Confederate States of America: King Cotton, Rail Gauges and No Allies

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The Confederate States of America drafted a constitution, printed currency and fought a four-year war, yet no foreign government ever recognized it. This episode examines how it was built and why it failed. Secession followed Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election on a platform to stop slavery's expansion into the territories. The Deep South left before his March 1861 inauguration, while Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina left only after Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops. Missouri and Kentucky ended up with rival governments, and western Virginia broke away to rejoin the Union.

The Confederate constitution protected slavery in any new territories, set a single six-year presidential term and gave the president a line-item veto, while state governors used states' rights to defy Jefferson Davis and the absence of political parties left Congress gridlocked. The King Cotton embargo of 1861 failed as Britain drew on stockpiles and new supplies from India and Egypt. After 1865, groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy built the Lost Cause through textbook committees and monuments, and the battle flag returned with the Dixiecrats in 1948.

• More than 100,000 Southerners fought for the Union, and the Confederacy suspended habeas corpus and imposed martial law in East Tennessee.
• Frederick Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond toured Britain speaking against slavery, and the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation closed the door to European intervention.
• The Anaconda Plan blockaded 3,500 miles of coastline and split the Confederacy along the Mississippi.
• Incompatible track gauges forced cargo to be unloaded and reloaded, leaving food rotting at depots while Richmond saw bread riots.
• The Confederacy signed treaties with the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee nations, which the U.S. later used to demand land cessions.