Congress of The Confederate States - Sessions

Sessions

Deputies from the first seven states to secede from the Union, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas, met at the Provisional Confederate Congress in Montgomery, Alabama, in two sessions in February through May 1861. They drafted and approved the Confederate States Constitution, elected Jefferson Davis President of the Confederate States and designed the Confederate flag.

Following the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, the remaining states which seceded from the Union sent delegates to the Confederate Congress, which met in three additional sessions between July 1861 and February 1862 in the Confederate capitol of Richmond, Virginia.

Elections for the First Confederate Congress were held on November 6, 1861. While Congressional elections in the United States were held in even-numbered years, elections for Confederate Congressman occurred in odd-numbered years. The First Confederate Congress met in four sessions in Richmond.

Because of the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, only two Congressional elections were ever held; the Second Confederate Congress was selected in November 1863 but served only one year of its two-year term. The final session of the Confederate Congress adjourned on March 18, 1865. That month, one of its final acts was the passage of a law allowing for the emancipation and military induction of any slave willing to fight for the Confederacy. This measure had originally been proposed by Judah P. Benjamin a year earlier but met stiff opposition until the final months of the war, when it was endorsed by Robert E. Lee. The final sentence recorded in the proceedings of the Confederate Congress reads "The hour of 2 o'clock having arrived, / The Speaker announced that the House stood adjourned sine die." (7 J. Conf. Cong. 796 (Mar. 18, 1865)).

The Confederacy did not have political parties but the Congress was dominated by former Democrats. While the 1863 elections had a low turnout, it threw out many secessionist and pro-Davis incumbents in favor of former Whigs. This weakened the administration's ability to get their policies through Congress.