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The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina's militia attacked Fort Sumter. Four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—then seceded and joined the Confederacy. On February 22, 1862, Confederate States Army leaders installed a centralized federal government in Richmond, Virginia, and enacted the first Confederate draft on April 16, 1862. By 1865, the Confederacy's federal government dissolved into chaos, and the Confederate States Congressadjourned, effectively ceasing to exist as a legislative body on March 18. After four years of heavy fighting, nearly all Confederate land and naval forces either surrendered or otherwise ceased hostilities by May 1865.[19][20] The most significant capitulation was Confederate general Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9, after which any doubt about the war's outcome or the Confederacy's survival was extinguished. Confederate President Davis's administration declared the Confederacy dissolved on May 5.[21][22][23]
^"History". Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
^W. W. Gaunt (1864). The Statutes at Large of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America: From the Institution of the Government, February 8, 1861 to Its Termination, February 18, 1862, Inclusive. Arranged in Chronological Order, Together with the Constitution for the Provisional Government and the Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States, and the Treaties Concluded by the Confederate States with Indian Tribes. D & S Publishers, Indian Rocks Beach. p. 1,2.
^Cooper (2000) p. 462. Rable (1994) pp. 2–3. Rable wrote, "But despite heated arguments and no little friction between the competing political cultures of unity and liberty, antiparty and broader fears about politics in general shaped civic life. These beliefs could obviously not eliminate partisanship or prevent Confederates from holding on to and exploiting old political prejudices. Indeed, some states, notably Georgia and North Carolina, remained political tinderboxes throughout the war. Even the most bitter foes of the Confederate government, however, refused to form an opposition party, and the Georgia dissidents, to cite the most prominent example, avoided many traditional political activities. Only in North Carolina did there develop anything resembling a party system, and there the central values of the Confederacy's two political cultures had a far more powerful influence on political debate than did organizational maneuvering."
^David Herbert Donald, ed. Why the North Won the Civil War. (1996) pp. 112–113. Potter wrote in his contribution to this book, "Where parties do not exist, criticism of the administration is likely to remain purely an individual matter; therefore the tone of the criticism is likely to be negative, carping, and petty, as it certainly was in the Confederacy. But where there are parties, the opposition group is strongly impelled to formulate real alternative policies and to press for the adoption of these policies on a constructive basis. ... But the absence of a two-party system meant the absence of any available alternative leadership, and the protest votes which were cast in the 1863 Confederate mid-term election became more expressions of futile and frustrated dissatisfaction rather than implements of a decision to adopt new and different policies for the Confederacy."
^ abTikkanen, Amy (June 17, 2020). "American Civil War". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved June 28, 2020. ...between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.
^Smith, Mark M. (2008). "The Plantation Economy". In Boles, John B. (ed.). A Companion to the American South. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN978-1-4051-3830-7. Antebellum southern society was defined in no small part by the shaping and working of large tracts of land whose soil was tilled and staples tended by enslaved African-American laborers. This was, in short, a society dependent on what historians have variously referred to as the plantation system, the southern slave economy or, more commonly, the plantation economy... Slaveholders' demand for labor increased apace. The number of southern slaves jumped from under one million in 1790 to roughly four million by 1860. By the middle decades of the antebellum period, the Old South had matured into a slave society whose plantation economy affected virtually every social and economic relation within the South.
^McMurtry-Chubb, Teri A. (2021). Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy. Lexington Books. p. 31. ISBN978-1-4985-9907-8. The plantation as the vehicle to wealth was tied to the primacy of cotton in the growth of global capitalism. The large-scale cultivation and harvest of cot ton required new forms of labor organization, as well as labor management, Enter the overseer. By 1860, there were approximately 38,000 overseers working as plantation managers throughout the antebellum south. They were employed by the wealthiest of planters, planters who held multiple plantations and owned hundreds of enslaved Africans. By 1860, 85 percent of all cotton grown in the South was on plantations of 100 acres or more. On these plantations resided 91.2 percent of enslaved Africans. Planters came to own these Africans through the internal slave trade in the United States that moved to its cotton fields approximately one million enslaved laborers.
^Robert S. Rush; William W. Epley (2007). Multinational Operations, Alliances, and International Military Cooperation. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 21,27.
^John T. Ishiyama (2011). Comparative Politics: Principles of Democracy and Democratization. John Wiley & Sons. p. 214.
^Dunbar Rowland (1925). History of Mississippi, the Heart of the South, volume 1. S. J. Clarke publishing Company. p. 784.
^Charles Daniel Drake (1864). Union and Anti-Slavery speeches, delivered during the Rebellion, etc. p. 219,220,222,241.
^"Learn – Civil War Trust"(PDF). civilwar.org. October 29, 2013. Archived(PDF) from the original on April 1, 2010. Retrieved August 27, 2017.
^Hacker, J. David (September 20, 2011). "Recounting the Dead". Opinionator. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
^The constitutionality of the Confederacy's dissolution is open to interpretation at least to the extent that, like the United States Constitution, the Confederate States Constitution did not grant anyone (including the President) the power to dissolve the country. However, May 5, 1865, was the last day anyone holding a Confederate office recognized by the secessionist governments attempted to exercise executive, legislative, or judicial power under the C.S. Constitution. For this reason, that date is generally recognized to be the day the Confederate States of America formally dissolved.
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