Confederate States of America (redirected from Provisional Confederate Government)

Confederate States of America: see Confederacy.

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Confederate States of America

 or Confederacy

Government of the 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860–61 until its defeat in the American Civil War in 1865. In the months following Abraham Lincoln's election as president in 1860, seven states of the Deep South (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas) seceded. After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia joined them. The government was directed by Jefferson Davis as president, with Alexander H. Stephens as vice president. Its principal goals were the preservation of states' rights and the institution of slavery. The government's main concern was raising and maintaining an army. It counted on the influence of King Cotton to exert financial and diplomatic pressure on the Union from sympathetic European governments. Battlefield victories for the South in 1861–62 gave the Confederacy the moral strength to continue fighting, but from 1863 dwindling finances and battlefield reverses increasingly led to demoralization. The surrender at Appomattox Court House by Gen. Robert E. Lee precipitated its dissolution.

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Confederate States of America

US History the 11 Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi) that seceded from the Union in 1861, precipitating a civil war with the North. The Confederacy was defeated in 1865 and the South reincorporated into the US

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Confederate States of America 

from 1861 to 1865, the confederation of slaveholding states of the South that rebelled against and seceded from the USA between December 1860 and May 1861. The Confederate States of America was proclaimed at a congress in Montgomery in February 1861. Its constitution declared slavery the “cornerstone of the entire edifice of state.” By the end of May 1861 the Confederacy included 11 states: South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. Richmond, Va., was the capital, and Jefferson Davis was proclaimed president. The Confederacy unleashed the Civil War of 1861–65 in the USA. The defeat of the slaveholders led to the abolition of the Confederate States of America in 1865.