The Constitution was ratified in 1798, Washington was inaugurated in April 1789, the members of the Supreme Court were confirmed in the fall of 1789 and the court met for the first time in 1790. There was no deliberate delay in establishing the Supreme Court, the third branch of government. The confederacy, on the other hand had no trouble funding an army or passing tariff legislation, yet Davis and the confederate congress would not establish the one court required by their constitution. They had no trouble keeping their revolving door of a cabinet fully staffed, something not required by their constitution, in spite of the war, but they couldn't be bothered with the third branch of government. I would agree with you that it is not necessarily an indication of a functioning government but it is evidence of a government in contempt of its own constitution.
The USA in 1789 was hardly able defend its own claimed borders; it had no presence to speak of on the Great Lakes or the Mississippi; likewise Russia hardly had control of its vast borders for most of the 19th century, yet no one questiosn that they were a nation state.
In 1789 the U.S. borders ran about to the Mississippi. Parts of it may not have been adequately mapped but none of it was being taken away, either.
If you look at the most commonly accepted definitions of sovereignty in political science, the CSA fulfilled them, certainly by 19th century standards, whether we like it or not. It had defined borders; it had a government; it had a capital; it had an army and a navy; it had court system and a postal service; and it certainly exercised reasonable control throughout its claimed territory (until the final stages of the war) save possibly for some barren stretches of Texas and unionist counties in western Virginia - but then the USA itself had the same difficulty in much of the western territories.
It did not, as you pointed out, have the one true measure of sovereignty, the recognition of other nations. Nobody, with the possible exception of a single minor German principality (and that is questionable), ever considered the confederacy to be anything other than a rebellious part of the United States.
But then the US had the same difficulty in the first years of the Revolution, as did many Latin American states after first rebelling against Spanish control.
And the same situation would be true of them. They were nations in their own eyes only until someone else agreed that they were sovereign. For the U.S. that occur-ed in 1777.
The CSA lacked de jure recognition as a nation state by other states, but it certainly fulfilled the de facto defintion - and it was, after all, recognized as a belligerent by Great Britain.
De facto recognition holds no legal standing, and your claim that the confederacy had it from Great Britain or anyone else is debatable.
A fair point.
The lack of a Court is indeed striking, or at least it is to me. What little I know suggests lack of interest in the question by the Confederate Congress and the unwillingness to cede such power (underwartime, at any rate) by Jefferson Davis. He cannot have been eager to have some of his dictates ruled unconstitutional by a Confederate Supreme Court.
In 1789 the U.S. borders ran about to the Mississippi. Parts of it may not have been adequately mapped but none of it was being taken away, either.
Well, it wasn't at war, either.
Though it suffered major incursions into many of these remote areas by British forces and their Indian allies in the War of 1812. Even so much of it was land where US writ ran only in theory. It was left to generals like Wayne, Harrison and Jackson to conquer it by force.
Nobody, with the possible exception of a single minor German principality (and that is questionable), ever considered the confederacy to be anything other than a rebellious part of the United States.
True.
I think many foreign elites recognized - and there is evidence to support this, and not just in Russell's speech - that the CSA had created a going concern of a state, but they weren't ready to recognize them until they had gained a decisive victory on the battlefield. A victory that proved unattainable for Lee and a ANV.
If foreign recognition is make or break for you, then there's no way the CSA qualifies as a sovereign nation.
But that qualification aside, all I am arguing is that, like it or not (and I hold no brief for the Confederacy) that the CSA pretty much fulfilled all the rudimentary qualifications of statehood; and indeed I would go further to argue that unlike most other rebellions in modernity I can point to, it did so by forming a stable representative (save for the highly odious and notable exception of its 3 million black slaves) republic which commanded widespead popular support (as Gary Gallagher has pointed out) for most of the war. The CSA did not collapse, alas, under its own contradictions. It was destroyed by union armies. Reconstruction in the end proved just mild enough to help restore over time southern allegiances to the union again.
For all that, they formed this state in a petulant and ill-advised huff on a dubious (at best) constitutional theory, in what turned out to be utterly disastrous to every interest they held dear. They lost and lost badly, and so history brands them as rebels, not revolutionaries. And, in some cases, in even less flattering terms.