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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