confederacy

The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States (C.S. or CS) or the Confederacy, was an unrecognized breakaway state that fought against the United States during the American Civil War.In existence from 1861 to 1865, the Confederacy was originally formed by secession of seven slave states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. All of them are in the Lower South region of the United States, whose economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture, particularly cotton, and a plantation system that relied upon enslaved African Americans for labor. Convinced that white supremacy and the institution of slavery were threatened by the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, the Confederacy declared its secession in rebellion against the United States, with the loyal states becoming known as the Union during the ensuing American Civil War. In a speech known today as the Cornerstone Address, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens described its ideology as being centrally based "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition".Before Lincoln took office in March of 1861, a new Confederate government was established in February. It was considered illegal by the United States federal government, and many Northerners thought of the Confederates as traitors. The Confederate states volunteered militia units, and the new government formed its own Confederate States Army practically overnight. After war began in April, four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—also seceded and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy later accepted the slave states of Missouri and Kentucky as members, although neither officially declared secession nor were they ever largely controlled by Confederate forces, despite the efforts of Confederate shadow governments which were eventually expelled. The government of the United States (the Union) rejected the claims of secession as illegitimate.
The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter, a Union fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. No foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy as an independent country, although Great Britain and France granted it belligerent status, which allowed Confederate agents to contract with private concerns for arms and other supplies.
In 1865, after four years of heavy fighting and 620,000–850,000 military deaths, all Confederate land and naval forces either surrendered or otherwise ceased hostilities. The war lacked a formal end, with Confederate forces surrendering or disbanding sporadically throughout most of 1865. The most significant capitulation was Confederate general Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, after which any lingering doubt regarding the war's outcome and/or the Confederacy's prospect for survival was extinguished, although another sizable force under Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston did not formally surrender to William T. Sherman until April 26. The Confederacy's civilian government also disintegrated in a chaotic manner - the Confederate States Congress effectively ceased to exist as a legislative body following its final adjournment sine die on March 18 while Confederate President Jefferson Davis's administration declared the Confederacy dissolved on May 5, and Davis himself acknowledged in later writings that the Confederacy "disappeared" in 1865. Meanwhile, President Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth on April 15, 1865.

After the war, Confederate states were readmitted to the Union during the Reconstruction era, after each ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery. "Lost Cause" ideology—an idealized view of the Confederacy as valiantly fighting for a just cause—emerged in the decades after the war among former Confederate generals and politicians, as well as organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Particularly intense periods of Lost Cause activity came around the time of World War I, as the last Confederate veterans began to die and a push was made to preserve their memory, and then during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in reaction to growing public support for racial equality. Through activities such as building prominent Confederate monuments and writing school history textbooks to paint the Confederacy in a favorable light, Lost Cause advocates sought to ensure future generations of Southern whites would continue to support white supremacist policies such as the Jim Crow laws. The modern display of Confederate flags primarily started in the late 1940s with Senator Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, and has continued to the present day.

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