Difference between revisions of "Confederate States of America"

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-{| border="1" align="right" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="250" style="margin-left:5px"
-|align="center" colspan="2"|[[Image:Cwlogo.png|200px]]
-|-
-!colspan="2" align="center" style="color: white; height: 30px; background: gray  no-repeat scroll top left;"|The Civil War
-- 1865
-|-
-!colspan="2" align="center" style="color: white; height: 30px; background: gray  no-repeat scroll top left;"|Confederate States of America
-|-
-|Created
-|February 4, 1861
-|-
-|Ended
-|April 9, 1865
-|-
-|President
-|[[Jefferson Davis]]
-|-
-|Secretary of War
-|Leroy Pope Walker, Judah P. Benjamin, George W. Randolph, James Seddon, John C. Breckinridge
-|-
-|Secretary of the Navy
-|Stephan Mallory
-|-
-|Secretary of State
-|Robert Toombs, Robert M.T. Hunter, Judah P. Benjamin
-|}
-The '''Confederate States of America'''  (commonly referred to as The Confederacy, The South, the CSA, or simply as the Rebel States)  were an alliance of 11 southern [[America]]n states who fought against the Union states in the [[American Civil War]] (1861 to 1865) (commonly called "The War Between The States" by Southerners).
-The various southern states seceded from the [[United States of America]], and joined together as the "Confederate States of America" for a number of reasons, including a Northern state favored balance of power in Congress, Free Trade, and, after Lincoln's triumph in the [[1860 Presidential election]], the threat of radical [[abolitionism|abolitionists]] to end [[slavery]], which Southerners viewed as a matter of [[states' rights]] that should not be enforced at the federal level.
-Only four states where slavery was legal at that time failed to secede -- [[Delaware]], [[Kentucky]], [[Maryland]] and [[Missouri]].  It was a near thing in the latter three states, which all wound up raising [[regiment|regiments]] for the Confederacy as well as the [[Union]], although not as an official act of their governments.
-The president of the Confederate States of America was [[Jefferson Davis]], a former [[Secretary of War]] under [[President]] [[Franklin Pierce]] and later [[Senator]] from [[Mississippi]].  [[Richmond, Virginia]] was the capital of the Confederacy after that state seceded in mid-April of 1861 following the surrender of [[Fort Sumter]] and [[Lincoln's call for volunteers]], and one day before the [[Pratt Street riot]] in [[Baltimore, Maryland]], the first battle of the Civil War to kill Americans on both sides.
-General [[Robert E. Lee]] led the Confederate forces into battle against the Union armies, led by various generals appointed by [[Abraham Lincoln]], with the last, and most successful being General Ulysses S. Grant. .
-== Ideology ==
-Professor [[Emory Thomas]] of [[Virginia]] found it instructive to compare the correspondence sent by the Confederate government in the first year of its existence to different governments.  He writes, "The Southern nation was by turns a guileless people attacked by a voracious neighbor, an 'established' nation in some temporary difficulty, a collection of bucolic [[aristocrats]] making a romantic stand against the banalities of [[industry|industrial]] [[democracy]], a [[cabal]] of commercial farmers seeking to make a pawn of [[King Cotton]], an [[apotheosis]] of nineteenth-century [[nationalism]] and revolutionary [[liberalism]], or the ultimate statement of social and economic [[reaction]]." <ref> [Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865.  New York: Harper & Row, 1979, pp. 83-84.] </ref> Certainly some of the leaders of the Confederacy could be found to believe in any one of these incarnations of their country, but probably none to believe in all at once.  The aspect of resistance to [[industrialization]] has most captured the imagination of future generations of Southerners.
-The example of the [[U. S. Constitution]] clearly guided the drafters of the Confederate Constitution, enabling the latter group to complete their work in less than half as much time. <ref> [Thomas, p. 63.] </ref> The predictable provision banning efforts to end de jure slavery is found at Article I, Section 9, clause 4, lumped in with the provisions banning [[ex post facto laws]] and [[bills of attainder]].  It is three clauses down from a most unexpected clause banning the [[Atlantic Ocean|Atlantic]] [[slave trade]], but permitting the importation of slaves from the Union.  The wording of this clause demonstrates that the drafters clearly anticipated that not all slave states would secede, although they also included a provision for accepting new states into the Confederacy, which proved essential when [[Virginia]], [[Arkansas]], [[Tennessee]] and [[North Carolina]] seceded from the United States after the Constitution was in effect.  Although the Confederate document includes no [[bill of rights]] as such, the [[Ninth Amendment]] and [[Tenth Amendment]] are reproduced in Article VI as Sections 5 and 6.  The Confederate ban on a [[religious test for office]] is Section 4, notwithstanding the fact that the preamble invokes the blessing of almighty [[God]] on the Confederate experiment. <ref> [Thomas, Appendix, pp. 306-322.] </ref>  Perhaps the most significant differences had to do with the [[appropriations]] process in Congress.  Not only was a [[line-item veto]] expressly included, but Congress required a two-thirds [[supermajority]] to appropriate any funds not specifically requested by the President, giving Jefferson Davis in a real sense more Constitutional power than Abraham Lincoln possessed.
-== Economics - The Inevitable Clash ==
-While idealogy would provide much of the motivation to go to war, the economics of the Northern and Southern states made it impossible for anything but a clash to come to a head. While the Northern States had modernized and embraced the industrial revolution, incorporating new technology and rebuilding infrastructure to support it, the South had relied on the farming that had sustained it since the founding of America. The problem came with the liquidity of capital.
-When a businessman in the North wanted to build a factory, he would obtain a loan from the bank or from a group of investors, pay the labour and material costs to erect it, and thereafter be almost assured of some level of income as his products were produced, put on trains, and shipped to markets. The capital was constantly liquid, changing hands from one individual to another, and in almost all cases, stood to increase.
-When a plantation or farm owner in the South wanted to expand, his capital remained highly illiquid, because it remained tied down in slaves, land, and the equipment he needed. And while new goods from Northern factories were in increasing demand, the South found itself having to compete with goods from overseas. While the Northern businessman grew wealthier, the Southern businessman had a very limited chance. With the scarcity of liquid capital, no banks in the South offered the loans that they did in the North, further miring the economy in stagnation.
-== Legacy - Physical/Military ==
-The principal physical legacy of the Confederacy was mass fratricidal destruction.  Four years of Civil War killed at least 620,000 soldiers (counting deaths from disease as well as in battle), of whom approximately 260,000 were from the Confederacy.  This represented a much larger fraction (slightly over one quarter) of the Confederacy's military age white men than was lost by the Union.
-An unknown number of [[civilians]] also died, in part as a result of the campaign of organized plunder in late 1864 and early 1865 by the troops of [[Union]] [[General]] [[William Tecumseh Sherman]] which helped not only to destroy the will of the Confederacy to fight, but literally to destroy the [[infrastructure]] of the Confederacy.  Severe damage was inflicted on both urban and rural communities in the South, and hundreds of thousands of people became refugees.  The exigencies of [[total war]] had led to the destruction of Southern infrastructure, in particular [[railroads]], long before 1864, but never on such a scale.
-[[Total war]] based on modern technology was confirmed as the mode in which [[nation-states]] would fight each other throughout the industrial age.  Simultaneously with the Union,   the Confederacy launched the first seagoing [[ironclad]] warships.  With the possible exception of the [[Prussia|Prussians]] and [[Great Britain|British]], it is unlikely that any country of comparable population and technology in the 1860's could have resisted the Union onslaught for as long as the Confederacy did.  This is considered by some historians to represent a major moral victory for the Confederacy.  An equally impressive moral victory was the decision by General Lee on April 9, 1865 to rule out continuing to fight as [[insurgents]]; although it can be argued that this only delayed the inevitable failure of [[Reconstruction]], it also made physical rebuilding possible in a way it would not be in the latter stages of civil wars in other countries in the [[20th century]].  Notional or real, its superiority man for man (and especially general for general) was permanently impressed on the South, which today remains more pro-military than any other region of the United States as measured by percentage of voluntary [[enlistment|enlistments]].
-== Legacy - Political/Ideological ==
-The Confederacy is the primary reason that it became possible in the 1860's to abolish slavery.  Given [[Article Five]] of the [[U. S. Constitution]], it would have been impossible to abolish slavery without secession in the 15 established states with the 35 free states which later existed.  As it actually happened, the [[Thirteenth Amendment]] was ratified by a 26-state [[Union]] containing only four slave states.  The most likely solution in the absence of secession would have been to admit smaller Western states, possibly even turning what became [[Indian reservations]] into states.  However, the continuing political focus on slavery would have made expansion of the U. S. to [[Alaska]] and [[Hawaii]] unlikely in the nineteenth century, if at all.
-While the Confederacy lost the Civil War, it can be seen to have won the peace.  [[Radical Republicans]] were forced in the [[Compromise of 1877]] to concede the failure of Reconstruction and withdraw the U. S. Army from the South, or at least from its mission of guaranteeing the rights of African-Americans.  In a process known as [[Redemption]], the [[Republican Party]] was crushed out of existence across the South and black people stripped of their voting and other rights by a system which came to be known as [[Jim Crow]].  Northern Republicans encouraged a [[narrative]] of the Civil War which sought to make it about anything other than slavery.  They were able to use the phrase "rum, Romanism and rebellion" and other means of [[waving the bloody shirt]] to generally dominate national politics through both the [[Third Party System]] and the [[Fourth Party System]].
-The association of the [[Democratic Party]] with the South was entirely accurate as that region was totally dominated by Democrats by 1900.  However, only with the election of [[Woodrow Wilson]] in 1912 was a Southerner able to return to the [[White House]].  Whenever Democrats held a majority of either house of [[Congress]], Southerners would immediately become the chairmen of all committees, giving that region a disproportionate influence on national politics.  Ironically, because of their [[Thomas Jefferson|Jeffersonian]] roots, Southern Democrats were a party of [[small government]] and lower [[taxes]] (radically cutting back spending on [[public schools]] among other things during [[Redemption]]), and were hostile to organized labor.
-[[American politics]] have been defined in part by the conflict between the [[Alexander Hamilton|Hamiltonian]] and Jeffersonian schools of the role of government, particularly the [[Federal government]].  The Confederacy can be seen as the [[last stand]] of the Jeffersonians, who favored a system in which state policy and sovereignty would trump that of the Federal government.  To this way of thinking, subsequent American politics have actually been a competition between more and less radical Hamiltonians.
-== See also ==
-[[American Civil War: 1861]]
-[[American Civil War: 1862]]
-[[American Civil War: 1863]]
-[[American Civil War: 1864]]
-[[American Civil War: 1865]]
-[[American Civil War: Aftermath]]
-[[Category:American Civil War]]
-[[Category:United States History]]

Difference between revisions of "Confederate States of America"

Revision as of 04:14, June 20, 2007

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