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
Economy of the Confederate States of America total US exports by dollar value. Confederate leaders believed that this would give the new nation a firm financial basis. Cotton was the primary export, accounting for seventy-five percent of Southern trade in 1860. The Confederate States entered the war with the hope that its near monopoly of the world cotton trade would force the European importing countries, especially Great Britain and France, to intervene in the war on her behalf. In 1861, Southerners at the local level imposed an embargo on cotton shipments — it was not the government's policy. Millions of bales of cotton went unshipped, and by