C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America secede from the Union to form the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.) after Republican Abraham Lincoln is elected president in the 1860 election, due to fears over the abolition of the ownership of Negro slaves. The C.S.A. engage with the Union in "The War of Northern Aggression"; following the Union victory in the Battle of Antietam, President Lincoln issues a revolutionary proclamation entitled the "Emancipation Proclamation," but—within this alternate history—the proclamation fails. Confederate President Jefferson Davis takes this opportunity to counteract the Proclamation and send politician Judah P. Benjamin to persuade the United Kingdom and France to provide military and
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