Global InformationConfederate States of America information
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Confederate States of America | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 1861–1865 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Top: Flag
(1861–1863) Bottom: Flag (1865)  Seal
(1863–1865) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Motto: Deo vindice Under God, our Vindicator | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anthem: God Save the South (unofficial) Dixie (popular, unofficial) March: The Bonnie Blue Flag | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Federal Union and Southern States | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Status | Unrecognized state[1] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Capital |
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| Largest city | New Orleans (until May 1, 1862) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Common languages | English (de facto) minor languages: French (Louisiana), Indigenous languages (Indian territory) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Demonym(s) | Confederate Dixie | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Government |
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| President | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1861–1865 | Jefferson Davis | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Vice President | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1861–1865 | Alexander H. Stephens | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Legislature | Congress | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Upper house | Senate | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Lower house | House of Representatives | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Historical era | American Civil War | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Provisional constitution | February 8, 1861 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• American Civil War | April 12, 1861 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Permanent constitution | February 22, 1862 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia | April 9, 1865 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Military Collapse | April 26, 1865 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Debellation and Dissolution | May 5, 1865 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Population | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• 1860[a] | 9,103,332 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
• Slaves[b] | 3,521,110 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Currency |
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| 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 comprised eleven U.S. states that declared secession and warred against the United States during the American Civil War.[8][9] The states are 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 Northern slave states, 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, segregationists used it for demonstrations.[27][28]
- ^ a b c "Preventing Diplomatic Recognition of the Confederacy, 1861–65". U.S. Department of State. Archived from the original on August 28, 2013.
- ^ "Reaction to the Fall of Richmond". American Battlefield Trust. December 9, 2008. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ "History". Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ a b W. W. Gaunt (1864). The Statutes at Large of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America: From the Institution of the Government, February 8, 1861 to Its Termination, February 18, 1862, Inclusive. Arranged in Chronological Order, Together with the Constitution for the Provisional Government and the Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States, and the Treaties Concluded by the Confederate States with Indian Tribes. D & S Publishers, Indian Rocks Beach. p. 1,2.
- ^ Cooper (2000) p. 462. Rable (1994) pp. 2–3. Rable wrote, "But despite heated arguments and no little friction between the competing political cultures of unity and liberty, antiparty and broader fears about politics in general shaped civic life. These beliefs could obviously not eliminate partisanship or prevent Confederates from holding on to and exploiting old political prejudices. Indeed, some states, notably Georgia and North Carolina, remained political tinderboxes throughout the war. Even the most bitter foes of the Confederate government, however, refused to form an opposition party, and the Georgia dissidents, to cite the most prominent example, avoided many traditional political activities. Only in North Carolina did there develop anything resembling a party system, and there the central values of the Confederacy's two political cultures had a far more powerful influence on political debate than did organizational maneuvering."
- ^ David Herbert Donald, ed. Why the North Won the Civil War. (1996) pp. 112–113. Potter wrote in his contribution to this book, "Where parties do not exist, criticism of the administration is likely to remain purely an individual matter; therefore the tone of the criticism is likely to be negative, carping, and petty, as it certainly was in the Confederacy. But where there are parties, the opposition group is strongly impelled to formulate real alternative policies and to press for the adoption of these policies on a constructive basis. ... But the absence of a two-party system meant the absence of any available alternative leadership, and the protest votes which were cast in the 1863 Confederate mid-term election became more expressions of futile and frustrated dissatisfaction rather than implements of a decision to adopt new and different policies for the Confederacy."
- ^ "1860 Census Results". Archived from the original on June 4, 2004.
- ^ a b Tikkanen, Amy (June 17, 2020). "American Civil War". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved June 28, 2020.
...between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.
- ^ a b Hubbard, Charles (2000). The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. p. 55. ISBN 1-57233-092-9. OCLC 745911382.
- ^ a b "Confederate States of America". Encyclopædia Britannica. July 20, 1998. Retrieved June 25, 2019.
- ^ Smith, Mark M. (2008). "The Plantation Economy". In Boles, John B. (ed.). A Companion to the American South. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4051-3830-7.
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.
- ^ McMurtry-Chubb, Teri A. (2021). Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy. Lexington Books. p. 31. ISBN 978-1-4985-9907-8.
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.
- ^ Charles Daniel Drake (1864). Union and Anti-Slavery speeches, delivered during the Rebellion, etc. p. 219,220,222,241.
- ^ M. McPherson, James (1997). For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York City: Oxford University Press. pp. 106, 109. ISBN 978-0195124996.
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.
- ^ Thomas, Emory M. The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (1979) pp. 256–257.
- ^ McPherson, James M. (2007). This mighty scourge: perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford University Press US. p. 65. ISBN 978-0198042761.
- ^ Robert S. Rush; William W. Epley (2007). Multinational Operations, Alliances, and International Military Cooperation. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 21,27.
- ^ John T. Ishiyama (2011). Comparative Politics: Principles of Democracy and Democratization. John Wiley & Sons. p. 214.
- ^ Dunbar Rowland (1925). History of Mississippi, the Heart of the South, volume 1. S. J. Clarke publishing Company. p. 784.
- ^ Stephens, Alexander (July 1998). "Cornerstone Speech". Fordham University. Retrieved June 25, 2019.
- ^ "Learn – Civil War Trust" (PDF). civilwar.org. October 29, 2013. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 1, 2010. Retrieved August 27, 2017.
- ^ Hacker, J. David (September 20, 2011). "Recounting the Dead". Opinionator. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
- ^ Arrington, Benjamin P. "Industry and Economy during the Civil War". National Park Service. Retrieved February 5, 2022.
- ^ Davis, Jefferson (1890). Short History of the Confederate States of America. Belford co. p. 503. Retrieved February 10, 2015.
- ^ The constitutionality of the Confederacy's dissolution is open to interpretation at least to the extent that, like the United States Constitution, the Confederate States Constitution did not grant anyone (including the President) the power to dissolve the country. However, May 5, 1865, was the last day anyone holding a Confederate office recognized by the secessionist governments attempted to exercise executive, legislative, or judicial power under the C.S. Constitution. For this reason, that date is generally recognized to be the day the Confederate States of America formally dissolved.
- ^ David W. Blight (2009). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press. p. 259. ISBN 978-0-674-02209-6.
- ^ Strother, Logan; Piston, Spencer; Ogorzalek, Thomas. "Pride or Prejudice? Racial Prejudice, Southern Heritage, and White Support for the Confederate Battle Flag". academia.edu: 7. Retrieved September 13, 2019.
- ^ Ogorzalek, Thomas; Piston, Spencer; Strother, Logan (2017). "Pride or Prejudice?: Racial Prejudice, Southern Heritage, and White Support for the Confederate Battle Flag". Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. 14 (1): 295–323. doi:10.1017/S1742058X17000017. ISSN 1742-058X.
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