this, arguing that the Federal government had the right to intervene economically.

With Abraham Lincoln's election as President of the United States, the seven southern states were convinced that the plantation economy was threatened, and so they seceded from the Union. On February 8, 1861, before Lincoln took office, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution, and established a confederation government of "sovereign and independent states".

The confederation functioned similarly to the European Union; prior to adopting the first Confederate constitution, the Southern states were sovereign republics, e.g. "Republic of Florida", "Republic of Louisiana", "Republic of Texas" etc. Some Northerners reacted to the new country by saying "Let the Confederacy go in peace!", while some Southerners wanted to maintain their loyalty to the Union.

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when the South Carolina militia attacked Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. South Carolinians wanted to evict the Union troops so they could protect the harbor from federal reinforcements. After war began, four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—also joined the Confederacy. Four slave states of the Border South, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, remained in the Union and became known as border states.

Virginia early on wanted to remain loyal to the Union, with Governor Letcher declaring that Virginia would fight and resist any "troops sent to coerce a secessionist state". However, Virginia was very pro-slavery, and with the start of the Civil War, rumors spread that Virginia would soon be invaded by "an army of Abolitionists under Abraham Lincoln". Upon Virginia's secession, federal troops immediately crossed into the northwestern part of the state, creating West Virginia. Virginia fielded the Army of Northern Virginia, the primary military force of the Confederate States Army.

On February 22, 1862, one year into the war, Confederate States Army leaders re-established a federal government in Richmond, Virginia, and enacted the first Confederate draft on April 16, 1862, and began conscripting people in large numbers. In the Cornerstone Speech, Vice President Alexander H. Stephens described the new government's ideology as centrally based "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."

By 1865, the Confederacy's federal government dissolved into chaos: the Confederate States Congress adjourned ''sine die'', 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.

The war lacked a clean end date: the most significant capitulation was Confederate general Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, after which any doubt about the war's outcome or the Confederacy's survival was extinguished, although another large army under Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston did not formally surrender to William T. Sherman until April 26. Contemporaneously, President Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth on April 14. Confederate President Jefferson Davis's administration declared the Confederacy dissolved on May 5, and acknowledged in later writings that the Confederacy "disappeared" in 1865. On May 9, 1865, U.S. President Andrew Johnson officially called an end to the armed resistance in the South.

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. 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.

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