The Confederate States of America (also called the Confederacy, the Confederate States, C.S.A.

and The South) is a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by eleven Southern slave states that declare their secession from the United States.

Secessionists argue that the United States Constitution is a compact among states, an agreement that each state can abandon without consultation.

The U.S. government (The Union) rejects secession as illegal.

Following a Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter, a federal fort in the Confederate state of South Carolina, the U.S. uses military action to defeat the Confederacy.

No foreign nation officially recognizes the Confederate States of America as an independent country, but several do grant belligerent status.The Confederate Constitution of seven state signatories — South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas — forms a "permanent federal government" in Montgomery, Alabama.

In response to a call by Lincoln for troops from each state to recapture Sumter and other lost federal properties in the South, four additional slave-holding states — Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina — declare their secession and join the Confederacy.

Missouri and Kentucky are represented by partisan factions from those states.

Also aligned with the Confederacy are the Five Civilized Tribes and a new Confederate Territory of Arizona.

Efforts to secede in Maryland are halted by martial law, while Delaware, though of divided loyalty, does not attempt it.

West Virginia separates from the Confederate state of Virginia in 1863 and aligns with the Union.

The Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia has an uneasy relationship with its member states because of issues related to control of manpower, although the South mobilizes nearly its entire white male population for war.

Confederate control over its claimed territory and population steadily shrinks from 73% to 34% during the course of the American Civil War due to successful Union overland campaigns, their control of inland waterways into the South, and the seacoast Union blockade.

These create an insurmountable disadvantage in men, supplies and finance.

Public support of the Jefferson Davis administration erodes over time with repeated military reverses, economic hardship, and charges of autocratic government.

Richmond falls after four years of Union campaigns in April 1865, Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant, and the Confederacy effectively collapses.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 through the administrations of Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Grant, and saw the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to free 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.