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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 comprised 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.
The Confederacy was formed on February 8, 1861, by seven slave states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.[10] 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.[11][12] The Federal Government in Washington D.C. and states under its control were known as the Union.[9][10][13][14]
Convinced that the South's plantation economy was threatened by the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency, the seven slave states seceded from the United States. No foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy as an independent country, although the United Kingdom and France granted it belligerent status.[1][15][16]
On February 8, 1861, before Lincoln took office, a provisional constitution was adopted, and established a confederation government of "sovereign and independent states".[4] The confederation functioned similarly to the European Union.[17][18] 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.[19]
The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when the South Carolina militia attacked Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. 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.
On February 22, 1862, one year into the war, Confederate States Army leaders re-established a federal government in Richmond, and enacted the first Confederate draft on April 16, 1862. 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."[20]
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.[21][22]
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.[23][24][25] 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.[26] 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.[27][28]
...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.
Confederate soldiers from slaveholding families expressed no feelings of embarrassment or inconsistency in fighting for their own liberty while holding other people in slavery. Indeed, white supremacy and the right of property in slaves were at the core of the ideology for which Confederate soldiers fought.... Herrenvolk democracy—the equality of all who belonged to the master race—was a powerful motivator for many Confederate soldiers.
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