Confederate States of America - History

History

The Confederacy was formed in the Montgomery Convention February 1861 by state delegations sent from seven of the United States. Following Lincoln’s inauguration, four additional border states were represented, and subsequently two states and two territories gained seats in the Confederate Congress in accordance with their Secessionist resolves. The government existed from Spring 1861 to Spring 1865 during a Civil War initiated by Confederate firing on U.S. Fort Sumter.

A sufficient number of whites had considered themselves more Southern than American and would fight for their state and their section to be apart from the larger nation. That sectionalism became Southern nationalism, the "Cause". For the duration of its existence, the Confederacy underwent trial by war. The Southern Cause transcended ideology of "states' rights" concerning tariff policy or internal improvements to include lifestyle, values and belief system. Its “way of life” became sacred to its adherents. Everything of the South became a moral question, commingling love of things Southern and hatred of things Yankee. Not only did national political parties split, but national churches and interstate families also divided along sectional lines as the war approached.

In no states were the whites unanimous. There were minority views everywhere and the upland plateau regions in every state had strongholds of Unionist support, especially western Virginia and eastern Tennessee. South of the Mason–Dixon Line voter support for the three pro-Union candidates in 1860 ranged from 37% in Florida to 71% in Missouri. It was an American tragedy, the Brothers' War according to some scholars, "brother against brother, father against son, kith against kin of every degree". Nevertheless, historians argue that several thousand large-scale planters formed what they imagined to be a landed "aristocracy". They believed in a landed aristocratic ideal, despite depending on industrialized Europe for their markets, and they acted on their belief. The Confederacy had a much larger middle class of whites of small planters, farmers, merchants and artisans, which held to a “persistent folk culture in the Old South”. Otherwise, as the historian Emory Thomas notes, there would have been Confederate armies of planter generals with no soldiers.