 The Alabama Secession Convention invited delegates of all other 14 slaveholding states to join at Montgomery, which became birthplace of the Confederacy, on February 11, 1861, when 7 Cotton States of the Lower South formed the new republic, with Montgomery as Confederate capital and former Mississippi U.S.Senator Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy.In December 1860, Stephen F. Hale, Alabama's commissioner to Kentucky, wrote a letter to the latter state's governor about Alabama's justification for secession.