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The Confederate States of America—also known as the Confederacy, CSA, or C.S.—was a self-proclaimed sovereign nation consisting of eleven Southern US states whose secession from the United States in the early 1860s began the American Civil War (1861–1865).

Prior to and during the American Civil War (1861–1865), some white residents of secessionist Southern states actively opposed the Confederate cause. These dissenters are collectively known as Southern Unionists, because they aligned themselves with the Unionists of the North. Overlooked by historians for decades, Southern Unionists began to draw increased attention from scholars and researchers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The documents under examination in this chapter vehemently defend the decisions of South Carolina and Georgia to secede from the United States of America in, respectively, late 1860 and early 1861. South Carolina was the first of the eleven states to secede; Georgia was the fifth. There are immediate differences in the approaches used by both: South Carolina employing impassioned, heated words in explanation of their secession, including substantial citations from the Declaration of Independence and early American leaders; and Georgia employing a more sedate, economical approach. One noted difference is the direct reference to slavery early in Georgia’s document—stating that the right of slavery was implicit within the birth of the nation as a whole—while South Carolina’s conclusion (which makes no mention of the institution of slavery) was based primarily on their right, as dictated within the Declaration of Independence, to throw off a government which impeded their natural rights to govern their people independently.

Newly elected president Abraham Lincoln had one opportunity to try to convince the Southern slave-holding states not to force the issue of secession from the United States. Although seven states had already declared that they were forming the Confederate States of America, in his first inaugural speech, Lincoln sought to alleviate their concerns regarding the issues of slavery and states’ rights. The entire speech was focused on these issues, as was the attention of the entire country.

Many illustrious names are frequently mentioned in association with the Civil War—Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, for example—but rarely do they include that of Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America. Stephens, a well-educated and highly regarded politician from Georgia, sat at the helm of the Southern states alongside President Davis. In this speech, given in Savannah, Georgia, in the weeks leading up to the start of the Civil War, Stephens explains the reasons for the secession of the Southern states and heatedly denounces the attempts of the United States government to deny their right to do so. Stephens presents an educated logic for the Confederacy’s stance, one that provides an intriguing perspective on the Southern states in the time immediately preceding the war.

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is a concept that depicts the American Civil War (1861–65) as having been an honorable and ultimately tragic struggle by the South to preserve its way of life in the face of destruction by the Union, or the North. Conceived in the immediate aftermath of the war, the Lost Cause romanticizes the antebellum South as a kind of idyllic paradise in which Southerners were their own masters. The concept asserts that the Civil War was fought primarily over the right of the Southern states to determine their own futures and that Confederate soldiers valiantly defended their culture from the tyrannical North.