The Confederate States of America are a relic of the past. Following their incomplete victory against the Union, the country failed to modernise either its state apparatus, its army, or its economic model. Only the reformation of chattel slavery into contracts of servitude saved it, by bringing much needed European capital and armaments. When President Benjamin Harrison declared war on the Confederation in 1891 under the pretense of national unification and the liberation of the American continent of slavery by any name, the CSA was wholly unprepared. While the CSA fielded tight formations of riflemen, the United States responded with breech-loaded rifles, cannons and even machineguns. Foreseeing this disaster years in advance, the CSA had trained an organisation called the Ku Klux Klan to be the world's most formidable and extensive guerilla force. The United States government ingeniously finished the war with the 1893 Constitutional Union Act, which dictated the Confederate States of America would maintain autonomy as a sovereign nation, but would adopt the US Constitution and be part of its political process. An incomplete union.
Today, the CSA is a shell of its former self. By all accounts, its member states are no less American than those under the Washington government. CSA soldiers are armed by American companies and led by American officers under NATO. But many adherents of the old supremacist regime remain, and the country's black population has become extremely agitated, demanding equal rights to whites under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. The American people and government support extensive civil rights legislation, putting them at odds with the south. George Wallace, former governor of Alabama, has been elected as Spokesman of the Confederate Congress, the highest public office in the CSA, and subordinate only to the President of the United States. As a moderate, his task is to balance Washington's desire for civil rights and complete unification against the Deep South's radicals, pushing for independence and a caste state.