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Confederate States of America

From dKosopedia

The Confederate States of America attempted to secede from the United States in 1860 and 1861, after the election of Abraham Lincoln as President. These eleven states formed a government in accordance with their principles of States Rights (including the right of secession) and maintaining the legality of slavery, the South's "Peculiar Institution". War broke out with the United States over the attack by rebel forces on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

States in the Confederacy

Seven states declared their secession before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861:

  1. South Carolina (December 20, 1860)
  2. Mississippi (January 9, 1861)
  3. Florida (January 10, 1861)
  4. Alabama (January 11, 1861)
  5. Georgia (January 19, 1861)
  6. Louisiana (January 26, 1861)
  7. Texas (February 1, 1861)

After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and Lincoln's subsequent call for troops on April 15, four more states declared their secession:

  1. Virginia (April 17, 1861; ratified by voters May 23, 1861)
  2. Arkansas (May 6, 1861)
  3. Tennessee (May 7, 1861; ratified by voters June 8, 1861)
  4. North Carolina (May 20, 1861)

The slave states of Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware remained in the Union.

Legacy

After the armies of the Confederacy surrendered in 1865, the states of the Confederacy were brought back into the United States under a variety of new laws and Constitutional amendments abolishing slavery, giving freed slaves full rights as citizens, including the vote, and stripping many officials of the Confederacy of their civil rights as US citizens. Newly freed blacks outvoted whites in several states, sending black Representatives and Senators to Congress, and taking over state legislatures. In reaction, southern Whites organized to reverse this trend in the Ku Klux Klan and in political movements to pass laws restricting the rights of ex-slaves (Jim Crow Laws). The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and later reversed these oppressive measures and criminal intimidations. The Republicans reacted with the Southern Strategy, pandering to Southern racism under the banner of States Rights and other code words for race, and then supporting the Christian Right, whose roots are in the Christian support of slavery in the South before the Civil War.

This strategy had intermittent success, up through Newt Gingrich's Contract With America and the George W. Bush Administration, but then imploded. Now, after the election of Barack Obama as President, the Republican Party has been reduced to little more than corporate interests plus this Southern base (minus Virginia and North Carolina) together with some Central states (Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas), whose issues are almost exclusively race, abortion, and gay marriage. All of the other Republican issues, such as "smaller government", are code for race, that is, for denying civil rights and government aid to Blacks, other minorities, and immigrants (legal and illegal).

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This page was last modified 22:55, 21 August 2009 by Edward Cherlin. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.


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