Confederate States of America formed

On February 4, 1861, delegates from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas assembled in Montgomery, Alabama, to create the Confederate States of America. The Montgomery convention adopted a provisional constitution on February 8, 1861, elected Jefferson Davis president on February 9, 1861, and chose Alexander H. Stephens as vice president. Davis took office in Montgomery on February 18, 1861, giving the secession movement a functioning national government before Abraham Lincoln had even been inaugurated in Washington.

The Montgomery convention transformed secession from a series of state ordinances into a direct constitutional claim that the Union could be lawfully dissolved. Confederate delegates grounded their new government in the protection of slavery, and Stephens later declared in his March 21, 1861 Cornerstone Speech that the Confederacy rested on the inequality of the races and the permanence of African slavery. Lincoln and northern Unionists rejected that claim entirely, treating the Confederate government as an unlawful rebellion against the Constitution rather than a legitimate republic.

The Confederate constitution adopted permanently on March 11, 1861 and the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 followed directly from the government created at Montgomery. Once Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy after Sumter, the provisional government organized in Alabama became the political instrument for the four-year Civil War.