<P> The U.S. government began a decade - long process known as Reconstruction which attempted to resolve the political and constitutional issues of the Civil War . The priorities were: to guarantee that Confederate nationalism and slavery were ended, to ratify and enforce the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery; the Fourteenth which guaranteed dual U.S. and state citizenship to all native - born residents, regardless of race; and the Fifteenth, which guaranteed the right of freedmen to vote . </P> <P> By 1877, the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction in the former Confederate states . Federal troops were withdrawn from the South, where conservative white Southern Democrats had already regained political control of state governments, often through extreme violence and fraud to suppress black voting . Confederate veterans had been temporarily disenfranchised by Reconstruction policy . The prewar South had many rich areas; the war left the entire region economically devastated by military action, ruined infrastructure, and exhausted resources . Continuing to be dependent on an agricultural economy and resisting investment in infrastructure, the region remained dominated by the planter elite into the 20th century . After a brief period in which a Republican - Populist coalition took power in several southern states in the late 19th century, the Democratic - dominated legislatures worked to secure their control by passing new constitutions and amendments at the turn of the 20th century that disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites . This exclusion of blacks from the political system, and great weakening of the Republican Party, was generally maintained until after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 . The Solid South of the early 20th century was built on white Democratic control of politics . The region did not achieve national levels of prosperity until long after World War II . </P> <P> The Confederacy was established in the Montgomery Convention in February 1861 (before Lincoln's inauguration in March) and was disintegrated in April and May 1865 . It was formed by delegations from seven Southern slave states that had proclaimed their secession from the Union . After the fighting began in April, four additional slave states seceded and were admitted . Later, two states (Missouri and Kentucky) and two territories were given seats in the Confederate Congress . </P> <P> Many southern whites had considered themselves more Southern than American and were prepared to fight for their state and their region to be independent of the larger nation . That regionalism became a Southern nationalism, or the "Cause". For the duration of its existence, the Confederacy underwent trial by war . The "Southern Cause" transcended the ideology of states' rights, tariff policy, or internal improvements . This "Cause" supported, or descended from, cultural and financial dependence on the South's slavery - based economy . The convergence of race and slavery, politics, and economics raised almost all South - related policy questions to the status of moral questions over way of life, commingling love of things Southern and hatred of things Yankee (the North). Not only did national political parties split, but national churches and interstate families as well divided along sectional lines as the war approached . According to historian John M. Coski, "The statesmen who led the secession movement were unashamed to explicitly cite the defense of slavery as their prime motive...Acknowledging the centrality of slavery to the Confederacy is essential for understanding the Confederate ." </P>

When were the confederate states of america formed