Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Confederate States of America" in English language version.
I maintain that it was inaugurated and begun, though no blow had been struck, when the hostile fleet, styled the 'Relief Squadron', with eleven ships, carrying two hundred and eighty-five guns and two thousand four hundred men, was sent out from New York and Norfolk, with orders from the authorities at Washington, to reinforce Fort Sumter peaceably, if permitted 'but forcibly if they must' ...After the war, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens maintained that Lincoln's attempt to resupply Sumter was a disguised reinforcement and had provoked the war.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)Antebellum southern society was defined in no small part by the shaping and working of large tracts of land whose soil was tilled and staples tended by enslaved African-American laborers. This was, in short, a society dependent on what historians have variously referred to as the plantation system, the southern slave economy or, more commonly, the plantation economy... Slaveholders' demand for labor increased apace. The number of southern slaves jumped from under one million in 1790 to roughly four million by 1860. By the middle decades of the antebellum period, the Old South had matured into a slave society whose plantation economy affected virtually every social and economic relation within the South.
The plantation as the vehicle to wealth was tied to the primacy of cotton in the growth of global capitalism. The large-scale cultivation and harvest of cot ton required new forms of labor organization, as well as labor management, Enter the overseer. By 1860, there were approximately 38,000 overseers working as plantation managers throughout the antebellum south. They were employed by the wealthiest of planters, planters who held multiple plantations and owned hundreds of enslaved Africans. By 1860, 85 percent of all cotton grown in the South was on plantations of 100 acres or more. On these plantations resided 91.2 percent of enslaved Africans. Planters came to own these Africans through the internal slave trade in the United States that moved to its cotton fields approximately one million enslaved laborers.
{{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help){{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)[The American Civil War was] between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.
Confederate leaders themselves made it plain that slavery was the key issue sparking secession.
Confederate leaders themselves made it plain that slavery was the key issue sparking secession.
Confederate leaders themselves made it plain that slavery was the key issue sparking secession.
Confederate leaders themselves made it plain that slavery was the key issue sparking secession.