Confederate States of America

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 12th of April 1861, artillery shells arced over Charleston Harbor and slammed into the walls of Fort Sumter. The Confederate States of America had existed for barely two months, and it was already at war. What drove eleven Southern states to walk away from the United States, build their own government from scratch, and fight for four years against overwhelming odds? And why did an entity that no foreign government ever recognized, that survived less than a single presidential term, leave such a long and contested shadow over the country that defeated it? Those questions sit at the heart of the Confederacy's story, from the Montgomery Convention of February 1861 to the surrender of the last Confederate warship in Liverpool harbor in November 1865.

• 2. Slavery as the Foundation

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  Historians who have examined the original secession documents of the eleven Confederate states find the same argument repeated: the institution of slavery was under threat, and secession was the remedy. Historian John M. Coski wrote that the statesmen who led the secession movement were unashamed to explicitly cite the defense of slavery as their prime motive, and that acknowledging the centrality of slavery to the Confederacy is essential for understanding it.

  The political crisis had been building for decades. By the mid-19th century, the question of whether slavery would be permitted in new western territories had become the defining issue in American politics. Congress had long tried to manage the tension by admitting new states in pairs, one slave and one free, to preserve sectional balance in the Senate. That arrangement grew harder to sustain as anti-slavery sentiment intensified in the North and fear of abolition deepened in the South.

  Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election without carrying a single Southern state. Seven Deep South states, whose cotton-based economies depended entirely on enslaved labor, responded by declaring secession before Lincoln even took office in March 1861. The Confederate constitution written in March 1861 contained several explicit protections of the institution of slavery, including provisions for its recognition and protection in any Confederate territory. It also explicitly denied individual states the power to bar slaveholders from bringing their slaves across state lines within the Confederacy.

  Historian David M. Potter captured the deeper tension: the people who wanted slaves to be free also cherished the Constitution, which protected slavery, and the Union, which was a fellowship with slaveholders. Those values, he observed, could not logically be reconciled. That irreconcilable conflict would have to be settled on the battlefield.

• 3. Building a Government

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  Delegates from six states gathered at the Montgomery Convention in Alabama on the 4th of February 1861, and within four days had created a new country. A provisional government was established, and Jefferson Davis was elected provisional president unanimously by a vote of six states to zero. His U.S. Senate resignation speech had made an impression, and when he arrived in Montgomery he got the job he had said he wanted less than the one he was given: he had publicly sought command of Confederate armies, but the convention handed him the presidency instead.

  Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia was elected provisional Vice President on the 9th of February 1861, though some delegations held private reservations about him. Davis and Stephens were both inaugurated, Davis on February 18, and later confirmed in a formal election on the 6th of November 1861, running unopposed. They were inaugurated for their full terms on the 22nd of February 1862.

  The Confederate constitution, adopted in final form on that same day, made several notable departures from the U.S. Constitution. It gave the president the power to line-item veto any bill, a power held by some state governors but never by a U.S. president. It set a single six-year presidential term with no possibility of re-election. It explicitly invoked God's blessing in its preamble, a contrast to the secular language of the U.S. Constitution. And it prohibited the central government from using revenues collected in one state to fund internal improvements in another, a direct response to longstanding Southern complaints about federal spending policy.

  Montgomery, Alabama served as the capital from February 4 until the 29th of May 1861. Richmond, Virginia was then chosen as the interim capital, a decision that Vice President Stephens and others saw as a signal to border states that the Confederacy was serious about pulling Virginia's neighbors into the fold. The Davis administration declared it must be held at all hazards.

• 4. States, Borders, and Contested Loyalty

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  The eleven states that formally joined the Confederacy did not all do so at once, and the internal divisions within several of them complicated the picture considerably. South Carolina was the first, voting to secede on the 20th of December 1860. North Carolina was the last of the eleven, on the 20th of May 1861, after the Fort Sumter attack and Lincoln's call for militia had made neutrality untenable for most conditional Unionists in the Upper South.

  Kentucky declared neutrality rather than secession, but when Confederate troops moved in, the state legislature requested Union forces to drive them out. A rump convention in Russellville signed an Ordinance of Secession, and Kentucky was admitted into the Confederacy on the 10th of December 1861, with Bowling Green as its first capital. By the end of the war, the numbers told the real story: 90,000 Kentuckians had fought for the Union compared to 35,000 for the Confederacy. Missouri's constitutional convention rejected secession by a vote of 89-1 on the 19th of March 1861, but an exiled governor eventually called a rump session that passed a secession ordinance on October 31 of that year. The Confederate government of Missouri spent most of the war operating in exile, eventually at Marshall, Texas.

  Virginia itself split. The populous counties along the Ohio and Pennsylvania borders rejected the Confederacy, and a Unionist convention in Wheeling in June 1861 established a restored government. Voters in the fifty counties that would eventually become West Virginia had cast significant numbers of Unionist votes in Virginia's May 23 secession referendum. Those same counties simultaneously supplied more than 20,000 soldiers to each side.

  Far to the southwest, citizens in Mesilla and Tucson voted on the 16th of March 1861 to join the Confederacy, and the Confederate Arizona Territory was formally proclaimed on the 14th of February 1862. The Confederate New Mexico campaign to take the northern half of that territory failed in 1862, and the territorial government relocated in exile to San Antonio, Texas. The Indian Territory also sent representatives to the Confederate Congress after 1863, with Elias Cornelius Boudinot representing the Cherokee and Samuel Benton Callahan representing the Seminole and Creek.

• 5. Fighting for Recognition

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  The Confederate government sent James M. Mason to London and John Slidell to Paris, banking on the idea that European powers would have to recognize the Confederacy to secure their cotton supply. The phrase "cotton is king" captured the theory, but the British had built up stocks to last more than a year and were developing alternative sources. The U.S. Navy intercepted Mason and Slidell on the British ship Trent in 1861 and took them to Boston, touching off an international incident. The diplomats were eventually released and continued to their posts. Neither secured diplomatic recognition, and historians have judged their diplomacy as poor.

  British public opinion was largely hostile to the Confederate cause. The United Kingdom had outlawed the transatlantic slave trade by 1833, with the Royal Navy patrolling the Middle Passage to prevent slave ships from reaching the Western Hemisphere. The first World Anti-Slavery Convention had been held in London in 1840. Black abolitionist speakers including Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Sarah Parker Remond, her brother Charles Lenox Remond, James W. C. Pennington, Martin Delany, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and William G. Allen had spent years in Britain, where, as Allen said, there was an absence of prejudice against color and a sense of being among friends rather than enemies.

  By September 1862 the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and abolitionist opposition in Britain extinguished the possibility of British intervention. British foreign secretary Lord John Russell and Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had shown interest in mediation; Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone had actually tried to convince Palmerston to intervene. But the calculation was stark: a war with the United States would mean the immediate loss of American grain, the end of British exports to the U.S., seizure of billions of pounds invested in American securities, and a likely invasion of Canada.

  Confederate diplomat John Slidell did negotiate a loan of fifteen million dollars from French capitalists for ironclad warships and military supplies, and French Emperor Napoleon III privately assured Slidell he would propose joint recognition to Britain. After the defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July 1863, those hopes collapsed. By December 1864, Davis secretly sent Duncan F. Kenner to Europe with an offer to abandon slavery entirely in exchange for recognition, but European leaders could see the Confederacy was on the verge of defeat and did not respond.

• 6. Manpower and Conscription

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  Estimates of the total Confederate Army range between 750,000 and 1,000,000 troops, though incomplete and destroyed records make any precise figure impossible. Confederate casualty figures are similarly uncertain: roughly 94,000 killed or mortally wounded, around 164,000 dead from disease, and between 26,000 and 31,000 deaths in Union prison camps. Against these losses, the eleven Confederate states were outnumbered by the North approximately four to one in military manpower and were far more badly outmatched in industrial capacity, railroads, and military equipment.

  In early 1862, the Confederate Army nearly dissolved. Most soldiers had volunteered for twelve-month terms, and the majority refused to re-enlist. The Confederate Congress responded on the 16th of April 1862 with the first national conscription law in North American history, declaring all white males between 18 and 35 to be members of the Confederate Army for three years. A year later, on the 3rd of March 1863, the United States Congress passed its own draft law, the Enrollment Act.

  The Confederate conscription system was riddled with exemptions from the start. The First Conscription Act of April 1862 exempted transportation, communications, and industrial workers, ministers, teachers, and men deemed physically unfit. The Second Conscription Act of October 1862 expanded exemptions further. Most contentiously, the Twenty Negro Law exempted one white overseer or owner for every plantation with at least twenty slaves, provoking the widespread cry of "rich man's war and a poor man's fight". The substitute system, which let wealthy men pay others to serve in their place, was abolished altogether in December 1863.

  By February 1864 the age bracket for conscription had expanded to 17-50. By March 1864, the Superintendent of Conscription reported that across the Confederacy, every officer in constituted authority, men and women alike, were engaged in opposing the enrolling officer. Nearly 3,000 officers were eventually tasked with recovering deserters and conscripting the eligible. In early 1865, with Lee calling for more troops and the army wracked by disease and desertion, the Confederate Congress finally approved recruiting black infantry units, but contrary to Lee's and Davis's recommendations, refused to guarantee the freedom of black volunteers. No more than two hundred black combat troops were ever raised.

• 7. Collapse and Aftermath

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  By the first three months of 1865, the Confederacy held only three pockets of unoccupied territory containing roughly one-third of its population. Philip Sheridan's forces had occupied the Great Valley of Virginia, the breadbasket of the Confederacy. Sherman had taken Charleston, South Carolina, by land attack. The Confederacy controlled no ports, no navigable rivers, and no functioning railroads.

  At the Hampton Roads Conference in February 1865, senior Confederate officials met with Lincoln but rejected his invitation to restore the Union with compensation for emancipated slaves. Davis held to independence or nothing. Lee's army, barely holding the trenches around Petersburg, finally broke when Union forces punched through on April 2. Richmond fell immediately. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on the 9th of April 1865.

  The formal end came in stages. Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10. All remaining Confederate land forces surrendered by June 1865. The last Confederate military unit, the commerce raider CSS Shenandoah, surrendered on the 6th of November 1865 in Liverpool, England. The ship had been at sea when the war ended, unaware it was over, and had continued raiding Union shipping in the Pacific Ocean.

  After the war, the Confederate states were readmitted to Congress only after each ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime. Davis himself assessed in 1890 that with the capture of the capital, the dispersion of the civil authorities, and his own arrest, the Confederate States of America disappeared, its history henceforth becoming part of the history of the United States. But the Confederacy did not simply disappear from American life. Decades after the war, former Confederate generals and politicians, along with organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, promoted Lost Cause mythology, an idealized view of the Confederacy as having fought for a just cause. Intense periods of Lost Cause activity clustered around the turn of the twentieth century and again during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, with advocates building Confederate monuments and influencing textbook authors to ensure future generations of Southern whites would support white supremacist policies. The Confederate battle flag's modern display began primarily during the 1948 presidential election, when the pro-segregationist Dixiecrat Party adopted it as their symbol.