Video: 'Texas in the Civil War'

(Friday, February 1, 1861; 12 weeks after the 1860 United States presidential election) — 87 days after Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election of 1860 on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, Texas became the seventh state to leave the Union today when the the Texas Legislature voted 166-7 to secede.

Texas followed South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. By Feb. 8, 1861, the seven cotton states would form the Confederate States of America.

After the American Civil War began in April 1861, four slave states of the Upper South — Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina — also seceded and joined the Confederacy.

The Confederacy later accepted the slave states of Missouri and Kentucky as members, although neither officially declared secession nor were they ever largely controlled by Confederate forces, despite the efforts of Confederate shadow governments which were eventually expelled.

The U.S. government rejected the claims of secession as illegitimate.