Confederate States of America

The Confederate States of America (CSA), also known as the Confederacy, was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by a number of Southern American slave states that had declared their secession from the United States. The Confederacy recognized, as members, 11 states that had formally declared secession, two additional states with less formal declarations, and one new territory. The Confederacy was eventually defeated in the American Civil War against the Union (the U.S.). Secessionists argued that the United States Constitution was a compact among states, an agreement which each state could abandon without consultation. The United States government rejected secession as illegal. Following the Confederate attack at Fort Sumter, the Union used military action to defeat the Confederacy. No foreign nation officially recognized the Confederacy as an independent country, but several did grant belligerent status.

The Confederate Constitution of seven state signatories—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas—formed a "permanent federal government" in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1861. In response to a call by U. S. President Abraham Lincoln for troops from each state to recapture Sumter and other lost federal properties in the South, four additional slave-holding states—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina—declared their secession and joined the Confederacy. Missouri and Kentucky were represented by partisan factions from those states. Also aligned with the Confederacy were the Five Civilized Tribes and a new Confederate Territory of Arizona. Efforts to secede in Maryland were halted by martial law, while Delaware, though of divided loyalty, did not attempt it. A Unionist government in western parts of Virginia organized the new state of West Virginia which was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863. The Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia had an uneasy relationship with its member states because of issues related to control of manpower, although the South mobilized nearly its entire white male population for war.

Confederate control over its claimed territory and population steadily shrank from 73% to 34% during the course of the Civil War due to the successful Union overland campaigns, their control of inland waterways into the South and the seacoast Union blockade. These created an insurmountable disadvantage in men and supplies and finance. Public support of the Jefferson Davis administration eroded over time with repeated military reverses, economic hardship and charges of autocratic government. Richmond fell after four years of Union campaigns in April 1865, and shortly afterwards, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, and with that the Confederacy effectively collapsed. Four years later, the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White that secession was illegal, and that the Confederacy had never legally existed.

The U.S. Congress began a decade-long process known as Reconstruction which some scholars treat as an extension of the Civil War. It lasted throughout the administrations of Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Grant, and saw the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to free slaves, the Fourteenth to guarantee dual U.S. and state citizenship to all, and the Fifteenth to guarantee the right to vote in states. The war left the South economically devastated by military action, ruined infrastructure and exhausted resources. The region remained well below national levels of prosperity until after World War II.