Confederate States Army

The Confederate States Army (CS Army) was the army of the Confederate States of America during its brief existence between its establishment in February 1861 and its dissolution and the capture of its President, Jefferson Davis, by United States soldiers in May 1865.

In the United States Presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln as its Presidential candidate, campaigned against the expansion of slavery in the United States. The Democratic Party divided over the issue. Lincoln won the election without winning the electoral votes in a single southern state. Lincoln did not propose federal laws against slavery where it already existed, but his general view of the matter was stated in his 1858 House Divided Speech, in which he had expressed a desire to "arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction." Even though Lincoln proposed no immediate action against slavery during his campaign or upon his election, the complex issues of slavery, competing understandings of federalism, party politics, expansionism, sectionalism, tariffs, economics, values and social structures brought to a head by his election stirred violent passions and fears of abolition of slavery in the southern states, which soon led to the American Civil War.

Starting with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, seven Deep South states that permitted slavery, which in addition to South Carolina included Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, purported to secede from the Union by February 1861. President James Buchanan stated that secession was unconstitutional and wrong but that the United States Constitution did not give the President or the United States Congress the power to stop it. By the time Lincoln took office as President on March 4, 1861, the seceding states had formed the Confederate States of America (or "Confederacy") and had begun to seize federal property, including most federal forts, within their borders. Lincoln was determined to hold the remaining forts, including Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and to preserve the union. He considered secession to be illegal and to be rebellion against the duly constituted government of the United States. By the time Lincoln was sworn in as President, civil war had become inevitable.

Under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, troops controlled by the Confederate government and under the command of General P. G. T. Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12–13, 1861, forcing its capitulation on April 14, 1861. Northerners, including Westerners, rallied behind Lincoln's call on April 15, 1861 for all the states to send troops to recapture the forts from the secessionists and to preserve the Union. Four states in the upper South (Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina and Virginia) also permitted slavery but previously had rejected overtures to join the Confederacy. These states now refused Lincoln's call to send forces against their neighbor slave states, promptly declared their secession from the United States and joined the Confederacy.[1] Both the Union and the Confederacy then began in earnest to raise large volunteer armies with the objectives of putting down the rebellion and preserving the union, on the one hand, or of establishing independence from the United States, on the other hand.

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