A Short History of the Confederate States of America A Short History of the Confederate States of America A Short History of the Confederate States of America is a memoir written by Jefferson Davis, completed shortly before his death in 1889. Davis wrote most of this book while staying at Beauvoir along the Mississippi Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Mississippi. The book is much less a Davis memoir than an articulation of the secession argument. In Davis' earlier work, "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government", he had written what is probably the most thorough exegesis of the compact theory of the United States Constitution in existence, devoting the
Confederate States of America of the Confederacy, and Alexander H. Stephens, its former Vice-President, both wrote postwar arguments in favor of secession's legality and the international legitimacy of the Government of the Confederate States of America, most notably Davis' "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government". Once war with the United States began, the Confederacy pinned its hopes for survival on military intervention by Great Britain and France. The Confederates who had believed that "cotton is king" – that is, that Britain had to support the Confederacy to obtain cotton – proved mistaken. The British had stocks to last over a year and