Confederate States of America

Confederate States Of America	Confederate States Of America
 	
Founders: 	The Confederacy
Established: 	February 4th, 1861
Collapse: 	May 5th, 1865
Era: 	American Civil War
Leaders: 	
*Jefferson Davis
*Alexander Stephens
Years Active: 	1861-1865
Status: 	Disbanded...
Continent: 	North America,
Creator: 	
2091riveraisrael
The Confederate States of America (CSA), also known as the Confederacy, was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by a number of Southern slave states that had declared their secession from the United States. The Confederacy recognized as members eleven states that had formally declared secession, two additional states with less formal declarations, and one new territory. The Confederacy was eventually defeated in the American Civil War against the Union. Secessionists argued that the United States Constitution was a compact among states, an agreement which each state could abandon without consultation. The United States government rejected secession as illegal. Following the Confederate attack at Fort Sumter, the Union used military action to defeat the Confederacy. No foreign nation officially recognized the Confederacy as an independent country, but several did grant belligerent status.
The Confederate Constitution of seven state signatories—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas—formed a "permanent federal government" in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1861. Four additional slave-holding states—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina—declared their secession and joined the Confederacy following a call by U. S. President Abraham Lincoln for troops from each state to recapture Sumter and other lost federal properties in the South. Missouri and Kentucky were represented by partisan factions from those states. Also aligned with the Confederacy were the "Five Civilized Tribes" and a new Confederate Territory of Arizona. Efforts to secede in Maryland were halted by martial law, while Delaware, though of divided loyalty, did not attempt it. A Unionist government in western parts of Virginia organized the new state of West Virginia which was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863. The Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia, had an uneasy relationship with its member states due to issues related to control of manpower, although the South mobilized nearly its entire white male population for war. 
Confederate control over its claimed territory and population steadily shrank from 73% to 34% during the course of the Civil War due to the Union's successful overland campaigns, its control of the inland waterways into the South and its blockade of the Southern seacoast. These created an insurmountable disadvantage in men,supply and finance. Public support of Confederate President Jefferson Davis' administration eroded over time with repeated military reverses, economic hardship and allegations of autocratic government. After four years of Union campaigning, Richmond fell in April 1865, and shortly afterwards, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, and with that the Confederacy effectively collapsed. Four years later, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White that secession was illegal, and that the Confederacy had never legally existed. The U.S. Congress began a decade-long process known as Reconstruction which some scholars treat as an extension of the Civil War. It lasted throughout the administrations of Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Grant, and saw the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to free the slaves, the Fourteenth to guarantee dual U.S. and state citizenship to all, and the Fifteenth to guarantee the right to vote in states. The war left the South economically devastated by military action, ruined infrastructure and exhausted resources. The region remained well below national levels of prosperity until after World War II.
== History ==
===Disunion Revolution===
he Confederate States of America was created by secessionists in Southern slave states who refused to remain in a nation that they believed was turning them into second–class citizens. The agent of the change was seen as abolitionists and anti-slavery elements in the Republican Party who they believed used repeated insult and injury to subject them to intolerable "humiliation and degradation". The "Black Republicans" and their allies now threatened a majority in the United States House, Senate and Presidency. On the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (a presumed supporter of slavery)was 83 and ailing.
During the campaign for president in 1860, some secessionists threatened disunion should Lincoln be elected, most notably William L. Yancey touring the north as Stephen A. Douglas toured the South calling for Union if Lincoln should be elected. To Secessionists the Republican intent was clear. A Lincoln victory forced them to a formidable choice even before his inauguration, "The Union without slavery, or slavery without the Union."
===Secession===
Secessionists argued that the United States Constitution was a compact among states that could be abandoned at any time without consultation and that each state had a right to secede. After intense debates and statewide votes, seven Deep South cotton states passed secession ordinances by February 1861 (before Abraham Lincoln took office as president), while secession efforts failed in the other eight slave states. Delegates from those seven formed the C.S.A. in February 1861, selecting Jefferson Davis as the provisional president. Unionist talk of reunion failed and Davis began raising a 100,000 man army.
===Capitals===
Montgomery, Alabama served as the capital of the Confederate States of America from February 4 until May 29, 1861. Six states created the Confederate States of America there on February 8, 1861. The Texas delegation was seated at the time, so it is counted in the "original seven" states of the Confederacy. But it had no roll call vote until after its referendum made secession "operative". Two sessions of the Provisional Congress were held in Montgomery, adjourning May 21. The Permanent Constitution was adopted there on March 12, 1861. 
The permanent capital provided for in the Confederate Constitution called for a state cession of a ten-miles square (100 square mile) district to the central government. Atlanta, which had not yet supplanted Milledgeville, Georgia as its state capital, put in a bid noting its central location and rail connections, as did Opelika, Alabama, noting its strategically interior situation, rail connections and nearby deposits of coal and iron.
Richmond, Virginia was chosen for the interim capital. The move was used by Vice President Stephens and others to encourage other border states to follow Virginia into the Confederacy. In the political moment it was a show of "defiance and strength". The war for southern independence was surely to be fought in Virginia, but it also had the largest Southern military-aged white population, with infrastructure, resources and supplies required to sustain a war. The Davis Administration's policy was that, "It must be held at all hazards."[66]
The naming of Richmond as the new capital took place on May 30, 1861, and the last two sessions of the Provisional Congress were held in the new capital. The Permanent Confederate Congress and President were elected in the states and army camps on November 6, 1861. The First Congress met in four sessions in Richmond February 18, 1862 – February 17, 1864. The Second Congress met there in two sessions, May 2, 1864 – March 18, 1865.
As war dragged on, Richmond became crowded with training and transfers, logistics and hospitals. Prices rose dramatically despite government efforts at price regulation. A movement in Congress led by Henry S. Foote of Tennessee argued to remove the Capital from Richmond. At the approach of Federal armies in early summer 1862, the government’s archives were readied for removal. As the Wilderness Campaign progressed, Congress authorized Davis to remove the executive department and call Congress to session elsewhere in 1864 and again in 1865. Shortly before the end of the war, the Confederate government evacuated Richmond, planning to relocate farther south. Little came of these plans before Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865
===Civil War Years===
====1861====
The American Civil War broke out in April 1861 with the Battle of Fort Sumter in Charleston. In December 1860, Federal troops had withdrawn to the island fort from others in Charleston Harbor soon after South Carolina’s declaration of secession to avoid soldier-civilian street confrontations.
In January, President James Buchanan had attempted to resupply the garrison with the Star of the West, but Confederate artillery drove it away. In March, President Lincoln notified Governor Pickens that without Confederate resistance to resupply there would be no military reinforcement without further notice, but Lincoln prepared to force resupply if it were not allowed. Confederate President Davis in cabinet decided to capture Fort Sumter before the relief fleet arrived and on April 12, 1861, General Beauregard forced their surrender.
Following Fort Sumter, Lincoln directed states to provide 75,000 troops for three months to recapture the Charleston Harbor forts and all other federal property that had been seized without Congressional authorization. In May, Federal troops crossed into Confederate territory along the entire border from the Chesapeake Bay to New Mexico. The Confederate victory at Fort Sumter was followed by Confederate victories at the battles of Big Bethel, (Bethel Church) VA in June, First Bull Run, (First Manassas) in July and in August, Wilson’s Creek, (Oak Hills) in southwest Missouri. At all three, Confederate forces could not follow up their victory due to inadequate supply and shortages of fresh troops to exploit their successes. Following each battle, Federals maintained a military presence and their occupation of Washington DC, Fort Monroe VA and Springfield MO. Both North and South began training up armies for major fighting the next year.
Confederate commerce-raiding just south of the Chesapeake Bay was ended in August at the loss of Hatteras NC. Early November a Union expedition at sea secured Port Royal and Beaufort SC south of Charleston, seizing Confederate-burned cotton fields along with escaped and owner-abandoned "contraband" field hands. December saw the loss of Georgetown SC north of Charleston. Federals there began a war-long policy of burning grain supplies up rivers into the interior wherever they could not occupy
====1862====
The victories of 1861 were followed by a series of defeats east and west in early 1862. To restore the Union by military force the Federal intent was to (1) secure the Mississippi River, (2) seize or close Confederate ports and (3) march on Richmond. To secure independence, the Confederate intent was to (1) repel the invader on all fronts, costing him blood and treasure and (2) carry the war into the north by two offensives in time to impact the mid-term elections.
Much of northwestern Virginia was under Federal control. In February and March, most of Missouri and Kentucky were Union "occupied, consolidated, and used as staging areas for advances further South". Following the repulse of Confederate counter-attack at the Battle of Shiloh, (Pittsburg Landing) Tennessee, permanent Federal occupation expanded west, south and east. Confederate forces then repositioned south along the Mississippi River to Memphis, where at the naval Battle of Memphis its River Defense Fleet was sunk and Confederates then withdrew from northern Mississippi and northern Alabama. New Orleans was captured April 29 by a combined Army-Navy force under U.S. Admiral Farragut, and the Confederacy lost control of the mouth of the Mississippi River, conceding large agricultural resources that supported the Union’s sea-supplied logistics base. 
Although Confederates had suffered major reverses everywhere but Virginia, as of the end of April the Confederacy still controlled 72% of its population. Federal forces disrupted Missouri and Arkansas; they had broken through in western Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana. Along the Confederacy’s shores it had closed ports and made garrisoned lodgments on every coastal Confederate state but Alabama and Texas. Although scholars sometimes assess the Union blockade as ineffectual under international law until the last few months of the war, from the first months it disrupted Confederate privateers making it "almost impossible to bring their prizes into Confederate ports". Nevertheless, British firms developed small fleets of blockade running companies, such as John Fraser and Company and the Ordnance Department secured its own blockade runners for dedicated munitions cargos. The Civil War saw the advent of fleets of armored warships deployed in sustained blockades at sea. After some success against the Union blockade, in March the ironclad CSS Virginia was forced into port and burned by Confederates at their retreat. Despite several attempts mounted from their port cities, C.S. naval forces were unable to break the Union blockade including Commodore Josiah Tattnall’s ironclads from Savannah, in 1862 with the CSS Atlanta. Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory placed his hopes in a European-built ironclad fleet, but they were never realized. On the other hand, four new English-built commerce raiders saw Confederate service, and several fast blockade runners were sold in Confederate ports, then converted into commerce-raiding cruisers, manned by their British crews.
In the east, Union forces could not close on Richmond. General McClellan landed his army on the Lower Peninsula of Virginia. Lee subsequently ended that threat from the east, then Union General John Pope attacked overland from the north only to be repulsed at Second Bull Run, (Second Manassas). Lee’s strike north was turned back at Antietam MD, then Burnside’s offensive was disastrously ended at Fredericksburg VA in December. Both armies then turned to winter quarters to recruit and train for the coming spring.
In an attempt to seize the initiative, reprovision, protect farms in mid-growing season and influence U.S. Congressional elections, two major Confederate incursions into Union territory had been launched in August and September 1862. Both Braxton Bragg's invasion of Kentucky and Lee's invasion of Maryland were decisively repulsed, leaving Confederates in control of but 63% of its population. Civil War scholar Alan Nevins argues that 1862 was the strategic high water mark of the Confederacy. The failures of the two invasions were attributed to the same irrecoverable shortcomings: lack of manpower at the front, lack of supplies including serviceable shoes, and exhaustion after long marches without adequate food.
====1863-1864====
The failed Middle Tennessee campaign was ended January 2, 1863 at the inconclusive Battle of Stones River, (Murfreesboro), both sides losing the largest percentage of casualties suffered during the war. It was followed by another strategic withdrawal by Confederate forces. The Confederacy won a significant victory April 1863, repulsing the Federal advance on Richmond at Chancellorsville, but the Union consolidated positions along the Virginia coast and the Chesapeake Bay.
Without an effective answer to Federal gunboats, river transport and supply, the Confederacy lost the Mississippi River following the capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port Hudson in July, ending Southern access to the trans-Mississippi West. July brought short-lived counters, Morgan's Raid into Ohio and the New York City draft riots. Robert E. Lee’s strike into Pennsylvania was repulsed at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania despite Pickett’s famous charge and other acts of valor. Southern newspapers assessed the campaign as "The Confederates did not gain a victory, neither did the enemy."
September and November left Confederates yielding Chattanooga, Tennessee, the gateway to the lower south. For the remainder of the war fighting was restricted inside the South, resulting in a slow but continuous loss of territory. In early 1864, the Confederacy still controlled 53% of its population, but it withdrew further to reestablish defensive positions. Union offensives continued with Sherman’s March to the Sea to take Savannah and Grant's Wilderness Campaign to encircle Richmond and besiege Lee's army at Petersburg.
In April 1863, the C.S. Congress authorized a uniformed Volunteer Navy, many of whom were British. Wilmington and Charleston had more shipping while "blockaded" than before the beginning of hostilities. The Confederacy had altogether eighteen commerce destroying cruisers, which seriously disrupted Federal commerce at sea and increased shipping insurance rates 900 percent. Commodore Tattnall unsuccessfully attempted to break the Union blockade on the Savannah River GA with an ironclad again in 1863. However beginning April 1864 the ironclad CSS Albemarle engaged Union gunboats and sank or cleared them for six months on the Roanoke River NC. The Federals closed Mobile Bay by sea-based amphibious assault in August, ending Gulf coast trade east of the Mississippi River. In December, the Battle of Nashville ended Confederate operations in the western theater.
====1865 Collapse====
The first three months of 1865 saw the Federal Carolinas Campaign, devastating a wide swath of the remaining Confederate heartland. The "breadbasket of the Confederacy" in the Great Valley of Virginia was occupied by Philip Sheridan. The Union Blockade captured Fort Fisher NC, and Sherman finally took Charleston SC by land attack. 
The Confederacy controlled no ports, harbors or navigable rivers. Railroads were captured or had ceased operating. Its major food producing regions had been war-ravaged or occupied. Its administration survived in only three pockets of territory holding one-third its population. Its armies were defeated or disbanding. At the February 1865 Hampton Roads Conference with Lincoln, senior Confederate officials rejected his invitation to restore the Union with compensation for emancipated slaves. The Davis policy was independence or nothing, while Lee's army was wracked by disease and desertion, barely holding the trenches defending Jefferson Davis' capital.
The Confederacy's last remaining blockade-running port, Wilmington, North Carolina, was lost. When the Union broke through Lee's lines at Petersburg, Richmond fell immediately. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. "The Surrender" marked the end of the Confederacy. The CSS Stonewall sailed from Europe to break the Union blockade in March; on making Havana, Cuba it surrendered. Some high officials escaped to Europe, but President Davis was captured May 10; all remaining Confederate forces surrendered by June 1865. The U.S. Army took control of the Confederate areas without post-surrender insurgency or guerrilla warfare against them, but peace was subsequently marred by a great deal of local violence, feuding and revenge killings.
Historian Gary Gallagher concluded that the Confederacy capitulated in the spring of 1865 because northern armies crushed "organized southern military resistance." The Confederacy's population, soldier and civilian, had suffered material hardship and social disruption. They had expended and extracted a profusion of blood and treasure until collapse; "the end had come". Jefferson Davis' assessment in 1890 determined, "With the capture of the capital, the dispersion of the civil authorities, the surrender of the armies in the field, and the arrest of the President, the Confederate States of America disappeared ... their history henceforth became a part of the history of the United States."
== Military ==
Southern Civil War historian E. Merton Coulter noted that for those who would secure its independence, "The Confederacy was unfortunate in its failure to work out a general strategy for the whole war". Aggressive strategy called for offensive force concentration. Defensive strategy sought dispersal to meet demands of locally minded governors. The controlling philosophy evolved into a combination "dispersal with a defensive concentration around Richmond". The Davis administration considered the war purely defensive, a "simple demand that the people of the United States would cease to war upon us."
As the Confederate government lost control of territory in campaign after campaign, it was said that "the vast size of the Confederacy would make its conquest impossible". The enemy would be struck down by the same elements which so often debilitated or destroyed visitors and transplants in the South. Heat exhaustion, sunstroke, endemic diseases such as malaria and typhoid would match the destructive effectiveness of the Moscow winter on the invading armies of Napoleon.
But despite the Confederacy's essentially defensive stance, in the early stages of the war there were offensive visions of seizing the Rocky Mountains or cutting the North in two by marching to Lake Erie. Then, at a time when both sides believed that one great battle would decide the conflict, the Confederate won a great victory at the "Battle of Manassas". It drove the Confederate people "insane with joy", the public demanded a forward movement to capture Washington DC, relocate the Capital there, and admit Maryland to the Confederacy. A council of war by the victorious Confederate generals decided not to advance against larger numbers of fresh Federal troops in defensive positions. Davis did not countermand it. Following the Confederate incursion halted at the Battle of Antietam, (Sharpsburg), in October 1862 generals proposed concentrating forces from state commands to re-invade the north. Nothing came of it. Again in early 1863 at his incursion into Pennsylvania, Lee requested of Davis that Beauregard simultaneously attack Washington with troops taken from the Carolinas. But the troops there remained in place during the Gettysburg Campaign.
Without counting their enslaved men, eleven states of the Confederacy were outnumbered by the North about four to one in military population. It was overmatched far more in military equipment, ability to produce and procure it, railroads for transport, and wagons supplying the front. Big guns were out-ranged and small arms were less effective. Confederate military policy innovated to compensate. Booby-trapped land mines were laid in the path of invading armies. Harbors, inlets and inland waterways were laced with numbers of sunken "torpedo" mines and covered with mobile artillery batteries. Rangers were sent to disrupt and destroy supplies of invading armies until they were disbanded, then the "dashing cavalry".
The Confederacy relied on external sources for war materials. The first came from trade with the enemy. "Vast amounts of war supplies" came through Kentucky, and thereafter, western armies were "to a very considerable extent" provisioned with illicit trade via Federal agents and northern private traders. But that trade was interrupted in the first year of war by Admiral Porter's river gunboats as they gained dominance along navigable rivers north-south and east-west. Overseas blockade running then came to be of "outstanding importance". On April 17, President Davis called on privateer raiders, the "militia of the sea", to make war on U.S. seaborne commerce. Despite noteworthy effort, over the course of the war the Confederacy was found unable to match the Union in ships and seamanship, materials and marine construction.
Perhaps the most implacable obstacle to success in the 19th century warfare of mass armies was the Confederacy's lack of manpower, sufficient numbers of disciplined, equipped troops in the field at the point of contact with the enemy. During the wintering of 1862–1863, Lee observed that none of his famous victories had resulted in the destruction of the opposing army. He lacked reserve troops to exploit an advantage on the battlefield as Napoleon had done. Lee explained, "More than once have most promising opportunities been lost for want of men to take advantage of them, and victory itself had been made to put on the appearance of defeat, because our diminished and exhausted troops have been unable to renew a successful struggle against fresh numbers of the enemy."
===Armed Forces===
The military armed forces of the Confederacy comprised three branches: Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
The Confederate military leadership included many veterans from the United States Army and United States Navy who had resigned their Federal commissions and had won appointment to senior positions in the Confederate armed forces. Many had served in the Mexican-American War (including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis), but some such as Leonidas Polk (who had attended West Point but did not graduate) had little or no experience.
The Confederate officer corps consisted of men from both slave-owning and non-slave-owning families. The Confederacy appointed junior and field grade officers by election from the enlisted ranks. Although no Army service academy was established for the Confederacy, some colleges (such as The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute) maintained cadet corps that trained Confederate military leadership. A naval academy was established at Drewry’s Bluff, Virginia in 1863, but no midshipmen graduated before the Confederacy's end.
The soldiers of the Confederate armed forces consisted mainly of white males aged between 16 and 28. The median year of birth was 1838, so half the soldiers were 23 or older by 1861. The Confederacy adopted conscription in 1862. Many thousands of slaves served as laborers, cooks, and pioneers. Some freed blacks and men of color served in local state militia units of the Confederacy, primarily in Louisiana and South Carolina, but their officers deployed them for "local defense, not combat." Depleted by casualties and desertions, the military suffered chronic manpower shortages. In the spring of 1865, the Confederate Congress, influenced by the public support by General Lee, approved the recruitment of black infantry units. Contrary to Lee’s and Davis’s recommendations, the Congress refused "to guarantee the freedom of black volunteers." No more than two hundred black troops were ever raised.
====Rasing an Army====
The immediate onset of war meant that it was fought by the "Provisional" or "Volunteer Army". State governors resisted concentrating a national effort. Several wanted a strong state army for self-defense. Others feared large "Provisional" armies answering only to Davis. When filling the Confederate government's call for 100,000 men, another 200,000 were turned away by accepting only those enlisted "for the duration" or twelve-month volunteers who brought their own arms or horses.
It was important to raise troops; it was just as important to provide capable officers to command them. With few exceptions the Confederacy secured excellent general officers. Efficiency in the lower officers was "greater than could have been reasonably expected". As with the Federals, political appointees could be indifferent. Otherwise, the officer corps was governor-appointed or elected by unit enlisted. Promotion to fill vacancies was made internally regardless of merit, even if better officers were immediately available.
Anticipating the need for more "duration" men, in January 1862 Congress provided for company level recruiters to return home for two months, but their efforts met little success on the heels of Confederate battlefield defeats in February. Congress allowed for Davis to require numbers of recruits from each governor to supply the volunteer shortfall. States responded by passing their own draft laws.
The veteran Confederate army of early 1862 was mostly twelve-month volunteers with terms about to expire. Enlisted reorganization elections disintegrated the army for two months. Officers pleaded with the ranks to re-enlist, but a majority did not. Those remaining elected majors and colonels whose performance led to officer review boards in October. The boards caused a "rapid and widespread" thinning out of 1700 incompetent officers. Troops thereafter would elect only second lieutenants. 
In early 1862, the popular press suggested the Confederacy required a million men under arms. But veteran soldiers were not re-enlisting, and earlier secessionist volunteers did not reappear to serve in war. One Macon, Georgia, newspaper asked how two million brave fighting men of the South were about to be overcome by four million northerners who were said to be cowards.
== Economy ==
Most whites were subsistence farmers who traded their surpluses locally. The plantations of the South, with white ownership and an enslaved labor force, produced substantial wealth from cash crops. It supplied two-thirds of the world’s cotton, which was in high demand for textiles, along with tobacco, sugar, and naval stores (such as turpentine). These raw materials were exported to factories in Europe and the Northeast. Planters reinvested their profits in more slaves and fresh land, for cotton and tobacco depleted the soil. There was little manufacturing or mining; shipping was controlled by outsiders.
New Orleans. South's largest port city, only pre-war population over 100,000. Port and region's agriculture lost to Union April 1862
Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond VA. South's largest factory. Ended locomotive production in 1860 to make arms and munitions
The plantations that employed over three million black slaves were the principal source of wealth, but those slaves were also the source of general tension and white racial solidarity. William Freehling and Steven A. Channing have documented the race-based system of enslavement as "prone to insurrection and racial upheaval" inside the South, and by midcentury, its maintenance there was coming under increasing attacks from outside.
Slave labor was applied in industry in a limited way in the Upper South and in a few port cities. One reason for the regional lag in industrial development was "top-heavy income distribution". Mass production requires mass markets, and slave-labor living in packed-earth cabins, using self-made tools and outfitted with one suit of work clothes each year of inferior fabric, did not generate consumer demand to sustain local manufactures of any description in the same way a mechanized family farm of free labor did in the North. The Southern economy was "pre-capitalist" in that slaves were employed in the largest revenue producing enterprises, not free labor. That labor system as practiced in the American South encompassed paternalism, whether abusive or indulgent, and that meant labor management considerations apart from productivity.
Approximately 85% of both North and South white populations lived on family farms, both regions were predominantly agricultural, and mid-century industry in both was mostly domestic. But the Southern economy was uniquely pre-capitalist in its overwhelming reliance on the agriculture of cash crops to produce wealth. Southern cities and industries grew faster than ever before, but the thrust of the rest of the country’s exponential growth elsewhere was towards urban industrial development along transportation systems of canals and railroads. The South was following the dominant currents of the American economic mainstream, but at a "great distance" as it lagged in the all-weather modes of transportation that brought cheaper, speedier freight shipment and forged new, expanding inter-regional markets.
A third count of southern pre-capitalist economy relates to the cultural setting. The South and southerners did not adopt a frenzied work ethic, nor the habits of thrift that marked the rest of the country. It had access to the tools of capitalism, but it did not adopt its culture. The Southern Cause as a national economy in the Confederacy was grounded in "slavery and race, planters and patricians, plain folk and folk culture, cotton and plantations"
===Transportation Systems===
In peacetime, the extensive and connected systems of navigable rivers and coastal access allowed for cheap and easy transportation of agricultural products. The railroad system in the South had been built as a supplement to the navigable rivers to enhance the all-weather shipment of cash crops to market. They tied plantation areas to the nearest river or seaport and so made supply more dependable, lowered costs and increased profits. In the event of invasion, the vast geography of the Confederacy made logistics difficult for the Union. Wherever Union armies invaded, they assigned many of their soldiers to garrison captured areas and to protect rail lines.
At onset of the Civil War, the Southern rail network was disjointed and plagued by change in track gauge as well as lack of interchange. Locomotives and freight cars had fixed axles and could not roll on tracks of different gauges (widths). Railroads of different gauges leading to the same city required all freight to be off-loaded onto wagons to be transported to the connecting railroad station where it would await freight cars and a locomotive to proceed. These included Vicksburg, New Orleans, Montgomery, Wilmington and Richmond. In addition, most rail lines led from coastal or river ports to inland cities, with few lateral railroads. Due to this design limitation, the relatively primitive railroads of the Confederacy were unable to overcome the Union Naval Blockade of the South's crucial intra-coastal and river routes.
The Confederacy had no plan to expand, protect or encourage its railroads. Refusal to export the cotton crop in 1861 left railroads bereft of their main source of income. Many lines had to lay off employees; many critical skilled technicians and engineers were permanently lost to military service. For the early years of the war, the Confederate government had a hands-off approach to the railroads. Only in mid-1863 did the Confederate government initiate an national policy, and it was confined solely to aiding the war effort. Railroads came under the de facto control of the military. In contrast, U.S. Congress had authorized military administration of railroad and telegraph January 1862, imposed a standard gauge, and built railroads into the South using that gauge. Confederate reoccupation of territory by successful armies could not be resupplied directly by rail as they advanced. The C.S. Congress formally authorized military administration of railroads in February 1865.
In the last year before the end of the war, the Confederate railroad system stood permanently on the verge of collapse. There was no new equipment and raids on both sides systematically destroyed key bridges, as well as locomotives and freight cars. Spare parts were cannibalized; feeder lines were torn up to get replacement rails for trunk lines, and the heavy use of rolling stock wore them out
== Appearance ==
===Confederate Conquest===
Confederate States Of America (Confederate Conquest Cameo)	Confederate States Of America (Confederate Conquest Cameo)
 	
Founders: 	The Confederacy
Established: 	February 4th, 1861
Collapse: 	May 17th, 1883
Era: 	American Civil War
Leaders: 	
*Jefferson Davis
*Alexander Stephens
Years Active: 	1861-1883
Status: 	Disbanded...
Continent: 	North America,
Creator: 	
2091riveraisrael
The Confederate States of America, were known too be the Main Antagonist Faction of Confederate Conquest, resulting into an alternate histroy taking place after Gettysburg on July 3rd, 1863. After Gettysburg, the Confederacy launched a major Invasion on the Union dating from July 4th, 1863 - October 2nd, 1872, after an alternate Confederate victory at Gettysburg, on July 8th, 1863. The victory at Gettysburg later resulted in the destruction of about 6 cores of the Army of the Potomac along with the fall of both Baltimore, and Pennsylvania.
The war at Vicksburg was later overrun causing a large Confederate victory against the Union army later resulting into the Confederate reclamation of the entire Missippi and the defeat of Grants Army. The C.S.A later launched a devestating counter attack against the U.S at Stone Creek destroying the Union advance towards Richmond, as well as pushing them back across the Potomac where they were attacked by the Army of Virgina that had invaded Gettysburg. 
After the crushing Union defeat in Virginia, as well as the fall of Washington D.C, Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with vice president Alaxander Stephens, switched the C.S.A's tactics from defense into Offense. The strategy worked as planned on August 1st, 1863, when the Confederate Northern Invaders piereced farther north invading New Jersey from Pennsyilvania. Weeks after, the entire C.S.A was unleashed on the U.S. causing the Union too be overwhelmed on all sides.
At first the C.S.A were known to be highly unstoppable, overruning Washington D.C. New Jersey, Illinois and many other northern states. The results were done when many states such as Californa, Utah, Kansas, Ext secceeded from the U.S after their defeat in Gettysburg.
The Confederate Invasion finally came to an end on October 2nd, 1872 at Northan Michigan, when British and French forces showed up too finally drive back the Southern Invaders. By 1880 the war was finally brought back southbound, and continued on as the Union had done throughout the wars end on 1865. On 1883 Richmond finally fell bringing about the end to the bloody conflict, but leaving a some total of about 18% of the American population dead.
== Trivia ==