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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 | |
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| |
Status | Unrecognized state[1] |
Capital |
|
Largest city | New Orleans (until May 1, 1862) |
Common languages | English (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 |
Legislature | Congress |
Senate | |
House of Representatives | |
Historical era | American 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 | |
Today part of | United 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 9, 1865.[8] The Confederacy was comprised of eleven U.S. states that declared secession and warred against the United States during the American Civil War.[8][9] The states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States in 1860, the southern states were convinced their slavery-based plantation economy was 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. These states seceded in the first of two waves of secession.[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 the South Carolina militia attacked Fort Sumter. Four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—then seceded, in the second wave of secession, and joined the Confederacy. On February 22, 1862, Confederate States Army leaders re-installed a 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]
...between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.
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.
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.
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