First White House of the Confederacy
Abraham Lincoln's election as the 16th president of the United States in November, 1860, set fire to a powder train of reaction throughout the slave-owning states of the Cotton South. Led by South Carolina on December 20,1860, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas seceded in rapid succession in the first weeks of 1861. On February 4, 1861, the seceded states met in Alabama's State Capitol building to form the Confederate States of America.
Why Montgomery? Just an inland river town of 8,000 souls-half of them slaves-and barely forty years from the wilderness, Montgomery had been the capital only since 1847. It had been settled in the main by residents of Virginia, South Carolina and the Broad River region of Georgia. Knowing that the upper South regarded South Carolina's Southern rights views as extreme, the secessionist leader Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., suggested to his Alabama counterpart, William Lowndes Yancey, that the seceded states meet in Montgomery.
Situated on seven hills overlooking the Alabama River, and near the Federal Road from Georgia to Mobile, Montgomery enjoyed a location central to the Deep South, good transportation facilities, by both railroad and steamboat and a reputation as the Black Belt's center of wealth and culture. William L. Yancey, "the Patrick Henry of the South," and his firebrand group who had made Montgomery a center of secessionist activity, induced the State Secession Convention to issue an invitation to the other Southern states to meet here. These secessionists feared the wait-and-see attitude of the Southern "cooperationists," and felt that they had to forge their slave-holding confederacy quickly, while popular passion waxed hot over the elevation of what they called a "Black Republican" (meaning black-hearted) to the White House in Washington.
On February 8, 1861 the Provisional Confederate Congress convened in the Senate chamber of the State Capitol for the purpose of electing a President. Jefferson Finis Davis, distinguished military hero, statesman, patriot and Mississippi planter, was unanimously chosen. He and his wife received the news by telegram in their rose garden at Brierfield Plantation, at Davis Bend on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, on February 10. Accepting reluctantly, he journeyed to Montgomery by riverboat and train, arrived on the 16th and was inaugurated on the front portico of the Capitol on the 18th, at 1:00 P.M., as Provisional President of the Confederate States of America.
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