Hell Yeah

The Confederate States of America (also called the Confederacy, the Confederate States, and the C.S.A.) was an unrecognized state set up from 1861 to 1865 by eleven southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S. The U.S. government rejected secession as illegal, and after four years of fighting in the American Civil War, the Confederate armies surrendered, its government collapsed, and its slaves were emancipated. The Confederacy's control over its claimed territory shrank steadily during the course of the war, as the Union took control of much of the seacoast and inland waterways.

Secessionists argued that the United States Constitution was a compact among states that could be abandoned at any time without consultation and that each state had a right to secede. After intense debates and statewide votes, seven Deep South cotton states passed secession ordinances by February 1861 (before Abraham Lincoln took office as president), while secession efforts failed in the other eight slave states.

The Confederacy effectively collapsed after Ulysses S. Grant captured its capital of Richmond, Virginia and Robert E. Lee's army in April 1865. The remaining Confederate forces surrendered by the end of June, as the U.S. Army took control of the South. Because Congress was not sure that white Southerners had really given up slavery or their dreams of Confederate nationalism, a decade-long process known as Reconstruction expelled ex-Confederate leaders from office, enacted civil rights legislation (including the right to vote) that included the freedmen (ex-slaves), and imposed conditions on the readmission of the states to Congress. The war and subsequent Reconstruction left the South economically prostrate, and it remained well below national levels of prosperity until after 1945.

Our Anthem 1
The South Shall Rise Again
Our Anthem 2