Confederate States of America

The Confederate States of America (CSA), also known as the Confederate States (C.S.), the Confederacy, or the South, was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States from 1861 to 1865. It comprised eleven U.S. states that declared secession: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. These states fought against the United States during the American Civil War.

With Abraham Lincoln's election as President of the United States in 1860, eleven southern states believed their slavery-dependent plantation economies were threatened, and seven initially seceded from the United States. The Confederacy was formed on February 8, 1861, by South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. They adopted a new constitution establishing a confederation government of "sovereign and independent states". The federal government in Washington D.C. and states under its control were known as the Union.

The Civil War began in April 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. In February 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, most Confederate land and naval forces either surrendered or otherwise ceased hostilities by May 1865. 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.

After the war, during the Reconstruction era, the Confederate states were readmitted to Congress after each ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery, "except as a punishment for crime". 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, Ladies' Memorial Associations, 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 it was used by the pro-segregationist and white supremacist Dixiecrat Party.

Historians who address the origins of the American Civil War agree that the preservation of the institution of slavery was the principal aim of the eleven Southern states (seven states before the war and four states after its onset) that declared their secession from the United States (the Union) and united to form the Confederacy. While historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of slavery, they disagree on which aspects of this conflict (ideological, economic, political, or social) were most important, and on the North's reasons for refusing to allow the Southern states to secede. Proponents of the pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology deny that slavery was the principal cause of the secession, a view disproven by overwhelming historical evidence, including some of the seceding states' own secession documents.

The principal political battle leading to secession was over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the Western territories destined to become states. Initially Congress had admitted new states into the Union in pairs, one slave and one free. This had kept a sectional balance in the Senate but not in the House of Representatives, as free states outstripped slave states in numbers of eligible voters. Thus, at mid-19th century, the free-versus-slave status of the new territories was a critical issue, both for the North, where anti-slavery sentiment had grown, and for the South, where the fear of slavery's abolition had grown. Another factor leading to secession and the formation of the Confederacy was the development of white Southern nationalism in the preceding decades. The primary reason for the North to reject secession was to preserve the Union, a cause based on American nationalism.

Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election. His victory triggered declarations of secession by seven slave states of the Deep South, all of whose riverfront or coastal economies were based on cotton that was cultivated by slave labor. They formed the Confederate States after Lincoln was elected in November 1860 but before he took office in March 1861. Nationalists in the North and "Unionists" in the South refused to accept the declarations of secession. No foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy. The U.S. government, under President James Buchanan, refused to relinquish its forts in territory claimed by the Confederacy. The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces bombarded the Union's Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.

Background factors in the run up to the war were partisan politics, abolitionism, nullification versus secession, Southern and Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics, and modernization in the antebellum period. "While slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war." Historian David M. Potter wrote: "The problem for Americans who, in the age of Lincoln, wanted slaves to be free was not simply that southerners wanted the opposite, but that they themselves cherished a conflicting value: they wanted the Constitution, which protected slavery, to be honored, and the Union, which was a fellowship with slaveholders, to be preserved. Thus they were committed to values that could not logically be reconciled."