Confederate States of America (CSA or C.S.)

The Confederate States of America—also known as the Confederacy, CSA, or C.S.—was a self-proclaimed sovereign nation consisting of eleven Southern US states whose secession from the United States in the early 1860s began the American Civil War (1861–1865).

The Confederacy seceded from the Union, the name for the United States during the war, as a resolution to a number of tensions that had existed between the North and South for decades. The tensions had arisen primarily over the issues of slavery and states' rights in relation to the federal government. The Northern states had already abolished slavery within their boundaries. The Southern states, which depended heavily on slaves to perform the farm labor that drove their economies, feared that the federal government would soon impose its will on all US states by banning slavery throughout the country. Believing states should be able to determine their own futures, eleven Southern slave states seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, and formed the Confederate States of America. The Civil War between the Confederacy and Union followed soon thereafter.

The Confederacy possessed most of the elements of a democratic republic. It had a constitution, congress, president, vice president, and other government institutions. However, the Confederacy struggled to survive for the majority of its existence. This was due mostly to financial difficulties brought on by the strains of managing the war with the North and by the widespread poverty that already existed in the rural South. After four years of laboring to raise the funds and troops necessary to defeat the powerful Union, the Confederacy collapsed militarily and economically in 1865. It was subsequently absorbed back into the United States. The US government addressed many of the issues that had led to the Civil War during the Reconstruction period of the late 1860s and 1870s.

Background

The Confederacy's secession from the Union in the early 1860s, and the Civil War that immediately followed, resulted from decades of strife between the Northern and Southern regions of the United States. They disagreed on the future of slavery, states' rights versus federal rights, and the ways in which the United States should incorporate new territories as the country expanded throughout the nineteenth century.

In this era, the North and South were separated along cultural and economic lines. For centuries, Americans had been enslaving African people for labor, but the Northern states gradually abolished slavery over the initial decades of the nineteenth century. They did this because their economies were becoming highly industrialized, and factory owners employed cheap immigrant labor to make their profits. Slaves, meanwhile, were used mostly for farm work.

Additionally, the abolitionist movement started to become more powerful in the North during the 1830s. Abolitionism is the belief that slavery should be ended. Abolitionist Northerners opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories the United States was acquiring, including Missouri in the 1820s and Kansas and Nebraska in the 1850s. Abolitionist beliefs on this matter directly opposed those of slave-holding Southerners.

While the Northern economy was urbanizing, the Southern economy remained almost entirely agricultural. Millions of slaves worked on their owners' plantations, growing the valuable crops of cotton and tobacco. These crops sustained the Southern states' economies. The importance of growing and harvesting the crops made slaves themselves expensive luxuries. Therefore, Southerners felt threatened by abolitionists' opposition to slavery expanding into the United States' new western lands. Southerners believed this represented a restriction of their economies' abilities to grow.

The US Congress attempted to resolve the matter of the western territories in 1854 by passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This law gave the people who populated the territories of Kansas and Nebraska the right to decide for themselves whether slavery would be allowed in those areas. However, the act actually led to the outbreak of Bleeding Kansas, a series of violent conflicts between abolitionists and pro-slavery forces in the territory. The violence continued into the late 1850s. In 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on Harpers Ferry, a federal arsenal in present-day West Virginia. It was believed he had intended to procure weapons for a mass slave rebellion against Southern slave owners. Brown was later executed for his part in the raid, after which some Northern abolitionists began upholding him as a martyr for the cause of freedom. This further unnerved Southerners, who now believed the North was plotting to eradicate both slavery and the slave owners themselves.

These fears reached new heights in November of 1860, when Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party was elected president of the United States. Abolitionists from numerous defunct political parties had founded the Republican Party in 1854 as a vehicle for their abolitionist motives. With the Republican Lincoln now holding the highest office in the land, Southerners believed the time had finally come when the federal government would exercise unilateral power over the states by abolishing slavery and destroying the South's way of life. In reality, Lincoln opposed only the spread of slavery to new US states. He did not intend to outlaw the practice entirely.

The South, however, had already begun planning for its own future. South Carolina delegates convened in December of 1860 to discuss the issue of seceding from the Union. They ultimately voted to do so, and South Carolina became the first Southern state to leave the United States on the eve of the Civil War. The state urged other Southern slave states to do the same, and by early 1861, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas had all joined South Carolina in seceding from the Union. Delegates from these seven states met in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 8, 1861, and declared the formation of the sovereign republic of the Confederate States of America.

Over the next two months, the Confederacy began gathering and training its armies for war, although few Confederate officials believed the United States would actually fight to regain its lost territory. Confederate forces started the Civil War on April 12, 1861, when they attacked the US-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The Union army returned fire, but the Confederacy captured the fort the next day. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee each joined the Confederacy over the next month, bringing the total number of Confederate states to eleven by mid-1861.

Overview

The Confederate States Constitution, adopted on March 11, 1861, had been based largely on the US Constitution and even included some of the exact same language as that document. As in the United States, for instance, the Confederate States Congress was composed of two houses, a House of Representatives and a Senate. Representatives were elected every two years, and senators every six years. Unlike US presidents, however—who could serve up to two four-year terms—Confederate presidents were limited to one six-year term without the possibility of re-election.

Other prescriptions of the Confederate Constitution had been written specifically in response to the aspects of the US government with which Confederate leaders disagreed. For example, Confederate presidents possessed line-item veto authority, which allowed them to reject parts of bills passed by Congress without discarding entire bills; US presidents could only sign or veto bills, without modifying their contents.

The main difference between the US and Confederate constitutions was in the powers they each afforded to their central governments in relation to the states. US states maintained their own rights but were still ultimately subject to federal law. The Confederate Constitution, meanwhile, essentially made each Confederate state a kind of sovereign entity while affording few powers to the central government. Confederate states could raise their own armies and amend the Confederate Constitution without great difficulty. State courts also held final authority on decisions and could not be overruled by central government courts. The central Confederate government required state approval to use funds and other capital and was limited in its ability to tax imports and exports.

Slavery, one of the central reasons for the Confederacy's existence, also figured heavily in the Confederate Constitution. One section of the document banned the passage of any law that denied Confederate citizens the right to own slaves. Citizens could also travel anywhere without fearing the loss of their slaves, and slaves could not become legally free simply by successfully escaping from their masters. Any new states or territories entering the Confederacy would be compelled to acknowledge the country's institution of slavery.

Jefferson Davis was elected the first Confederate president in early 1861. He hoped the Confederacy and United States could live alongside each other peacefully, but he still intended to defend his new country and its traditions from Union assault, if necessary. Davis therefore began preparing the Confederacy for war in the months following the attack on Fort Sumter.

Davis was a competent executive who had served in several prominent political positions in the United States in previous decades, including as a US senator, commander in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), and secretary of war in the administration of President Franklin Pierce in the mid-1850s. However, even Davis struggled to overcome the Confederacy's primary disadvantage throughout the Civil War: poverty.

Many Southern planters were wealthy slave owners, but the majority of Confederate citizens were poor farmers who could afford to grow only what they needed to survive. Only about $27 million in coins existed throughout the South at the start of the war, and Union naval blockades depleted this amount over time.

Davis implemented a series of increasingly unpopular measures to raise money for the war effort. These included printing more paper money, which inflated product prices; imposing income taxes; and commandeering privately owned machinery and transportation for the Confederate army. These policies drove the Confederacy nearly to bankruptcy and decreased Confederate citizens' enthusiasm for the war. The inflation caused by the excessive printing of money drove up food prices substantially, with the price of a 200-pound bag of salt rising from 65 cents in mid-1861 to $60 in late 1862. Consequently, poor families could not afford to buy food and rioted against the government's actions.

Meanwhile, the Confederacy performed exceptionally well on the battlefield in the early years of the Civil War. Historians have attributed this to the quality of the South's frontline generals—including Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson—and to the Confederate people's motivation to defend their culture and traditions from Northern attack. However, major Confederate victories at the First Battle of Bull Run (1861), Second Battle of Bull Run (1862), and Battle of Fredericksburg (1862) all came at the cost of high casualties.

Lacking troops after only a year of warfare, Davis implemented a military draft in the spring of 1862. The law required all white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to register for military service. The draft quickly generated controversy for its numerous loopholes that Confederate citizens believed favored the wealthy. For instance, those who could afford to do so were permitted to hire substitutes to serve in their place. Furthermore, the draft exempted anyone who owned at least twenty slaves. These allowances led many Confederate citizens to start referring to the Civil War as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." However, the Confederacy could not sustain the loopholes indefinitely; by 1864, the South's deepening struggles led the Confederate government to broaden the range of draft ages from seventeen to fifty. It also banned all substitutions.

The year 1864 was a major turning point in the war, as Union generals such as Ulysses S. Grant—commander of the Union army—and William Tecumseh Sherman implemented total war against the Confederacy. Total war is the complete destruction of all infrastructure, resources, and people in enemy territory during wartime. While Grant besieged the Confederate stronghold of Petersburg, Virginia, from mid-1864 to early 1865, Sherman began what became known as his March to the Sea in Georgia. This was the drive of Sherman's troops eastward across Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean, during which time they destroyed everything they encountered in a strategy called scorched earth.

The Union army continued capturing Confederate territory into the spring of 1865. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. Davis formally dissolved the Confederate government on May 5 before attempting to flee from advancing Union forces. He was captured in Georgia five days later. Davis was imprisoned for two years but was never tried for treason against the United States. He died in 1889, imploring Southerners to forget their resentment of the North and live together in a healing country.

The Confederate States of America had lasted a little more than four years. By the end of the Civil War, it had lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and was ruined by poverty and extensive property damage. Historians later questioned whether the Confederacy ever could have survived indefinitely, with or without the war, for some Confederate states had considered seceding from the Confederacy in protest of Davis's centralization of government power. Popular interest in the history and culture of the Confederacy remained strong in subsequent centuries, particularly in the American South.

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