History

During the American Civil War, the Confederate States of America consisted of the governments of 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860-61, carrying on all the affairs of a separate government and conducting a major war until defeated in the spring of 1865. Convinced that their way of life, based on slavery, was irretrievably threatened by the election of President Abraham Lincoln (November 1860), the seven states of the Deep South (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas) seceded from the Union during the following months. When the war began with the firing on Fort Sumter (April 12, 1861), they were joined by four states of the upper South (Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia). Formed in February 1861, the Confederate States of America was a republic composed of eleven Southern states that seceded from the Union in order to preserve slavery, states’ rights, and political liberty for whites. Its conservative government, with Mississippian Jefferson Davis as president, sought a peaceful separation, but the United States refused to acquiesce in the secession. The war that ensued started at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, and lasted four years. It cost the South nearly 500,000 men killed or wounded out of a population of 9 million (including 3 million slaves) and $5 billion in treasure. The Confederacy’s eastern military fortunes went well for the first two years, with major victories at First Manassas (Bull Run), ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s Valley Campaign, and the Seven Days’ Battles, where Gen. Robert E. Lee took command of the main eastern army in June 1862 and cleared Virginia of federal troops by September. His invasion of Maryland was checked at Sharpsburg (Antietam) in mid-September, and he returned to Virginia, where he badly defeated federal forces at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. The main western Confederate forces-commanded by Generals Albert Sidney Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, and Braxton Bragg-suffered defeats at Forts Henry and Donelson and Shiloh in Tennessee, and at Corinth, Mississippi, but they held that flank through 1862.