The 

Confederate States Army, also called the Confederate Army or simply the Southern Army,
was the military land force of the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the
Confederacy) during the American Civil War (1861–1865), fighting against the United States forces
in order to uphold the institution of slavery in the Southern states.[3] On February 28, 1861,
the Provisional Confederate Congress established a provisional volunteer army and gave control
over military operations and authority for mustering state forces and volunteers to the newly
chosen Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Davis was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy,
and colonel of a volunteer regiment during the Mexican–American War. He had also been a United
States Senator from Mississippi and U.S. Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. On
March 1, 1861, on behalf of the Confederate government, Davis assumed control of the military
situation at Charleston, South Carolina, where South Carolina state militia besieged Fort Sumter in
Charleston harbor, held by a small U.S. Army garrison. By March 1861, the Provisional Confederate
Congress expanded the provisional forces and established a more permanent Confederate States
Army.
An accurate count of the total number of individuals who served in the Confederate Army is not
possible due to incomplete and destroyed Confederate records; estimates of the number of
individual Confederate soldiers are between 750,000 and 1,000,000 men. This does not include an
unknown number of slaves who were pressed into performing various tasks for the army, such as
construction of fortifications and defenses or driving wagons.[4] Since these figures include estimates
of the total number of individual soldiers who served at any time during the war, they do not
represent the size of the army at any given date. These numbers do not include men who served
in Confederate States Navy.
Although most of the soldiers who fought in the American Civil War were volunteers, both sides by
1862 resorted to conscription, primarily as a means to force men to register and to volunteer. In the
absence of exact records, estimates of the percentage of Confederate soldiers who were draftees
are about double the 6 percent of United States soldiers who were conscripts.[5]
Confederate casualty figures also are incomplete and unreliable. The best estimates of the number
of deaths of Confederate soldiers are about 94,000 killed or mortally wounded in battle, 164,000
deaths from disease and between 26,000 and 31,000 deaths in United States prison camps. One
estimate of the Confederate wounded, which is considered incomplete, is 194,026. These numbers
do not include men who died from other causes such as accidents, which would add several
thousand to the death toll.[6]
The main Confederate armies, the Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee and the
remnants of the Army of Tennessee and various other units under General Joseph E. Johnston,
surrendered to the U.S. on April 9, 1865 (officially April 12), and April 18, 1865 (officially April 26).
Other Confederate forces surrendered between April 16, 1865, and June 28, 1865.[7] By the end of
the war, more than 100,000 Confederate soldiers had deserted,[8] and some estimates put the
number as high as one third of Confederate soldiers.[9] The Confederacy's government effectively
dissolved when it fled Richmond in April and exerted no control