Claim: Abraham Lincoln was in politics.

The Confederate States of America -LRB- CSA or C.S. -RRB- , commonly referred to as the Confederacy , was a self-proclaimed nation of 11 secessionist slave-holding states of the United States , existing from 1861 to 1865 . The Confederacy was originally formed by seven states -- South Carolina , Mississippi , Florida , Alabama , Georgia , Louisiana , and Texas -- in the Lower South region of the United States whose regional economy was mostly dependent upon agriculture , particularly cotton , and a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves .   Each state declared its secession from the United States following the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery . Before Lincoln took office in March , a new Confederate government was established in February 1861 , which was considered illegal by the government of the United States . After the Civil War began in April , four slave states of the Upper South -- Virginia , Arkansas , Tennessee , and North Carolina -- also declared their secession and joined the Confederacy . The Confederacy later accepted Missouri and Kentucky as members , although neither officially declared secession nor were they ever largely controlled by Confederate forces ; Confederate shadow governments attempted to control the two states but were later exiled from them .   The government of the United States -LRB- the Union -RRB- rejected the claims of secession and considered the Confederacy illegitimate . The Civil War began with the April 12 , 1861 , Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter , a Union fort in the harbor of Charleston , South Carolina . No foreign government officially recognized the Confederacy as an independent country , although Britain and France granted it belligerent status which allowed Confederate agents to contract with private concerns for arms and other supplies . In early 1865 , after four years of heavy fighting which led to an estimated 620,000 military deaths , all the Confederate forces surrendered and the Confederacy dissolved . The war lacked a formal end ; nearly all Confederate forces had been forced into surrender or deliberately disbanded by the end of 1865 , by which point the dwindling manpower and resources of the Confederacy were facing overwhelming odds . Jefferson Davis later lamented that the Confederacy had `` disappeared '' in 1865 .