Confederate States of America

The Confederate States of America (C.S.A. or C.S.), commonly referred to as the Confederacy and the South, was an American confederal republic that existed from the beginning of the War for Southern Independence in 1861, until the formation of the Confederacy of American Syndicates in 1916.

Originally formed by seven secessionist slave-holding American states in the Lower South region, whose economies were heavily dependent upon agriculture, particularly cotton, and a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves. Each state declared its secession from the United States, following the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Following the outbreak of the War for Southern Independence in April 1861, four slave states of the Upper South also declared their secession and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy later accepted Missouri and Kentucky as official members, following the Treaty of Mexico City in 1863 and added the states of Sequoia and Arizona in the 1880s.

Following independence, the Confederacy struggled to remain competitive against not only the growing tide of the Industrial Revolution and European colonial economies, but also continued moral objections to the institution of slavery, which formed the backbone of Southern culture. Economically and politically dependent upon European markets and controlled by a politically dominant agarian Planter class for much of the 1860s and 1870s, a series of political reforms by western states in the 1880s and 90s saw the gradual replacement of the agrarian slavery system with a more industrialized system of "indentured labor" and societal caste system, where African-Confederates were granted some privileges but were still routinely discriminated against and limited in movement and economic freedom.

Despite such reforms, economic tensions caused by the Great War, racial and ethnic tensions by the lower African-Confederate  and immigrant classes, and the collapse of the Cotton industry in the early part of the 20th century, saw the collapse of the Confederate States and the Second Mexican Empire to racial and socialist revolutions, eventually leading to the unification of Mexico and the Confederate States into the Confederacy of American Syndicates in 1916.

Foundation
The initial Confederacy was established in the Montgomery Convention in February 1861 by seven states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, adding Texas in March before Lincoln's inauguration; before expanding in May and July 1861, with Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina. It was formed by delegations from seven slave states of the Lower South that had proclaimed their secession from the Union. After the fighting began in April, four additional slave states seceded and were admitted.