Confederate States Congress

The Confederate States Congress was both the provisional and permanent legislative assembly/legislature of the Confederate States of America that existed from February 1861 to April/June 1865, during the American Civil War. Its actions were, for the most part, concerned with measures to establish a new national government for the Southern proto-state in the current Southern United States region, and to prosecute a war that had to be sustained throughout the existence of the Confederacy. At first, it met as a provisional congress both in the first capital city of Montgomery, Alabama, and the second in Richmond, Virginia. As was the case for the provisional Congress after it moved northeast to Richmond, the permanent Congress met in the existing Virginia State Capitol, a building which it also shared with the secessionist Virginia General Assembly (state legislature).

The precursor to the permanent Congressional legislature was the temporary Provisional Congress of the Confederate States, which helped establish the Confederacy as a state / nation with an organized government. Following elections held in individual states, refugee colonies, and army camps in November 1861, the 1st Confederate States Congress met in four sessions. The 1863 midterm elections led to many former Democrats losing to former Whigs, the political parties of the recent 1850s in the United States in which they had formerly participated. The 2nd Confederate Congress met in two sessions following an intersession during the military campaign season beginning November 7, 1864, and ending on March 18, 1865, shortly before the conclusion of the Civil War and the downfall of the Confederacy.

All legislative considerations of the Confederate Congress were secondary to winning the American Civil War. These included debates whether to pass President Jefferson Davis's war measures and deliberations on alternatives to administration proposals, both of which were often denounced as discordant, regardless of the outcome. Congress was often held in low regard regardless of what it did. Amidst early battlefield victories, few sacrifices were asked of those who resided in the Confederacy, and the Confederate Congress and Davis were in essential agreement.

During the second half of the war, the Davis administration's program became more demanding, and the Confederate Congress responded by becoming more assertive in the law-making process even before the 1863 elections. It began to modify administration proposals, substitute its own measures, and sometimes it refused to act at all. While it initiated few major policies, it often concerned itself with details of executive administration. Despite its devotion to Confederate independence, it was criticized by supporters of Davis for occasional independence, and censured in the dissenting press for not asserting itself more often.

The Confederate Congress first met provisionally on February 4, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a unified national government among states whose secessionist conventions had resolved to leave their union with the United States. Most Deep South residents and many in the border states believed the new nation about to be born in a revolution to perpetuate slavery was the logical result of defeats in sectional contests.

The 1859 raid at the federal Harpers Ferry Armory in Harper's Ferry, then in Virginia, at the confluence of the Shenandoah with the Potomac River, by abolitionist John Brown to free slaves in Virginia was hailed in the North by other abolitionists, who proclaimed that it was a noble martyrdom, while many in the South saw Brown as a provocateur and dangerous extremist, seeking to incite servile insurrection and violent social upheaval. The North seemed unwilling to accept the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Dredd Scott case of March 1857, that slaves were not free citizens even if moved to Northern free states or to the western federal territories, and by implication, therefore guaranteeing slavery in the territories, and the Democratic Party had split among Northern and Southern factions over the issue, especially in the controversial disputed 1860 presidential election. Sectional antagonism was magnified with the decline of the national Whig Party and the upsurge of the newly-organized Republican Party in 1854, was insistent on ending the extension of slavery in the western territories, which was seen as a threat to the very existence of continued slavery in the South itself, and of a white Southern civilization.

The increasing economic rivalry and gap of wealth between Northern industry and more mechanized farming versus Southern slave cash-crop agriculture seemed to be a losing battle that would permanently subject the South as diminished colonists dependent on an aggressive business world. Secession was to the state delegates meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, a clear cut solution to over several decades of humiliation, reverses, and defeats. A new nation of secessionist states exclusive to the South, would assure uncompromised slavery and deliver an independent economic security based on King Cotton.

The November 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln proved to be the deciding catalyst for the Deep South. Southern members of Congress repeatedly addressed their constituents, saying that all hope of sectional relief and redress was done and that "the sole and primary aim of each slaveholding State ought to be its speedy and absolute separation from an unnatural and hostile Union."