the.com/confederacy
Eleven states seceded to preserve slavery, fought a war over it, and lost.
means An alliance of states or people bound together by a formal agreement, each keeping its own sovereignty while acting jointly on shared interests — usually the word for a coalition, though history has permanently attached it to one particular rebellion.
from From Latin confoederare, 'to join together by a league' — com- 'together' plus foedus, 'treaty' or 'covenant' (the same root that gives us 'federal' and 'federation'). It passed through French into English simply meaning any league of allied parties. The word did fine as a neutral legal term for centuries before 1861, when eleven seceding U.S. states adopted it for their own union — and that usage, born of a war fought to preserve slavery, has dominated the word's connotations in American English ever since.
- lifespan
- four years, 1861 to 1865
- founding cause
- their own VP called slavery the cornerstone
- recognition
- zero foreign nations ever recognized it
- legacy
- monuments built decades later to rewrite the story