what was the south's nation called before the civil war confederate nation

Instead of instinctively assuming that it must have been either non-existent or spurious, historians such as Drew Gilpin Faust have begun “to explore Confederate nationalism in its own terms-as the South’s commentary upon itself-as its effort to represent southern culture to the world at large, to history, and perhaps most revealingly, to its own people.” Ĭonfederate nationalism did not properly exist until the creation of the Confederacy as a political entity in 1861. But in recent years historians have begun to take Confederate nationalism more seriously. Furthermore, because the raison d'être of the whole undertaking was slavery, and because slavery has had few outright defenders since 1865, paying attention to Confederate nationalism has often seemed distasteful. They have assumed that if there really was a Confederate nationalism worth talking about, the Confederacy would surely have won the war and established its independence.

The fact that the Confederates’ bid for independence failed has made many commentators unwilling to take its nationalism seriously. Over the next four years, even as they were struggling to win their independence on the battlefield, Confederates also paid much attention to the questions of what made them a distinctive people and why their distinctiveness should merit political independence.Įver since the Civil War, Confederate nationalism has been a controversial subject. Only nationalism could fully validate their status as an independent country. Confederates needed a coherent set of ideas to explain and justify their independence to themselves, to their erstwhile compatriots to the north, and to the rest of the world. Much more difficult, though, would be the creation of Confederate nationalism. In Montgomery, Alabama in February, 1861, delegates from the lower tier of southern states signed the provisional Confederate Constitution and thereby created a new, independent nation-state.

What was the south's nation called before the civil war confederate nation