Confederate States Form: South Declares Independence

Six southern states walked out of the United States and formed their own country in five days. Delegates from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana convened in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4, 1861, and by February 8 had drafted a provisional constitution, elected Jefferson Davis as provisional president, and declared themselves the Confederate States of America. The new nation’s founding document explicitly protected the institution of slavery in terms the U.S. Constitution had only implied. The secession crisis had accelerated rapidly after Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery into new territories. South Carolina seceded first, on December 20, 1860, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana in January 1861. Texas would join on March 2. The upper South states of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina held back, waiting to see whether the new Lincoln administration would use force. The Montgomery Convention moved with remarkable speed. The provisional constitution closely mirrored the U.S. Constitution but with critical differences: it guaranteed the right to own slaves in any future Confederate territory, prohibited protective tariffs, limited the president to a single six-year term, and gave the president a line-item veto. Vice President Alexander Stephens would later declare in his "Cornerstone Speech" that the Confederacy’s foundation rested "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man." Davis, a West Point graduate and former U.S. senator and secretary of war, was inaugurated in Montgomery on February 18. Lincoln would not take office until March 4. In the intervening weeks, Confederate forces seized federal forts, arsenals, and customs houses across the South. The bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, began a war that would kill 750,000 Americans and destroy the institution the Confederacy was created to protect.