The border states or the Border South were four and later five slave states in the Upper South that primarily supported the Union during the American Civil War (1861–65). They were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and after 1863, West Virginia (although West Virginia was admitted on the condition that it gradually eliminate slavery). To their north, they bordered free states of the Union, and all but Delaware bordered slave states of the Confederacy to their south.
Of the 34 U.S. states in 1861, nineteen were free states and fifteen were slave including the four border states; each of the latter held a comparatively low percentage of slaves. Delaware never declared for secession. Maryland was largely prevented from seceding by local unionists and federal troops. Two others, Kentucky and Missouri, saw rival governments, though their territory mostly stayed in Union control after 1862. Four others did not declare for secession until after the Battle of Fort Sumter and were briefly considered border states: Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. They are called the Upper South, in contrast to the Deep South. A new border state was created during the war, West Virginia, which was formed from 50 counties of Virginia and became a new slave state in the Union in 1863, on the condition that it gradually abolish slavery.Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (Knopf, 1997), p. 22.In 1861, "From February into the late spring, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas were considered border states", says David Stephen Heidler et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the American Civil War (2002), p. 252.Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis, pp. 101–101 .
Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the border states, because they were not in rebellion. Of the states that were exempted from the proclamation, Maryland (1864), Missouri and Tennessee (January 1865), and West Virginia (February 1865) abolished slavery before the war ended. However, Delaware and Kentucky, while they saw a substantial reduction in slavery, did not see the abolition of slavery until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. In 1866, Kentucky refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. It did ratify it in 1976.
With these border southern states of the Upper South having geographic, social, political, and economic connections to both the North and South, the border states were critical to the outcome of the war. They are still considered to delineate the cultural border between the North and South, with the Ohio River being an important boundary between them. President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were both born in the border southern state of Kentucky, with Lincoln residing in Illinois and Davis residing in Mississippi on the eve of the Civil War.
Reconstruction, as directed by Congress, did not apply in the same way to the border states because they never seceded. They did undergo their own process of being under Northern military occupation, readjustment and political realignment after passage of amendments abolishing slavery and granting citizenship and the right to vote to freedmen. After 1880 most of these jurisdictions were dominated by white Democrats, who passed laws to impose the Jim Crow system of legal segregation and second-class citizenship for blacks. However, in contrast to the Confederate States, where almost all blacks were disenfranchised during the first half to two-thirds of the twentieth century, for varying reasons blacks remained enfranchised in the border states despite movements for disfranchisement during the 1900s.Ranney, Joseph A. In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law. p. 141. .
Background
In the border south states whose plantation economy was based around tobacco and hemp, slavery was already dying out in certain urban areas and the regions without cotton, especially in cities that were rapidly industrializing, such as Baltimore and St. Louis. By 1860, more than half of the African Americans in Delaware were free, as were a high proportion in Maryland.In nine of the ten chief southern cities, the proportion of slaves steadily declined before the war. The exception was Richmond, Virginia. Midori Takagi, "Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction": Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782–1865 (University Press of Virginia, 1999) p 78.
According to the 1860 United States census, slaves comprised less than a fifth of the population in all five border states, specifically Kentucky (19.5%), Maryland (12.7%), Missouri (9.7%), West Virginia (4.9%), and Delaware (1.6%).
Some slaveholders made a profit by selling surplus slaves to traders for transport to the markets of the Deep South, where the demand was still high for field hands on cotton plantations.Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861 (1950) pages 149–55 In contrast to the near-unanimity of voters in the seven cotton states in the lower South, which held the highest number of slaves, the border slave states of the upland South were bitterly divided about secession and were not eager to leave the Union. Border Unionists hoped that a compromise would be reached, and they assumed that Lincoln would not send troops to attack the South. Border secessionists paid less attention to the slavery issue in 1861, since their states' economies were based more on tobacco plantations, and trade with the North than on cotton. Their main concern in 1861 was federal coercion; some residents viewed Lincoln's call to arms as a repudiation of the American traditions of states' rights, democracy, liberty, and a republican form of government. Secessionists insisted that Washington had usurped illegitimate powers in defiance of the Constitution, and thereby had lost its legitimacy. After Lincoln issued a call for troops, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina promptly seceded and joined the Confederacy. A separatist movement began in western Virginia, where most farmers were yeomen and not slaveholders, to break away and remain in the Union.Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861 (1950), pp. 119–47
Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri of the Border South, which had many areas with much stronger cultural, geographic, and economic ties to the South than the North, were deeply divided; Kentucky tried to maintain neutrality, but eventually became split between a Unionist and Confederate state governments and bitterly divided area of warfare, falling under Union occupation after 1862. Union military forces were used to guarantee that these states remained in the Union. The western counties of Virginia rejected secession, set up a loyal government of Virginia (with representation in the U.S. Congress), and created the new state of West Virginia (although it included many counties which had voted for secession).
The Border States, while geographically and economically tied to the South, experienced significant internal division regarding the issue of secession. In particular, Virginia and Tennessee, two key Upper South states, were home to both secessionist and Unionist factions, creating a complex and volatile political landscape.
Divided loyalties
Though every slave state except South Carolina contributed white battalions to both the Union and Confederate armies (South Carolina Unionists fought in units from other Union states), the split was most severe in these border southern states. Sometimes men from the same family fought on opposite sides. About 170,000 border state men (including African Americans) fought in the Union Army and 86,000 in the Confederate Army.James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982), pp 156–62. Approximately 35,000–40,000 Kentuckians served as Confederate soldiers, while an estimated 80,000–125,000 Kentuckians served as Union soldiers, including over 20,000 freed or runaway Kentucky slaves and soldiers subject to Union drafts.Quisenberry, A. C. "Kentucky Union Troops in the Civil War". Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society, vol. 18, no. 54, 1920, pp. 13–18. . By the end of the war in 1865, nearly 110,000 Missourians had served in the Union Army and at least 30,000 in the Confederate Army.American Civil War in Missouri Research Guide You must click "Regimental Histories" to access the data. Some 50,000 citizens of Maryland signed up for the military, with most joining the United States Army. Approximately a tenth as many enlisted to "go South" and fight for the Confederacy. It has been estimated that, of the state's 1860 population of 687,000, about 4,000 Marylanders traveled south to fight for the Confederacy. While the number of Marylanders in Confederate service is often reported as 20,000–25,000 based on an oral statement of General Cooper to General Trimble, other contemporary reports refute this number and offer more detailed estimates in the range of 3,500 (Livermore)Thomas Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War, Boston, 1900. See chart and explanation, p. 550 to just under 4,700 (McKim).Randolph Harrison McKim, Numerical Strength of the Confederate Army, New York, 1912 West Virginia was unique among the Union leaning states in that it did not give most of its soldiers to the Union, they were about equally divided, and it was the only state to contain many counties that had formally voted to secede from the Union.Curry, Richard O., A House Divided, A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1964, pg. 49
Kentucky and Missouri had both pro-Confederate and pro-Union governments. West Virginia was formed in 1862–63 after Virginia Unionists from the northwestern counties of the state, then occupied by the Union Army consisting of many newly formed West Virginia regiments, had set up a loyalist "restored" state government of Virginia. Lincoln recognized this government and allowed them to divide the state. Kentucky and Missouri had adopted secession ordinances by their pro-Confederate governments (see Confederate government of Kentucky and Confederate government of Missouri), but the two states were never fully or officially under Confederate control, though at various points Confederate armies did enter those states and both states' Confederate governments controlled certain parts of them, with the Confederacy controlling more than half of Kentucky and the southern portion of Missouri early in the war.
Besides combat between regular armies, the border region saw large-scale guerrilla warfare and numerous violent raids, feuds, and assassinations.Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War; pp. 251–276. . Violence was especially severe in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and western Missouri. The single bloodiest episode of guerrilla warfare was the 1863 Lawrence Massacre in Kansas, in which at least 150 civilian men and boys were killed. It was launched in retaliation for an earlier, smaller raid into Missouri by Union men from Kansas.Fellman, Michael (1989). Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri in the American Civil War. . p. 25.
Though secession was widespread in the Deep South, several Upper South states, particularly Virginia and Tennessee, experienced fierce resistance to leaving the Union. These states saw significant internal divisions, with Unionist factions gaining momentum in regions such as western Virginia and East Tennessee.