Confederacy

Confederacy, name commonly given to the Confederate States of America, those Southern states that, by the ordinance of secession, withdrew from the Union to set up their own government in 1861. These included Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas. Jefferson Davis was president of the Confederacy, which existed until the end of the Civil War. Of the relatively few works of belles lettres published in the Confederacy, many were by British authors, but native works included R.M. Johnston's Georgia Sketches, J.B. Jones's Wild Western Scenes, Margaret J. Preston's Beechenbrook, and N.B. Tucker's The Partisan Leader. Literature about the Confederacy ranges from personal memoirs such as the posthumously published A Diary from Dixie (1905) by Mary Boykin Chesnut through historical studies and biographies of individual leaders, like Douglas Southall Freeman's Lee (4 vols., 1934–35) and Lee's Lieutenants (4 vols., 1946); to a great deal of fiction concentrating upon the Civil War, itself as various as John Esten Cooke's trilogy Surry of Eagle's Nest (1866), Hilt to Hilt (1869), and Mohun (1869), Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), and Faulkner's Unvanquished (1938). Freeman's The South to Posterity (1939) is a bibliography and “history of Confederate history.”